Diversity and contested social identities in multilingual and multicultural contexts of the University of the Western Cape, South Africa
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Date
2015
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Abstract
We draw on Rampton's Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among
Adolescents (2014. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge) notion of 'crossing' to
explore contestations in ethnolinguistic, cultural and racial affiliations at
the University of the Western Cape (UWC), a university built for
'Coloureds' in apartheid South Africa, but which rebelled by admitting
students of all races and ethnic backgrounds. Using interviews and
observation data, we show contestations around Xhosa and Afrikaans as
languages for black and coloured solidarity, respectively. We argue that
the multilingual and multicultural contexts in place entail that social
legitimacy is not achieved through fixed linguistics forms, bounded
ethnolinguistic categories and predetermined racial characteristics but in
negotiated in-group and out-group codes all of which are part of the
students' repertoire. We conclude that diversity is a function of
discourses of convergence and divergence as social practice, which give
the institution its unique character. The contestations and contradictions
thus reflect the democratic conditions on which discourses of diversity
are produced and consumed by the multiple socio-cultural range of
student populace.
Description
Keywords
University of the Western Cape, Discourse, Crossing, Exclusion, Social identities, Diversity
Citation
Banda, F. & Peck, A. (2015). Diversity and contested social identities in multilingual and multicultural contexts of the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(6).