UWCScholar

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 11

Recent Submissions

Politics and agrarian capital in land restitution: the greater tenbosch strategic partnership in Mpumalanga, South Africa.
(University of the Western Cape, 2024) Maila, Tetelo
The post-apartheid South African government is faced with an enormous unresolved task of implementing land restitution programme to address the challenge of historical injustices of land dispossession while achieving poverty amelioration, employment, and food security. The study explores the impacts of a state-led strategic partnership arrangement between a land restitution community called Siboshwa, which is part of South Africa’s biggest and most expensive land claim: The Greater Tenbosch land claim, and an agribusiness Rainbow Chicken Limited (RCL) Foods.The central research question is: How has the strategic partnership arrangement shaped social relations of property, power, and production on community-owned commercial farms, and to what ways do they impact livelihood strategies of land reform beneficiaries. The study is situated within agrarian political economy, which is concerned with long-term, historical patterns of structurally determined power relations amongst social groups, of processes of political and economic control by the state and powerful actors, as well as diverse patterns of production, investment, accumulation and reproduction across society. The study uses concepts drawn from the Sustainable Livelihood Approach (SLA), which emphasises analysing the role of policies, organizations, and institutions play in mediating access to livelihood resources, thus continuously defining and (re)shaping what is possible for whom. In efforts to foreground the underlying structural conditions that define social relations and assume a critical inquiry lens that probes beyond the surface level, I employed philosophical tenets and assumptions from Critical Realism which analyse the social relations that underpin social formations, modes of production, and societal reproduction chains. Data was collected through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods (mixed method approach) from Greater Tenbosch Land reform beneficiaries in the Nkomazi Local District and other key actors relating to the strategic parntership.
Revealing hidden diversity: new Latrunculia and Iophon species (Porifera, Demospongiae, Poecilosclerida) from the continental shelf of the Namaqua ecoregion (Benguela ecosystem), along with a range extension of Latrunculia (Aciculatrunculia) biformis
(Cambridge University Press, 2026) Samaai, Toufiek; Payne, Robyn Pauline; Kamwi, Blessing
Four new species of Poecilosclerida (Porifera, Demospongiae) assigned to the genera Latrunculia and Iophon are described from South Africa and Namibia, located in the Namaqua ecoregion. The Porifera occurring along the continental shelf within this ecoregion are relatively well-known, with 76 species formally described in previous literature. Of these, 35 species belong to the Order Poecilosclerida. Additionally, Latrunculia (Aciculatrunculia) biformis is reported from the continental shelf on the west coast of South Africa, extending its range further northwards into the South Atlantic. DNA barcoding and molecular phylogenetic analyses were employed to ensure accurate taxonomic assignment and designation of new species.
Controllable construction of a “rigid-flexible integrated” solid electrolyte interphase to enhance the stability of lithium metal anodes
(Elsevier B.V., 2026) Linkov, Vladimir; Liu, Hui; Ji, Shan
The repeated and significant volume changes occurring in lithium metal during charge-discharge processes exacerbate the rupture of the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI), which constitutes one of the key factors responsible for the diminished stability of lithium metal anodes. Regulating the mechanical flexibility of the SEI layer represents an effective strategy to mitigate the volume expansion effect. Here, a controllable Li3N/LiCl electrolyte interphase layer (SEI) on the lithium anode surface is in-situ formed with molecule 3-chloro-1,2,4-triazole. Through the moderation of Li3N's rigidity by LiCl's flexibility, after 500 cycles of the Li||Li symmetric battery, the thickness growth rate of the SEI layer at the lithium metal interface decreases from 2.1 times to 1.2 times. Under a current density of 1 mA cm−2 and a capacity of 1 mA h cm−2, the Li||Li symmetric battery with a Li3N/LiCl-Li anode achieves a cycle life of 750 h, while the voltage polarization remains stable at around 24 mV. The Li-S battery with Li3N/LiCl-Li anode shows a capacity decay rate of only 0.139 % after 110 cycles at 0.2C, and maintains excellent cycling performance even under high sulfur loading/low electrolyte/sulfur ratio and high current density of 1C.
Culture, crisis and epistemicide: what can southern African communities teach the world about living in an age of crisis?
(University of the Western Cape, 2025) Dossani, Sameer
Modern human beings (homo sapiens) are the last extant species of the genius homo and as such have been on the planet for some 350,000 years or more. Unlike other animal systems, humans have been able to live in many different environments. One key way in which that is done is through the creation of knowledge systems. Different communities have different knowledge systems. When communities with different knowledge systems interact with one another there have historically been a number of possible group to group relations, grouped into the following categories: conflict/domination, tolerance (separation) and syncretism (the coming together of two or more communities to form a new community). At the present moment one knowledge system – the European Colonial Knowledge System (CKS) – has come to dominate all others.
Tracing the evolutionary pathways of dust and cold gas in high-z quiescent galaxies with SIMBA
(EDP Sciences, 2025) Davé, Romeel; Lorenzon, Giuliano; Donevski, Darko
Recent discoveries of copious amounts of dust in quiescent galaxies (QGs) at high redshifts (z ³ 1 2) challenge the conventional view that these objects have a negligible interstellar medium (ISM) in proportion to their stellar mass. We made use of the SIMBA hydrodynamic cosmological simulation to explore how dust and cold gas evolve in QGs and are linked to the quenching processes affecting them. We applied a novel method for tracking the changes in the ISM dust abundance across the evolutionary history of QGs identified at 0 < z ² 2 in both cluster and field environments. The QGs transition from a diversity of quenching pathways, both rapidly and slowly, and they exhibit a wide range of times that elapsed between the quenching event and cold gas removal (from -650 Myr to -8 Gyr). Contrary to some claims, we find that quenching modes attributed to the feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGNs) do not affect dust and cold gas within the same timescales. Remarkably, QGs may replenish their dust content in the quenched phase primarily due to internal processes and marginally by external factors such as minor mergers. Prolonged grain growth on gas-phase metals appears to be the key mechanism for dust re-formation, which is effective within -100 Myr after the quenching event and rapidly increases the dust-to-gas mass ratio in QGs above the standard values (δDGR ³ 1/100). Consequently, despite heavily depleted cold gas reservoirs, roughly half of QGs maintain little evolution of their ISM dust with stellar age within the first 2 Gyr following the quenching. Overall, we predict that relatively dusty QGs (Mdust/M ³ 103 104) arise from both fast and slow quenchers, and they are prevalent in quenched systems of intermediate and low stellar masses (9 < log(M/M) < 10.5). This strong prediction poses an immediate quest for observational synergy between, for example, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA).