Purpose: In the past decade, against increasing global inequality, higher education has grappled with increased demands for social justice, transformation and decolonisation. While a lot of research in South Africa has focused on the (im)possibilities of fostering racial, gendered, socio-economic and cultural change, the connection of such change…

"Voluntourism," or "volunteer abroad," is a form of travel involving unpaid work intended to benefit a local community. Critiques of voluntourism as reproducing and, indeed, perpetuating global inequities are yielding a re-framing of voluntourism around principles of "partnership" and "equality." Drawing…

Postgraduate output is important in any country's knowledge development and their knowledge economy. The development of postgraduate output especially at master's and PhD levels in South Africa is at risk due to its slow pace. An argument that can be made is that undergraduate experiences lend to postgraduate access and success. This article…

Both Seychelles and South Africa are experiencing serious challenges with regard to providing for the need to employ the required number and quality of teachers -- needs that are differentiated according to specific areas of competencies. In the paper, it is argued that each of the education systems of these two countries should have a…

The colonial nature of South African universities remains a source of debate among students and academics. Decolonization as rethinking academic institutional practices seems less controversial; the specificity of how to decolonize the academia is the core of divergent arguments and contesting ideologies. Consequently, many suggestions and methods…

This article examines the vulnerability of orphans to sexual violence in and around their township secondary school. Using photovoice as a methodology with which to unearth these experiences and narratives, we examine how such an approach might engage the voices of orphans to inform thinking regarding sexual violence. Our analysis was informed by…

How are elite schools caught up in the changing processes of globalisation? Is globalisation a new phenomenon for them? This paper focuses on the globalising practices that selected elite schools adopt. It also explores how globalisation is impacting on the social purposes of elite schools, which conventionally have been to serve privileged social…

When academics, who occupy a traditional position of power and privilege, engage with community members whose thinking, attitudes, and responses have been shaped by ongoing sociohistorical oppression and disadvantage, democratic participation is not easy to attain. Yet, unless community members feel able to participate freely, the valuable local…

Group-based social hierarchies exist in nearly every society, yet little is known about whether children understand that they exist. The present studies investigated whether 3- to 10-year-old children (N = 84) in South Africa associate higher status racial groups with higher levels of wealth, one indicator of social status. Children matched higher…

Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United States, Xhosa South African…

This article examines the phenomenon of African migration to post-apartheid South Africa from a language-sociological perspective. Although the subject has been one largely neglected by language scholars, the handful of studies which have addressed the issue have yielded ethnographic data and raised questions of considerable significance for the…

South Africa presents a distinctive and varied context in which to explore the experience of women principals. The article draws on a larger data set to explore the interplay of gender and school size in seven schools with 200 students or fewer. From this study, we conclude that gender remains a potent influence on the career and experience of…

This article captures educational development from the perspective of those living on the social margins in South Africa, whose collective-individual priorities resulted in education for the community. The data were fugitive, in the minds of people for the most part, a small sample of key informants being selected by deliberate decision for…

Minority-race children in North America and Europe often show less own-race favoritism than children of the majority (White) race, but the reasons for this asymmetry are unresolved. The present research tested South African children in order to probe the influences of group size, familiarity, and social status on children's race-based social…

Our analysis of the phrase "social space" first of all concentrates on the modal or functional nature of the different aspects of reality, including the social and spatial aspects. Subsequently this leads to an analysis of the problem of modal analogies--one way in which an answer is given to the perennial philosophical problem…