Acta Academica最新文献

{"title":"TOWARDS STAFF DEVELOPMENT OF STUDENT AFFAIRS IN SOUTH AFRICA","authors":"Birgit Schreiber, Oliver J. J. Seale","doi":"10.52779/9781991260468/11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52779/9781991260468/11","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on the needs assessment of staff who work in student development, support, and services 1 , also called Student Affairs and Services (SAS), and its importance in enhancing student success in the South African university sector.The objective of the training needs analysis (TNA) undertaken by Higher Education Leadership and Management (HELM), was to explore the development needs of this domain within universities by gathering data via a survey using a convenience sample.The results of this study (N=362) suggest there is a compelling need for staff development in this sector.The identified needs focus on the development of 1) general leadership and management competencies, 2) communication and digital competencies, 3) competencies related to social justice, transformation, and gender equality, 4) understanding of the higher education sector, and 5) theories and practices of the Student Affairs and Services domain.While the needs are framed as competencies, these are not understood, here, as discreet or performative, but reflect a deeper need to reflect on and feel confident to navigate the complexities at the intersection of multi-disciplinary and crossboundary spaces in which Student Affairs often is located.This chapter contributes towards advancing a student-centred higher education sector by exploring the needs of the staff who provide student development, support, and services in higher education institutions in South Africa upon which a staff development programme can be premised.","PeriodicalId":38946,"journal":{"name":"Acta Academica","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://doi.org/10.52779/9781991260468/11","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147911205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Indigenous conceptions of human dignity","authors":"Elias G. Konyana","doi":"10.52779/9781991260253/03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52779/9781991260253/03","url":null,"abstract":"ZVIGAMBA TAMBANEVANA\"Listening to any one of Oliver Mtukudzi's songs, one always gleans a theme around the need to respect human dignity as epitomised in folktales often told by elders in the rural areas.One such story is that of a man named \"Zvigamba Tambanevana\".The name came from the type of clothes he had: tattered and made from pieces of cloths of different colours.At no particular occasion could anyone tell the colour of his shirt, shorts, trousers or anything he put on because they were made from differently coloured pieces of cloths.Most people in the village would despise him, treating him as an insignificant person.He had no friends except children who would occasionally troop around him, mocking him hilariously.For this reason, most people tagged him \"Zvigamba Tambanevana\", literally meaning \"one in tattered clothes who plays with children\".True to his fate, the man enjoyed playing with the children.So was his life for years, until one day he picked a shiny stone, which he took to someone to tell him what type of stone it was.Amazingly, it was a diamond gem!The man helped \"Zvigamba Tambanevana\" sell the gemstone and it fetched him a huge amount of money.This transformed his life and made him a rich man.He started retail shop businesses and was approached by many people who wanted him to help them by lending them some money to start businesses of their own.\"Zvigamba Tambanevana\" would always remind the men and women who came to him for help to remember how they used to treat him as a \"useless\" person.He often reminded them that everyone deserved some respect for who they are and not what they are because what one is today can change at any moment.He told everyone he helped that people should focus on respecting the dignity of other human beings and not the materials that they lack or possess.This story is commonly shared among informal gold miners popularly known as makorokoza (crackers) in Zimbabwe.These are usually young men who come from poor rural backgrounds and rummage places where mining is taking place or used to take place at commercial levels.Their lives revolve around looking for and selling small amounts of gold for survival.Whenever the informal miners do their job, they wear old, soiled and tattered clothes, because they work underground without appropriate equipment.Most of the time the informal miners are unfortunate as they hardly get much gold.Nevertheless, they do not give up, hoping to get the precious gem one day like what \"Zvigamba Tambanevana\" did.","PeriodicalId":38946,"journal":{"name":"Acta Academica","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"http://dx.doi.org/10.52779/9781991260253/03","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147907361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards a More Globally Inclusive and Relevant Neuroethics","authors":"Andrea C. Palk","doi":"10.52779/9781991201959/09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52779/9781991201959/09","url":null,"abstract":"in the field.","PeriodicalId":38946,"journal":{"name":"Acta Academica","volume":"1 1","pages":"157-182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://doi.org/10.52779/9781991201959/09","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147883518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Police intralingual translations of complainants’ statements in South Africa: From interviewing to collaborative record construction of a legal text","authors":"Monwabisi K. Ralarala, Laurian T. Lesch","doi":"10.52779/9781991201836/01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52779/9781991201836/01","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38946,"journal":{"name":"Acta Academica","volume":"1 1","pages":"15-35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://doi.org/10.52779/9781991201836/01","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147913873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Politicising ‘Covid-19’: An analysis of selected ZANU-PF officials’ 2020-2021 media statements on the pandemic in Zimbabwe","authors":"Paddington Mutekwe, K. Vanyoro","doi":"10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/2","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the politicisation of Covid-19 in Zimbabwe through discourse analysis of selected media statements released by Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) officials on the Covid-19 pandemic between March 2020 and February 2021. Theoretically, the paper employs Foucault’s theory of biopower to interpret the state-citizen power relations that surfaced in the Zimbabwean government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It argues that the ZANU-PF-led government used Covid-19 as an excuse to pursue its political interests. This is politics that protected ZANU-PF’s social, political and economic interests by using Covid-19 as an excuse to pulverise various forms of opposition. The argument advanced herein is that while the implementation of the lockdown in Zimbabwe was necessary to save lives, one of its consequences was the protection of self-interests through selective application of lockdown regulations and the passing of laws to silence critics. This resulted in the prohibition of political gatherings, arbitrary arrests, labelling and name-calling of the opposition and the West by ZANU-PF officials who were safeguarding their party’s waning support resulting from their mismanagement of the pandemic.","PeriodicalId":38946,"journal":{"name":"Acta Academica","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49562742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Taking ideology seriously in the time of plague: insights versus distractions","authors":"Rafal Soborski","doi":"10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/6","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that insights from ideology theory shed valuable light on the political aspects of COVID-19 and help understand and categorise policy responses to it. Much of the debate on the politics of COVID-19 has been dominated by questions concerning populism, but this article contends that this is not a fruitful direction for understanding current developments. The argument advanced here is that populism is a hollow and incoherent ideological category and so does not provide a suitable departure point to explore the ideological dimension of the pandemic. On the other hand, a critical engagement with the dominant ideology of neoliberalism goes a long way to explain different kinds of political fallout from COVID-19. While neoliberalism is unfit for the challenge posed by the virus, identifying the ideological underpinnings of the neoliberal approach may help to grasp its implications and formulate urgently needed alternatives.","PeriodicalId":38946,"journal":{"name":"Acta Academica","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41792931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The healing-growth future of humanity: regenerative politics and crealectic care","authors":"Luis de Miranda","doi":"10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/8","url":null,"abstract":"The 2020 coronavirus pandemic served to remind us that despite our Cartesian fantasies of control, naturing nature (natura naturans) is still active in the form of an untamed Other. The dominant reaction on most political sides was anthropocentric: if we do something – a doing generally framed within the scope of technique and management – nature shall go back to the kind and submissive non-viral neutrality that we appreciate in ‘her’ as a supposedly passive resource for productivism. How could humanity – a pandemic species itself and not only metaphorically – be better attuned with the powers of naturing nature, in a posture of co-creation rather than of a reactive technocratic war against the non-periodic or ‘monstrous’ aspects of life? This question is a matter of philosophical health: the future of humanity does not depend on statistics and logistics, but on the possibility of a philosophical (re)generative politics, a trustful care for creative singularity rather than an anxious control and production of regularity. Humanity’s collective health presupposes this reconciliation with naturing nature and the deployment of a global shared cosmology based on the creative healing-growth flux of originative creativity. This regenerative and life-affirming creative Real is here termed ‘Creal’, and we call ‘crealectics’ the generative philosophical health that favours healing growth.","PeriodicalId":38946,"journal":{"name":"Acta Academica","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42245686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conspiracy theories and pandemic management in Africa: critical reflections on contexts, contradictions and challenges","authors":"A. Oyekan","doi":"10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/3","url":null,"abstract":"The coronavirus pandemic, though primarily a health issue, has had significant social, economic and political implications across the world. There are reasons to believe that some of the changes occurring are likely to be permanent even in a post-pandemic world, and there are even suggestions that the world may be entering a phase in which pandemics become recurrent. Making sense of all that the pandemic has brought has by no means been easy, even for scientists who have had to review and revise their claims as new discoveries about the virus are made. One of the fallouts of the pandemic has been a proliferation of conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, as well as efforts to contain it. Summed up, these theories of various shades allege that certain powerful forces are behind the pandemic, in pursuit of some narrow ends that range from the political to the religious. In this paper, I analyse conspiracy theories and the motivations behind them. Situating conspiracy theories within the pandemic, I argue that they are best understood not within the framework of a single theory but by an understanding of how diverse motivations generate different, even contradictory conspiratorial accounts. I argue that whereas conspiracy theories have become a feature of modern society, and have been amplified in the age of technology, they have low credibility value in explaining the pandemic, while having significant implications. I also argue that if left unchecked, conspiracy theories have the capacity to further undermine governments’ capacity to respond to big crises in Africa in the future. I conclude that conspiracy theories are best managed in a pandemic through consistent, transparent engagement rooted in trust-building between the people and governments, especially in Africa.","PeriodicalId":38946,"journal":{"name":"Acta Academica","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42412132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Something eventful this way comes: on pandemics, events, and capitalism","authors":"Jason J. Howard","doi":"10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/5","url":null,"abstract":"Existentially and conceptually the disruptive wake of Covid-19 is different from the kind of problems the global community has weathered in the past. My article draws on Alain Badiou’s notion of an “event”—something unpredictable in its local specificities and radically open in terms of its possible effects—to explore the ramifications of the pandemic. Badiou’s approach is distinctive in that it explores different kinds of social disruption and can help us grasp whether the pandemic might carry the seeds of a revolution. I explore the disruptive effects of Covid-19 by first defining Badiou’s notion of events, and then examine whether Covid-19 fits this definition. I argue that although the current pandemic does not satisfy all Badiou’s criteria, it nevertheless may precipitate an event because of the peculiar way it disrupts contemporary capitalism.","PeriodicalId":38946,"journal":{"name":"Acta Academica","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43443269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Democracy in crisis","authors":"Lawrence A. Hamilton","doi":"10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa53i2/4","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I submit that the pandemic politics of the Covid-19 crisis have unmasked the inadequacies of existing representative democracies. Mixing the experiences and responses of various democracies and thinkers to this crisis, particularly from India and South Africa, I argue that a minimally functioning democracy must do two things at least: ensure the health and well-being of citizens and the equal means competitively to select prudent, empathetic and courageous leaders. For this, I suggest, we need a politics that allows us to express and assess our needs, and determine who is best placed to represent us in responding to these needs, all in non-dominating conditions. To this end, the article also proposes and defends four institutional reforms that would enable a dynamic, anti-oligarchic form of democracy to consistently empower the least powerful and keep elites properly in check.","PeriodicalId":38946,"journal":{"name":"Acta Academica","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44111434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}