Research Articles (Women & Gender Studies)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10566/8

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Changing bodily practices in interspecies communities with dairy cows and white lions: methodological challenges in co-constructing meaning
(SAGE Publications Ltd, 2025) Wels, Harry; Cornips, Leonie
Research with cows, white lions, and other forms of interspecies fieldwork presents deep methodological challenges. Traditional, human-centered ethnography falls short in capturing how non-human interlocutors shape the conditions, possibilities, and dynamics of research. Drawing on two contrasting case studies – a dairy calf in the Netherlands and white lions in South Africa – we show that interspecies ethnography requires unlearning human-centered bodily habits, developing species-specific sensitivity, and recognizing the active role of animals in shaping the temporalities, spatialities, and sensory registers of research encounters. We argue that emotions, tactile engagement, and multimodal communication are not supplementary, but fundamental elements of knowledge-making in communities that involve both humans and animals. Our comparative analysis of prey and predator contexts highlights how species, power relations, and material infrastructures shape what counts as participation and understanding. We conclude that preparing students for multispecies research demands a rethinking of ethnographic training, placing slow, embodied, and affectively engaged learning with other-than-human beings at the center.
Hegemonic digitalisation in policy on older people: the finnish case and wider social implications
(SAGE Publications Ltd, 2025) Hearn, Jeff; Niemistö, Charlotta; Sjögren, Hanna
This article brings together societal debates on digitalisation and analysis of governmental policy on older people, through the theoretical frame of hegemonic digitalisation, and the empirical case of Finnish policy. With changing demographics in many countries, old age has gained high-profile focus in governmental policy in recent years, which has in turn become increasingly constructed in relation to digitalisation, often via an interventionist logic that positions new technologies as solutions to problems of ageing. In this analysis, material-discursive power relations are highlighted, with policy understood as material-discursive in its formation, form and effects. Specifically, the article critically examines: the conceptualisation of hegemonic digitalisation, often assumed, even across political differences, as an efficient solution to declining resources within neoliberal governance, with reference to policy on/and older people; how digitalisation and older people are constructed in governmental policy documents in Finland; and the applicability of hegemonic digitalisation to Finnish policy on older people. The article concludes with discussion of the implications that follow for everyday life, policy, social analysis and social theory. Regarding theoretical implications, with hegemonic digitalisation, the hegemony of digitalisation is emphasised, as in national policy contexts, rather than whole-society or global hegemony seen as digital. Additionally, tensions persist between foregrounding hegemonic digitalisation, and the co-constitution of older people and digitalisation policy. Specificities of ageing and older age impinge on and present challenges for both analysis of digitalisation and social theory. Theorising materiality-discursivity is a fertile perspective for studies on age, policy and digitalisation, including how future-orientation figures in policy and research.
Narrative journeys: on the significance of motion in interviewing
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2025) Mphaphuli, Memory; Ayala, Ricardo
This article introduces narrative journeys as a distinct approach to qualitative interviewing that foregrounds movement not as context but as an active feature of meaning-making. Drawing on two case studies—one in Chile and one in South Africa—we explore how interviews conducted while walking allow for different narrative flows, affective rhythms and relational dynamics compared to conventional sit-down formats. Rather than focusing primarily on place, as is often the case in go-along interviews, we argue that it is the motion itself that reshapes the conditions for reflection, disclosure and interaction. Through the use of ethnographic vignettes, we examine how pace, gesture and spatial negotiation structure the unfolding of narrative content. We also address key ethical and methodological considerations, including visibility, consent and the unpredictability of public space. Our analysis suggests that narrative journeys offer not only an alternative technique but a reconfiguration of the interview as a dynamic and co-produced encounter. This approach may be particularly suited to research concerned with lived experience, relationality and the subtle interplay of thought and movement. We conclude by outlining a set of dimensions for analysing interviews in motion and reflecting on the potential of this method within qualitative research more broadly.
Doing pedagogy differently: in memory of Elmarie Costandius
(University of the Western Cape, 2025) Grace Bozalek, Vivienne Grace; Romano, Nike
Elmarie Costandius was passionate about pedagogy, particularly from a social justice perspective, throughout her career in higher education. Although located as a senior lecturer in the visual arts programme at Stellenbosch University, she pursued the field of education in her postgraduate studies, when she completed a second Masters Degree in Adult Learning and Global Change in 2007 at the University of the Western Cape, as well as a PhD in Curriculum Studies at Stellenbosch University, graduating in 2012. She received multiple teaching awards both from her own institution, Stellenbosch University, as well as nationally. Elmarie was also a teaching fellow in the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at Stellenbosch University and was chosen to be part of the Teaching Advancement at Universities (TAU) Fellowship programme, a national programme for outstanding teachers in higher education. In 2023, she won the TAU Fellows Award, which she felt honoured to receive - as she expressed it:
Re-reading africa through food: introduction
(Routledge, 2025) Lewis, Desiree; Thuynsma, Heather A.
Humanities-oriented scholarship and research on food has rapidly expanded in the globalNorth. Marion Nestle and W. Alex McIntosh (2010), for example, remarked that foodstudies had grown as a “new field”, with the humanities steadily consolidating interdisci-plinary work on food. Their remarks respond to the way in which food studies were pre-viously disparaged in humanities disciplines, despite Claude Lévi-Strauss’s and RolandBarthes’ pioneering of interdisciplinary work about food.
Metabolising the maze: towards a ruderal ethnography
(Emerald Publishing, 2025) Wels, Harry; Stehouwer, Saskia
The purpose of this article is to work towards a more embodied knowledge an deepened understanding of the wordless relationship that exists between all living beings on this earth. It aims to do this by looking at the threads that connect us, and entering and fully savouring the maze of entanglement, instead of rigidly trying to unravel it and explain away its mysteries in a traditional academic manner.
Gender-based violence in higher education and research performing organisations: three steps in critique and reconceptualisation
(Bristol University Press, 2025) Hearn, Jeff; Strid, Sofia; Humbert, Anne Laure
The critique and conceptualisation of current policy and research on gender-based violence in higher education institutions (HEIs) and research performing organisations (RPOs) are matters of central importance. Building critically on recent European research and policy experience, and conceptual reflections arising from a large European multi-country research and innovation project, three key steps in critique and reconceptualising of gender-based violence in HEIs and RPOs are explicated. These are: first, clarification of differential definitions of and inclusions in gender-based violence in HEIs and RPOs; second, drawing on the recent European UniSAFE project survey and analysis of 42,000 university staff and student respondents in 46 institutions within 15 countries, differential contextualisations of prevalence and consequences, especially the need for multi-level and intersectional analysis of prevalence and consequences; and, third, engagement with ongoing theoretical and practical contestations in conceptualisation. The article concludes with discussion of further key issues for research and policy. These include how gender and gender-based violence are understood across national, organisational contexts, and the need for more focus on perpetrators, and the organisational relations between perpetrators and victims. In working towards violence-free and safe HEIs and RPOs, the connections between violence and organisational structures, processes and dynamics must be confronted proactively.
Masculinity, matrimony and generation: reconfiguring patriarchy in Drum 1951-1983
(Taylor & Francis, 2008) Clowes, Lindsay
In this article I discuss some of the ways in which Drum tended to ascribe ‘modernity’ to particular practices and processes in opposition to other practices and processes portrayed as ‘traditional’. In mid-twentieth-century South Africa, dominant discourses tended to signal (white) male adulthood through independent decision making alongside financial autonomy. In contrast African discourses tended to signal male adulthood through proximity to family members, through respect for age and seniority and through deference to the praxis of ‘tradition’. In the representations of black men in its pages, Drum magazine negotiated a somewhat disorderly path through these competing racialised discourses. I suggest that Drum’s claim that black males were indeed men was made through highlighting and condoning practices that demonstrated similarities and continuities between subordinate black and dominant white versions of manhood. In challenging the racial discourse the magazine paradoxically found itself simultaneously reinforcing western rather than African versions of manhood.
In conversation with Erin Manning: a refusal of neurotypicality through attunements to learning otherwise
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2024) Manning, Erin; Bozalek, Vivienne Grace
This paper documents a conversation with Erin Manning in the first webinar of the series doing academica differently: In conversation with neuroatypicality. Drawing on her scholarship, teaching experience, as well as the more recent 3ecologies project, Manning shows how systems serve to pathologize by framing difference from the angle of typicality and as a divergence from the norm. She argues, therefore, that it is necessary to move beyond the ontological presuppositions enacted by systems of whiteness/neurotypicality. She proposes that academic work must continue to remain open to the differential within difference, and value slow and convivial practices that texture qualities of existence as a mode rather than as gridded individual identities. By focusing on the crucial notion of value in higher education and how it might be reworked in experimental ways, Manning suggests ways of attuning for learning otherwise beyond a neurotypical frame
Doing academia differently: In conversation With neuroatypicality
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2024) Bozalek, Vivienne
This special issue originated from a webinar series made possible through a tri-continental (3C) partnership between the University of the Western Cape, the University of Missouri, and Ghent University. These universities organized a series of webinars on the theme “doing academia differently: In conversation with neuroatypicality.” The tri-continental (3C) partnership is a trilateral agreement that set out to promote partnership between the three institutions during a time of travel restrictions due to the global pandemic.
Affective oceanic seaswimming and encounters for care-full environmental communication
(Routledge, 2024) Shefer, Tamara; Bozalek, Vivienne; Romano, Nike
Our oceanic swimming practice began as part of the project of doing scholarship differently in contemporary South African post-apartheid contexts. Swimming-writing-reading not only enables different ways of doing inquiry but also prompts new ways of communicating environmental injustices as we face them in/with/through the ocean. We argue the value of this practice, and the writings we generate and share, for a rethinking and reframing of environmental communication through practices of care. “Slow swimming” in the ocean brings one into intimate, affecting encounters with the ocean and its multiplicities. Porous to fluid temporalities, oceanic swimming-writing-reading becomes a hauntological place-space-time-mattering practice of swimming as we become aware of sedimented crimes of slavery and colonization, and confront the ghosts of apartheid and colonial violence. As we meet disasters of present and future, polluted and violated seas, our affective relational watery encounters with more-than-human species sharpen our response-ability to and responsibility for anthropocentric damages to the ocean and planet. We suggest such practices of affective wit(h)nessing, relationality, and care as a productive resource for communicating current environmental challenges that are consequences of certain human hands, as well as our mutual entanglements and response-abilities on planet Earth.
Book symposium: men, masculinities and southern urbanism
(Routledge, 2025) Hearn, Jeff; Chowdhury, Romit; Matlon, Jordanna
This book symposium is a multilogue on four books Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi: The Pressure of Being a Man in an African City, by Mario Schmidt; City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport, by Romit Chowdhury; Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony, by Shannon Philip; and A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism, by Jordanna C. Matlon. The discussion, held between the four authors, along with Jeff Hearn and Kopano Ratele, addresses: the background to the books based in Kenya, India and Côte d’Ivoire respectively; main contributions around men, masculinities and urbanism; ethnography and other methodologies; relations to Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities, Feminist and Human Geography, and kindred disciplines, and ways forward.
‘This thing that we do’: in pursuit of hope-full renewals through hydrofeminist scholarly praxis
(Routledge, 2024) Bozalek, Vivienne; Osgood, Jayne
In this paper, we dwell amongst what was agitated from enacting Neimanis' (2012) hydrofeminism in an ‘aqueous-body–writing–reading’ experiment that unfolded in discrete but entangled locations (London and Cape Town) to actively disrupt and reformulate ideas about what it is to do scholarly work. We consider how we might dislodge anthropocentric ways of knowing, being and doing through our swimming–writing–reading. Aligned with emergent hydrofeminist scholarship, our unruly writing experiment has–over 7 months of alternating seasons on two continents–involved exchanging, diffracting and curating words that e/merge together. The multiple, interwoven stories told in this paper are a direct challenge to what and how knowledge gets produced, by whom, where and for what purposes. Working with wit(h)nessing; contact zones; and radical openness, our speculative, enmeshed, multispecies praxis offers glimpses into the possibilities that exist in porous spaces to generate knowledge differently in the spirit of hopeful renewal.
Food shaming and race, and hungry translations
(Taylor & Francis, 2023) Lewis, Desiree
Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America by Psyche A. Williams-Forson (2022) and Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability by Richa Nagar (2019) deal with food and hunger in relation to the very different geo-political regions of North America and India. At the same time, they enter into dialogue with each other in exploring how socially situated bodies � othered in gendered, raced and neoliberal systems and discourses � navigate and resist oppressive food politics. As both authors also show, critical approaches to food politics should entail much more than attention to who gets to eat well, or why certain groups are able to waste food obscenely while most of the world�s population starves, cannot make informed and healthy food choices, or inhabits food deserts, those foodscapes of near-starvation created by the corporate food industry�s hunger for profits. As the authors show, exploring the politics of food, eating and hunger should focus also on the languages and attitudes surrounding how these are connected to radical struggles for human freedom. By focusing on the represented and imagined connections between human desires and experiences on one hand and food and hunger on the other, Williams-Forson and Nagar also encourage us to interrogate and re-imagine our relationships to both humans as well as nature and other living beings. These books� perspectives from different continents invite us to consider the trans-continental context of multiple subaltern struggles through the lens of food.
Greener on the other side: Tracing stories of amaranth and moringa through indenture
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Naidoo, Pralini
My research, with its focus on women and food seed through the lens of indenture, has led me into the world ofleafy green vegetables and their intimate connection to women who had been brought to South Africa to servicecolonial plantations. Leafy greens are currently buzzwords in thefitness, health, vegan, and vegetarianvocabulary. Occasionally, another leaf isdiscoveredby the doyens of fancy cuisine, researchers orexperts,elevating anunknowndark green leaf to superfood status. In the past few decades moringa and amaranthhave gained popularity in scientific and culinary circles. This sudden spurt of interest in a food that has been traditionally eaten for years in ex-indentured communities, among many others, has often elicited from this community, wry amusement, confusion at its celebrity status or pride at its recognition. Delving into research transcripts and fieldwork notes, I observe, not only, how these communities consume moringa and amaranth, but the variety of ways the human and other-than-human stories are entangled. I also consider the impact/benefits of the commodification of foods and seeds such as moringa and amaranth, on the many invisible people who have been propagating, consuming and storying the plant before its discovery.
Parents resist sexuality education through digital activism
(SAGE Publications, 2022) Ngabaza, Sisa
South Africa has high rates of HIV infection among its young population, high rates of unintended pregnancy among the youth, and extremely high rates of gender-based violence. Given all this, it is essential that young people be taught skills that will enable them to manage their sexuality. Schools have been shown to be best placed to provide accurate and relevant information on young people�s sexualities. Through the Life Orientation (LO) curriculum, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) offers age-appropriate sexuality education as a response to these concerns. However, research in sexuality education shows that there is a lack of guidance and preparedness by educators, and this hampers how sexuality education is delivered in South African schools. A recent attempt by the DBE to upscale and strengthen the sexuality education curriculum in South African schools was met with resistance from parents and other lobby groups. This resistance was driven across many different media platforms, and particularly through an online hashtag #LeaveOurKidsAlone, largely on Facebook and Twitter. Through this resistance, we are introduced to parents/adult response to the teaching and learning of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in South African schools, a voice that has been missing to a great extent in this debate.
Be a little careful: Women, violence, and performance in India
(Cambridge University Press, 2019) Arora, Swati
In this article Swati Arora analyzes a contemporary Indian feminist performance, Thoda Dhyaan Se (A Little Carefully, 2013), by framing it in the spatial ecosystem of the city of Delhi and exploring its engagement with feminist discourse and the national imaginary of India. It highlights the workings of the cultural economy of the city, which is defined by its spatial contours as well as the privileges of caste, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, and at the same time explores the heterogeneous nature of the country's feminist movement through an intersectional perspective. Swati Arora argues that the concerns raised by Thoda Dhyaan Se are limited to urban, middle-class, and upper-caste women and overlook the oppressive realities of women from non-urban, lower-class, and lower-caste backgrounds. With conversations around gender focused through campaigns like #MeToo and #TImesUp, it is important to contextualize the voices that are articulated and those that are excluded. Swati Arora is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape.
Under construction: Toward a theory and praxis of queer peacebuilding
(Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, 2023) Ritholtz, Samuel; Serrano-Amaya, Jos� Fernando; Judge, Melanie
| This article explores what queer as a concept brings to peacebuilding, presenting a guiding framework and introduction for a special issue on queer peacebuilding. It offers an initial approach to the topic, which means to center queer and trans perspectives of peace and bring queer epistemologies to bear on how peace is constituted so as to rearticulate the concept both in theory and praxis. In doing so, it addresses an unexamined gap in peacebuilding efforts to achieve gender justice and inclusive security in conflict-affected societies, namely the unique experiences of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer) individuals and their collective efforts to achieve social justice in these contexts. The authors approach the topic of queer peacebuilding through three questions: What is queer peacebuilding?, �Why is queer peacebuilding important? and What can queer peacebuilding contribute? While the impacts of queer peacebuilding in sites of contentious politics around the globe are visible, it remains an emergent and somewhat elusive concept, still under construction within peace and security scholarship and practice.
Participatory relationships matter: Doctoral students traversing the academy
(SAGE Publications, 2022) Veronica, Mitchell; Gredley, Susan; Carette, Lieve
In this article, we take our thoughts for a walk through our three different doctoral journeys and experiences with the Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry Webinar Series (2020�2021). The webinars presented an example of Slow scholarship, enabling us to think deeply and differently from others and develop new ideas to take further. The online connections offered opportunities for extending learning spaces beyond traditional bounded structures. Here we explore the rich learning gained from each other�s experiences of research, learning, and teaching in different higher education settings and ways in which these intersected with the webinars during the global COVID-19 pandemic. We contend that the generosity of senior academics in leadership positions who embraced global networks of communication, connected students with experts, and learned with and from their students through communal egalitarian spaces has enormous potential to support students as they traverse often demanding and challenging doctoral journeys.
Obstetric violence within students� rite of passage: The reproduction of the obstetric subject and its racialised (m)other
(UNISA Press, 2021) van der Waal, Rodante; Mitchell, Veronica; Bozalek, Vivienne
Building on the work of Mbembe (2019) and Silva (2007), we theorise how the obstetric institution can still be considered fundamentally modern, that is, entangled with colonialism, slavery, bio- and necropolitics and patriarchal subjectivity. We argue that the modern obstetric subject (doctor or midwife) representing the obstetric institution engulfs the (m)other in a typically modern way as othered, racialised, affectable and outerdetermined, in order to constitute itself in terms of self-determination and universal reason. While Davis-Floyd (1987) described obstetric training as a rite of passage into a technocratic model of childbirth, we argue that students� rite of passage is not merely an initiation into a technological model of childbirth. The many instances of obstetric violence and racism in their training make a more fundamental problem visible, namely that students come of age within obstetrics through the violent appropriation of the (m)other. We amplify students� curricular encounters in two colonially related geopolitical spaces, South Africa and the Netherlands, and in two professions, obstetric medicine and midwifery, to highlight global systemic tendencies that push students to cross ethical, social and political boundaries towards the (m)other they are trained to care for. The embedment of obstetric violence in their rite of passage ensures the reproduction of the modern obstetric subject, the racialised (m)other, and institutionalised violence worldwide.

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