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It is well evidenced that South Africa is characterised by extreme socioeconomic inequality, which is strongly racialised. We offer an original sociological perspective, which departs from established perspectives considering the dynamics of vulnerability and poverty to focus on the structuring of classed and racialised privilege. We map how stocks of economic, cultural, and social capital intersect to generate systematic and structural inequalities in the country and consider how far these are associated with fundamental racial divides. To achieve this, we utilise rich, nationally representative data from the National Income Dynamics Study and employ Multiple Correspondence Analysis to construct a model of South African 'social space'. Our findings underscore how entrenched racial divisions remain within South Africa, with White people being overwhelmingly located in the most privileged positions. However, our cluster analysis also indicates that forms of middle‐class privilege percolate beyond a core of the 8% of the population that is white. We emphasise how age divisions are associated with social capital accumulation. Our cluster analysis reveals that trust levels increase with economic and cultural capital levels within younger age groups and could therefore come to intensify social and racial divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I investigate the benefits and potential risks associated with utilizing participant observation to gain a deeper understanding of sexual identity. Specifically, my focus is on examining how young, heterosexual, middle-class, cisgender individuals in South Africa perceive and understand their heterosexual identities, exploring how privilege and heteronormativity shape their experiences. In my ethnographic study, I employed various qualitative data collection methods, including participant observation, to analyze how normative practices were negotiated and sustained in contemporary South Africa. As a feminist researcher, I reflect on the epistemological and methodological choices I made in the study, with reflexivity and positionality playing crucial roles in data collection and analysis. Drawing on experiences in three distinct social spaces in Johannesburg—high-end nightclubs, Tupperware-style sex-toy parties, and traditional braais [barbecues]—I examine the advantages and challenges of participant observation. This paper contributes to the broader discussion on the method's use, highlighting its potential to offer a nuanced understanding of a normalized phenomenon while acknowledging associated risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence has become a regular occurrence in the context of the South African student movement. However, to date there are no studies that investigate student wellbeing in the context of student movement violence. How are violence and wellbeing experienced in the context of the student movement? What resources do students draw upon to protect or restore their wellbeing during and in the aftermath of violence? This article discusses students' experiences of violence and wellbeing and particularly the resources that fostered their psychological wellbeing during and after experiences of violence related to the #FeesMustFall protests of 2015/16. The study used a photovoice methodology and worked with groups of former student activists from four universities in South Africa. Student psychological functioning in the midst of adverse circumstances is demonstrated in their ability to make meaning of their experiences by inventing knowledge spaces; creating spaces of inner harmony; having a sense of purpose; and protecting symbolic spaces of hope. It is also shown in their courage to challenge spaces of oppression. This study suggests that the co-production of social space for functioning occurs through an important psychological process of meaning-making that provides direction for student movement activities. Given our findings, it is recommended for student affairs and counselling services to m,./=-09864 facilitate the co-creation of spaces of knowledge and spaces of safety, spaces where students can experience being wanted and connected, and spaces where they can make sense of their experiences in the unfamiliar and potentially alienating higher education space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the intellectual and sociological contribution of Sitas as a diasporic public intellectual who bridges and navigates between continents. Sitas's creative, scientific, and critical engagement in postcolonial thinking connects Cyprus to Africa, drawing from both his country of origin, Cyprus, and South Africa, where he excelled as a dramatist, poet, sociologist and public intellectual. This 'in-betweenness' seems to be the basis for the vantage point from which to observe society to inspire him during his remarkable intellectual and artistic journey within and between the continents. Perhaps unknown outside Cyprus, Sitas has had a crucial impact on the development of critical social sciences and civic action in Cyprus: the study of racism, intolerance, and the potential for reconciliation and between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots and bringing to Cyprus postcolonial perspectives from the Global South, opening new readings in the study of reconciliation, borders, migration, precarity and social space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence has become a regular occurrence in the context of the South African student movement. However, to date there are no studies that investigate student wellbeing in the context of student movement violence. How are violence and wellbeing experienced in the context of the student movement? What resources do students draw upon to protect or restore their wellbeing during and in the aftermath of violence? This article discusses students' experiences of violence and wellbeing and particularly the resources that fostered their psychological wellbeing during and after experiences of violence related to the #FeesMustFall protests of 2015/16. The study used a photovoice methodology and worked with groups of former student activists from four universities in South Africa. Student psychological functioning in the midst of adverse circumstances is demonstrated in their ability to make meaning of their experiences by inventing knowledge spaces; creating spaces of inner harmony; having a sense of purpose; and protecting symbolic spaces of hope. It is also shown in their courage to challenge spaces of oppression. This study suggests that the co-production of social space for functioning occurs through an important psychological process of meaning-making that provides direction for student movement activities. Given our findings, it is recommended for student affairs and counselling services to m,./=-09864 facilitate the co-creation of spaces of knowledge and spaces of safety, spaces where students can experience being wanted and connected, and spaces where they can make sense of their experiences in the unfamiliar and potentially alienating higher education space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual diversity is a contentious topic in South Africa because many people still hold the perception that sexual identity can only be understood in heteronormative terms. This article adopts a feminist research approach to investigate how black gay male identities are constructed and managed at home, within friendships and in mining workplaces, drawing on data collected from five black gay male mineworkers. It opens up discussion on gay mineworkers' experiences in a country where diversity is upheld and celebrated through a democratic constitution, yet gay men must often negotiate and manage their sexual identities to fit in with the dominant heteronormative discourses present in different spaces in society, including adopting false heterosexual identities in particular spaces, which limits their freedoms. The study argues that experiences of constructing and managing black gay identities in heteronormative spaces is guided by the level of acceptance and tolerance perceived by gay people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a window into the lives of the residents of Agnes Rest, a rural village in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Using water infrastructures, I explore how two local terms umama wekhaya and abuntu babelungu, express local subjectivities created on the premise of an individual's experience of water access and their associated roles. I argue that local subjectivities are important to consider when conceptualising "what is development?" The grounded perceptions of Agnes Rest residents are shaped by the unique social categories that are present in their community. Inevitably, they portray a story of inequality and uneven distribution of municipal infrastructure in contemporary rural Eastern Cape. Drawing on Brian Larkin's definition of infrastructure, I analyse how points of water infrastructure are generative sites of engagement that connect and differentiate people, construct social spaces and influence local meanings of change and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is undergoing the advent of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), driven by technologies that create opportunities for businesses and society. The study investigated the barriers experienced in leveraging these opportunities within South Africa. Triangulation of round table discussion with 6 experts and 35 semi-structured interviews has identified eight barriers to effectively leveraging opportunities within the fourth industrial revolution. These include the prevailing prohibitive costs of data, low economic inclusion, poor digital culture, literacy and skills deficiency among the youth, the manual-automation job dilemma, high crime prevalence, low entrepreneurial intent as well as inadequate privacy and security within the technological and social media space. These barriers require urgent attention as they are likely to create another 'missed opportunity' for re-industrialisation in South Africa and other African countries, making it more difficult to win their fight for high economic growth and competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-apartheid South Africa, one of the central analytical questions is to do with the continuity of protests, in particular student movement protests that are highly driven by social, economic and political conditions in the present. In a social and political context of student protests, student movement is considered a threat to the state and a target for state violence. In this paper, we assert that student movement in contemporary South Africa is a social and political space in which we can begin to engage with and understand issues of dispossession and repossession as re-emerging struggles in South Africa. We also assert that student protests should be understood as real or perceived emancipatory terrain of transformation within and beyond the university campus, but also as the engine that engages with the unfinished struggle for decolonisation and transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. We draw on and engage with decolonial thought as our analytical lens through which to unpack and understand student protests in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are spaces constituted through social action, and how do they constitute social action? We address these questions by studying how protesters appropriate spaces by occupying streets and public buildings and by spreading specific atmospheres. We apply Alfred SCHÜTZ's phenomenological take on the constitution of multiple realities in terms of "province of meaning" as a heuristic device to capture the diversity of protest atmospheres along with their spatial, affective, and epistemic dimensions—those embodied and situated as well as virtual. This perspective allows us to describe empirical examples of protest situations in South Africa and Senegal where "the streets" and the media meet. Our research material spans documents, tweets, video material collected online, and ethnographic interviews. In this article, we look at how embodied practices reproduce and manifest particular "provinces of meaning" and "protest atmospheres," and how these embodied practices are complemented by social media practices. Our proposed approach not only provides an example of how a social space is created and refigured through social protest, but also allows a further understanding of the situational emergence of protests as collective action that creates "we-experiences." The phenomenological perspective goes beyond the widespread mind/body dualism that underlies so many interpretations of social movement culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens when misogyny leads to increasing murders of women, whose lives are considered not worthy because their respectability is under attack? What do feminists do in a global moment when antifeminist backlash emerges with fervor in politics, policy, and social spaces to reverse and challenge feminist progress? Rage happens. This article explores the role of rage in the development of African feminist digital counterpublics on Twitter. Through two Twitter hashtags, #MenAreTrash and #JusticeForSharon, I illuminate how anger emanating from increasing rates of femicide in Kenya and South Africa catalyzes the evolution of feminist communities of knowledge, solidarity, and resistance on Twitter. The rage illustrated in this article is considered in relation to longer histories of burnout and fatigue with nonresponse from the state and from male allies. Through these digital spaces, a process of building alliances and challenging antifeminist movements emerges. Feminist engagements around these hashtags are a site of concrete resistance against online misogyny as well as its material manifestations through femicide. In a context where antifeminist movements see digital spaces as sites to mobilize antifeminist sentiment, paying attention to digital feminist counterpublics is critical to understanding gender justice and freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social cohesion, the foundation that keeps society together, is influenced by various inter-related factors such as education social, cultural, religious, and business, among others. Current debates indicates that unless social cohesion in its various dimensions is addressed, be it through reconciliation, tackling inequality, crafting a national identity, or bridging rural-urban divides, the implementation of any Southern African Development Plan will be challenging. In this paper, social cohesion is viewed as an intervention for coexistence; as an invitation to find common ground and allowing the sharing of social spaces; and to forge a common identity whilst recognising societal diversity. This paper postulates that although social cohesion is intended to contribute towards nation-building and national unity, government policies are fundamental to the advancement thereof. The paper defines, unpacks, and identifies the challenges of social cohesion using South Africa as a case study. The paper argues that the family is instrumental in building social cohesion. Government through its policies processes has an important role to play in strengthen the family. The lessons learnt could contribute to the role of family towards social cohesion on the African continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contexts of scarcity, managing comorbidities is a complex process, shaped by divergent understandings of causes, prognoses, and social meanings of illness. Drawing on research with one young South African woman living with HIV and epilepsy, and 13 other people with comorbidities, we describe how concepts of "public" and "private" shape the management of co-morbid conditions. Despite narratives of HIV "normalization," participants labored to keep their HIV status private, while sharing other illness experiences more publicly. We challenge simple dichotomies between public and private spheres and emphasize the need for more fluid understandings of how people negotiate social space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any situation on the brink of change requires guides to assist in navigating such a new shared social space. Journalism is one such form of guidance. However, just as societal conditions are constantly in flux, so are the conditions under which journalism is practised. This is particularly true for the current generation of journalists with the lines between mainstream and alternative forms of journalism almost completely obscured. While the journalistic landscape is fluid, lessons for navigating this world can be found in the work of journalists from previous eras. This article places the work of South African journalist Nat Nakasa, a member of the 1960s Drum Generation, in conversation with the ideas of existentialism to further an understanding of existentialism in a South African context, and for South African journalism. This is achieved by identifying themes in Nakasa's work and linking these to some of the ideas of existentialism. The article argues that maintaining a public sphere within a democratic society requires a media sphere with space for mainstream and unconventional journalism. At the hand of an analysis of Nakasa's work, the article presents a possibility of how unconventional journalism can be a vital element to a pluralistic media environment and to guide society through any period of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing hegemony of English in South Africa; sub-standard schooling and school language in education policy have inhibited access to English literacy for many students studying in English at university. One of the more tangible outcomes of these factors is the high attrition rate at tertiary level. It is generally accepted that a once-off literacy intervention does not meet the language needs of the majority of our L2 students and more interventions are necessary. However, it is a struggle to find meaningful, sustainable spaces in the curriculum to achieve this. This article describes the various social spaces that are being explored at the University of the Free State to integrate literacy in the curriculum. The efficacy of the various interventions is not investigated or discussed in detail. This article outlines the spaces and how these are used to integrate literacy across the curriculum and concludes with lessons learned from these interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I have attempted to situate entrepreneurial identity in its more comprehensive personal context by tracking cultural transformations and attempting to understand how Ghanaian women entrepreneurs in Durban negotiate their day-to-day social identities. These women entrepreneurs found themselves projecting new identities in unfamiliar social spaces that are neither distinctively Ghanaian nor South African, but are rather a mélange or "in-betweenness" of elements of Ghanaian identity and South African socio-cultural characteristics. Although there is a range of particular attributes that give Ghanaian women entrepreneurs in Durban their specific identity, one needs to remain aware that each of these women supports multiple identities in the course of everyday life. My main interest in this area is in how such women experience and express their sense of belonging as a product of their transnational activities. Using the concept of bounded solidarity and enforceable trust, these women are able to move in and out of identity brackets. In pursuit of this aim I examine how Ghanaian women manipulate multiple identities in the course of entrepreneurial activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the ambiguous, contradictory and montaged space of Dimbaza in the former Ciskei bantustan of the Eastern Cape, figured simultaneously as homeland resettlement village, betterment rural township, decentralised industrialisation showcase, site of political banishment, international symbol of apartheid difference and as graveyard of the racially discarded, among others. Drawing on empire as the dependent space to command sovereignty, the paper considers Dimbaza in terms of South African empire. While it is suggested that as a means to re-figure the South African political, the bantustan may be read as a mark of a South African empire ‘project’, the paper is more concerned to ‘think with empire as a theoretical concept’. The paper draws on the elements of knowledge susceptible to being assembled by historical imagination – written documents, letters in the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) Collection, contemporary testimonies, and visual sources (including the important film documentary Last Grave at Dimbaza) – and which constitute or resist the native/racial/ethnic/African subject (and thus are seen to exemplify the racial spatial command of the sovereign). We assemble these in relation to seemingly antagonistic historical formulations, particularly ‘colonialism of a special type’ and the politics of exile and liberation. We propose that, rather than returning us to South African ‘empire’ as a totality, the term offers us multiple singularities that allow us to consider the imaginative formulation of the ‘empire of liberation’ as a dependent space that continues to command sovereignty within the ‘native question’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this study, we assessed the relevance and effectiveness of radio broadcasting as a strategy that facilitates the adoption and use of safer sexual practices among students at a South African university. Based on ethnographic data, the article highlights that the essential and critical contribution of campus radio lies in its ability to create a social space for HIV/AIDS communication. The overall aim of this study was to assess the relationship between exposure to radio broadcasting messages and the adoption of safer sexual practices. Our analysis suggests that campus broadcasting can be instrumental in promoting HIV/AIDS awareness and education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last 19 years of post-apartheid South African democracy, race remains an enduring and familiar trope, a point of certainty amid the messy ambiguities of transformation. In the present article, we explore the malleable, permeable, and unstable racializations of contemporary South Arica, specifically the way in which coloured and white racializations are negotiated and interactionally accomplished in the context of Capetonian hip-hop. The analysis reveals the complex ways in which racialized bodies are figured semiotically through reference to historical time and contemporary (translocal) social space. But also the way iconic features of blackness are reindexicalized to stand for a transnational whiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the attitudes and self-understanding of Catholic women missionaries in foreign countries since the second half of the twentieth century. The author situates these experiences within the broader context of the history of Christian missions as well as research on expatriates and transnationalism. She bases her research on oral history interviews with German and Austrian nuns who provide charitable works and social services in South Africa. Topics addressed include the missionaries' perception of social spaces, of living and working within expatriate communities, and of their education and vocation.

Abstract: The easing of legal and unauthorized entry to South Africa has made the country a new destination for Black immigrants. As this population continues to grow, its children have begun to experience South African schools in an array of uniquely challenging ways. For these immigrant youth, forging a sense of identity may be their single greatest challenge. There is however, very little research on the ways in which immigrant student identities are framed, challenged, asserted and negotiated in South African schools. Accordingly, this study asks how do immigrant students speak about their identifications in light of their negotiation of the school and social spaces in South Africa. Utilising the theoretical frameworks of understanding immigrant identities and identity pathways, this research study attempts to understand the unique experiences of Black immigrant youth inside South African schools. Findings were multi-fold in nature. First, although immigrant students’ ease of assimilation into the chosen reference group was to some degree sanctioned by their phenotypic racial features, their attempt at ‘psychosocial passing’ was politically motivated. Second, immigrant students did not readily classify according to skin pigmentocracy. Third, the majority of immigrant students heightened their ethnic self-awareness in forming their identity, but also assumed hyphenated identities. Fourth, immigrant students were not seen as having an identity, but rather as being ‘plugged into a category with associated characteristics or features’. Fifth immigrant students forged a ‘continental identity’. And sixth, the self-agency of immigrant students was twofold in nature; not only did they want to improve their own condition, but there seemed to be an inherent drive to improve the human condition of others. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article explores themes of social space and mobility significant to tourism within the townships near Cape Town, South Africa. Research on the emergence of 'township tourism' has produced contrasting interpretations. Some authors describe essentialised notions of' Africanness', 'culture', and poverty displayed for the consumption of European tourists as voyeurism. Others emphasize township tourism's grassroots potential for local development, and portray it as a form of reconciliation through the political and personal narratives shared between resident-guides and tourists. By focusing primarily on one family of township tourism 'hosts,' the findings presented here describe how those involved with township tourism utilized new avenues of social and physical mobility across socio-spatial boundaries that persist as legacies of apartheid. Flexible understandings of space and 'multiple mobilities' are considered here, and host agency is emphasized. Finally, by tracing public discourses of criminality and 'common sense' directed at international visitors to townships in 2010, this paper demonstrates how such narratives undermined efforts to reconfigure perceptions of township spaces. I conclude by arguing that township tourism carries the potential to map new cartographies of belonging, while also creating new exclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of coming out is important in trying to understand how a lesbian identity is shaped and re-negotiated within various social spaces in South Africa today. The article argues that it is vital to acknowledge the intersectionality of identities and social spaces in order to understand and conceptualise the coming-out process. The article raises the question how lesbian identities are formed over time and argues that the different stages of identity development are influenced by the individual's other overlapping identities, as well as certain spaces which either permit or prohibit the disclosure of her sexual identity. The study draws on data gathered through a series of qualitative semi-structured interviews with black and white lesbians, and it forms part of an ongoing conversation about the experiences of lesbian women in South Africa, by documenting the identity formation of several lesbian women living in and around Johannesburg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much has been written concerning the effect of the post-apartheid transition upon gay communities in predominantly more affluent parts of South Africa, little is still known about how this transition affected black African residents in the former townships. This article therefore examines the impact that the political transition had on groups in the former townships through an exploration that highlights first the way it helped create delineated sexual binary relationships. It will then go on to explore how the social expression of these binary relationships has a unique geography within the former townships which in turn also allows us to see how an historically very Westerncentric term of identification ‘gay’ has been appropriated in unique ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, particularly in post-industrial societies, the geographies of gay men’s and, to a lesser extent, gay women’s lives have received considerable research attention. A central research interest has been the mapping of gay geographies of leisure. There are, however, fewer studies in the academic record about gay leisure geographies in the developing world context, particularly in Africa. This investigation aims to address an aspect of this investigatory oversight by looking through the lens of white gay women in the city of Bloemfontein, South Africa. The study maps white gay women’s leisure-seeking and positions their (sexual) desire(s) relative to other homosexual and heterosexual leisure geographies. A highly complex and contradictory set of spatial and temporal patterns and practices emerge in which desire and repulsion are often in close proximity located in a number of leisure, retail, work, and private spaces. In addition, these spaces are inhabited by a range of different identity cohorts according to gender, gender performativity, class, and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The golf course is a significant social and ecological space which contributes to both increasing social polarisation and environmental injustice. Golf illustrates the shift from race to class-based exclusion that has characterised South Africa since 1994, and the increasing conspicuous consumption that shift has involved. The paper first demonstrates how golf involves the exclusion of the majority of South Africans from crucial resources, and then how golf is promoting inclusion into a new power elite that is marked by the co-existence of political and economic power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the historical geographies of South African retailing, indicating that the post-apartheid region must be understood as a contested social space. It explores the themes of race, region and multinationalism. It offers a short account of trading patterns in colonial and post-colonial Africa and investigates the development of the city of Lusaka in Zambia. It examines two cases of local contestation and resistance by both Zambians and South Africans depicting on accounts of people who have involved or stopped the South Africans in their expansionary tracks.