Papers by Vivienne Bozalek
A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines, 2021
This collection is a timely and nurturing gift to those struggling to keep care alive within incr... more This collection is a timely and nurturing gift to those struggling to keep care alive within increasingly deteriorating conditions of work, relations, and values in Higher Education. As we also face a more-than-human crisis threatening the already uncertain futures of people, societies and ecologies on this planet, developing a shared ground between a politics of care, critical pedagogies and posthumanist thought has never felt more vital. The generous interventions gathered in this volume offer rich conceptual propositions as well as inspiring experiences and stories from the ground, to stimulate new ways for teaching and scholarship, for learning practices and methodologies, that acknowledge and support the relational webs of care on which we all depend.
A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines, 2021
Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk, 2014
providers requesting them to benchmark their current curriculum against the new minimum standard ... more providers requesting them to benchmark their current curriculum against the new minimum standard requirements of the BSW on a template. Furthermore, providers of social work education and training had to indicate how they would change their current learning programmes to accommodate the minimum standards, which encompass 27 exit-level outcomes and their associated assessment criteria. Providers had until June 2006 to comply with the requirements of the new BSW qualification and had to start implementation of the learning programme in January 2007. These national changes in policy have made it important for social work educators in South African HEIs to carefully consider how they will provide learning opportunities for their undergraduate students to attain the BSW outcomes. Furthermore, the alignment of the curriculum across year levels as a collaborative exercise in social work programmes from a programmatic perspective becomes essential to plan for learning opportunities where students will be ultimately able to demonstrate that they are competent in 27 outcomes. In order to engage in such activities, social work educators need to engage with the concepts of outcomesbased education (OBE), which has now become an important component of educational policy in South Africa (Naicker, 2000). These changes require a different way of viewing and practising teaching and learning. Instead of concentrating on inputs or engaging primarily with the content of teaching, educators need to look at the sorts of capabilities which the BSW qualification identifies as important for beginner-level social workers. These capabilities are implicit in the exit-level outcomes and their associated assessment criteria. Social work educators will have to involve themselves in the process of establishing outcomes-based assessment plans and more learner-centred education in order to meet the minimum requirements of both the professional quality assurance body (the SACSSP) as well as the Higher Education Quality Assurance Council (HEQC). There has been some literature on how to engage with outcomes-based assessment plans and procedures and with innovative learnercentred education in Social Work and more generally in higher education
Southern African Journal of Social Work and Social Development
The focus of the article is on injustices towards South African families in postcolonial and neoc... more The focus of the article is on injustices towards South African families in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts, our understanding of which has been greatly enlarged by Nancy Fraser’s conceptualisations of expropriation and imperialism and Jacques Derrida’s notions of hostility and hospitality. We used Walter Benjamin’s and Karen Barad’s montage methods of fragmentary writing to diffractively read expropriation, imperialism, hostility and hospitality through one another in the context of injustices done to South African families. A diffractive methodology entails a close and attentive reading of concepts or pieces of text through one another, to arrive at new insights with regard to a particular issue. The new insights we arrive at in the article are five propositions for ethically engaging in a justice-to-come for social work – that of attentiveness, rendering each other capable, responsibility, response-ability and radical hospitality.
Higher Education Hauntologies
A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines, 2021
South African Journal of Higher Education, Nov 23, 2011
The notion of pedagogy of hope has been conceptualised and symbolised as a significant conciliato... more The notion of pedagogy of hope has been conceptualised and symbolised as a significant conciliatory and propelling vision for the University of Stellenbosch. Yet few representations of hope engage with the historical and theoretical roots of this notion. These perspectives are crucial to understand in order to provide a foundation on which to build a vision for an institution such as Stellenbosch University, given its past racialised history. This article uses bell hooks' writings on the pedagogy of hope to examine a curriculum project ...
Learning/Work, 2009
324 Critical friends sharing socio-cultural influences on personal and professional identity Vivi... more 324 Critical friends sharing socio-cultural influences on personal and professional identity Vivienne Bozalek and Lear Matthews Introduction The search for innovative ways to enhance the knowledge and skills of adult learners in distinct cultural domains is a challenge familiar to educators. ...
A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines, 2021
Higher education has been deeply affected by neoliberalism and corporatisation, with their emphas... more Higher education has been deeply affected by neoliberalism and corporatisation, with their emphasis on efficiency, competitiveness and valorisation of quantity over quality. This article argues that in the context of South African higher education, and in the Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP) more particularly, such commodification of education is problematic. The article explores what the Slow movement has to offer ECP in terms of scholarship. It seeks to answer the question: How might ECP be reconfigured using Slow imaginaries? Various academic disciplines and practices have incorporated Slow philosophy to develop alternative ways of doing academia; however, it has hitherto not been considered for programmes such as ECP. This article approaches Slow pedagogy for ECP using posthuman and feminist new materialist sensibilities that are predicated on a relational ontology. The article puts forward the following 10 propositions for a Slow scholarship in ECP using ideas from posthumanism and feminist new materialism: practice attentiveness through noticing, engage in responsible relations, diffract rather than reflect (thinking together affirmatively), render each other capable, enable collective responsiveness, explore creatively, making thoughts and feelings possible, enact curiosity, ask the right questions politely, foreground process rather than product, and create conditions for trust by wit(h)nessing. It is argued that by practising Slow scholarship with these propositions, ECPs might resist marketdriven imperatives that characterise contemporary academia.
Critical posthumanism, new/feminist materialisms and the affective turn have a great deal in comm... more Critical posthumanism, new/feminist materialisms and the affective turn have a great deal in common with each other, and can be seen as similar perspectives with slightly different emphases in each framework, all focusing on: relational ontologies; a critique of dualisms; and engagements with matter and the non-human. Feminist thinkers such as amongst others, have been identified both as critical posthumanists and new/feminist materialists, and have also contributed to ideas about the affective turn. Many of these scholars have been influenced by the work of Deleuze and Guattari and their notions of monism and vitalism, and have moved beyond the centrality of discourse and cartesian dualisms to incorporate a vision of human/nonhuman, body/mind, subject/object, nature/culture, matter/ meaning, continuity/discontinuity, beginning/returning and creation/renewal (Barad 2007) in their work.
Internationally, there is a growing interest in the potential of care ethics as a useful normativ... more Internationally, there is a growing interest in the potential of care ethics as a useful normative framework to evaluate teaching and learning in higher education. However, to date there has been little engagement with the inherent dangers of care such as those of paternalism and parochialism. This is particularly pertinent in the South African context where there are ongoing struggles to find ways of dealing with continuing inequality experienced by students, who may be at the receiving end of paternalism and parochialism. This article focuses on interviews conducted with teaching and learning practitioners collected during a larger national project on the potential of emerging technologies to achieve qualitative learning outcomes in differently placed South African higher education institutions. An analysis of the interviews indicated that while these lecturers were portrayed as innovative educators, using emerging technologies to enhance their pedagogy, issues of paternalism and ...
It is now widely accepted that the transmission of disciplinary knowledge is insufficient to prep... more It is now widely accepted that the transmission of disciplinary knowledge is insufficient to prepare students leaving higher education for the workplace. Authentic learning has been suggested as a way to bring the necessary complexity into learning to deal with challenges in professional practice after graduation. This study investigates how South African higher educators have used emerging technologies to achieve the characteristics of authentic learning. A survey was administered to a population of 265 higher educators in South Africa who self-identified as engaging with emerging technologies. From this survey, a sample of twenty one respondents were selected to further investigate their practice through in-depth interviewing using Herrington, Reeves & Oliver’s (2010) nine characteristics of authentic learning as a framework. Interrater analysis undertaken by five members of the research team revealed both consistencies and differences among the twenty one cases across the nine el...
Post-Anthropocentric Social Work
Equity & Excellence in Education
ABSTRACT The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientat... more ABSTRACT The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientations to analyze an event during a residential workshop organized as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing early childhood discourses in South Africa. An invitation during the workshop to grapple with what might be unsettling by attending to the agency of the more-than-human world and its entanglement with unequal human geographies of place, generated a diffractive photographic image and unsettling stories as a group of early childhood teachers and educational researchers kept re-turning to the data. Working with Barad’s methodology of temporal diffraction as apparatus, we discursively and visually trace entanglements that emerged from this data. We conclude on the mattering of this work for engaging with the potentials and tensions of attending to the more-than-human within highly asymmetrical human relations in the settler colonial context of South African education.
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Papers by Vivienne Bozalek