3 results
Chapter 12 - Decolonisation and Governance at South African Universities: Case study of the Green Leadership Schools
- from PART II - SECTORS AND LOCATIONS
-
- By Darlene Miller, Wits School of Governance., Nomalanga Mkhize, Rhodes University., Rebecca Pointer, Wits School of Governance., Babalwa Magoqwana, Nelson Mandela University.
- David Everatt
-
- Book:
- Governance and the Postcolony
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2019
- Print publication:
- 01 August 2019, pp 258-282
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
INTRODUCTION
Resistance by the national #FeesMustFall students’ movement in South Africa placed the governance of university spaces at the centre of public discourse and university policies in 2015/2016. At the outset, this phase of student resistance in South Africa involved a fierce symbolic struggle to remove the statue of colonial imperialist Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. The man and his chair were finally dismantled and moved by crane in 2015. The historical hangover of colonial culture in an African university space, so many years after African independence from colonial rule, points to wider problems of governance at South African universities. Spaces of learning are organised under the gaze of white men and the postcolonial patriarchy. Transformation in higher education has not fundamentally disrupted hegemonic and racialised structures of governance at South African universities.
This chapter focuses on the importance of space and power, and how alternative approaches to higher education learning spaces – the physical organisation of learning, dominant knowledge systems, and the integration of the environment – may allow greater freedom for black Africans in university learning spaces. The premise is that the present university system still constrains the growth of black intellectuals and professionals. We present a radical alternative based in a grounded research method, in which a number of workshops called Green Leadership Schools (GLS) were run by the authors of this chapter. Key social problems and theories made up the curriculum of the GLS – land, gender and leadership – and these were related to crucial environmental issues such as climate change and indigenous knowledge(s).
The format and foci of the different GLS, organised over a two-year period as four residential workshops in 2014 and 2015, experimented with a different kind of learning space that stepped outside the modernist structures of the university learning space. The GLS initiative predated and then overlapped with the #FeesMustFall national students’ movement. The concerns for radical university transformation by these students intersected with the radical pedagogies envisaged by the GLS. The final (and fourth) GLS was organised as a writing workshop for these students. Themes of indigenous environmentalism, matriarchal leadership and green learning spaces informed our idea of green leadership, and were explored in various ways at the schools.
Chapter 13 - Excavating the vernacular: ‘Ugly feminists’, generational blues and matriarchal leadership
- from PART FIVE - JUSTICE, IDENTITY, FORCE AND RIGHTS – ‘WE CAME FOR THE REFUND’
-
- By Darlene Miller, Darlene Miller is a senior lecturer at the Wits School of Governance. She completed a Doctorate in sociology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. Her focus was on regional political economy and the expansion of South African firms in post-apartheid southern Africa, with a specific focus on labour in Zambia and Mozambique.
- Edited by Susan Booysen
-
- Book:
- Fees Must Fall
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 20 April 2018
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2016, pp 270-291
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
INTRODUCTION
In the #FeesMustFall movement, two distinguishing features produce a rupture with the past. The first is that womanhood is a contested space, along with sexual identities. The second is the contestation of forms of leadership, in which representational systems of leadership have been destabilised. These modes of selforganisation and self-expression of students in the #FeesMustFall movement are different to the dominant practices in the recent past of South African social movements. While ‘being woman’ has been the terrain on which feminists in South Africa and globally have countered gendered political identities, the prevalence of diverse sexualities among women on the university barricades – in protests, speeches, marches, meetings and blogs – is a radical discontinuity with the past.
This gendered difference in the #FeesMustFall social movement is producing a radical feminist political praxis that stands in stark contrast to the ‘domesticated feminisms’ that characterise older South African political activists today. In various ways – through elite formation, political incorporation, ageing and political fatigue – most of the older feminists who were part of the democratic transition no longer occupy the spaces on the barricades. This may be seen as a natural cycle of social protest. Leon Trotsky is credited with the saying, ‘Before forty, a revolutionary. After forty, a rogue!’ This chapter contends that the different political positionalities of what I term the ‘new African woman’ vis-à-vis the ‘domesticated feminist’ produces a generational rupture and leads to what I call ‘generational blues’. By this term I imply that instead of the significant chasm that potentially exists between the ‘new African woman’ and the older feminist, the older feminist should be the ‘organic political elder’ of the ‘new African woman’.
My chapter focuses on the ways in which lesser-known coloured feminist activists of the 1980s and the 2010s have challenged their social containment as women in order to give fuller self-expression to their political activism. The 2012–2013 Red Tent research project (Miller 2013a, b, c, d) of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) conducted personal interviews with ten middle-class women from 1980s social movements in the Western Cape; a personal interview with a key woman leader from the Proudly Manenberg organisation active in the 2000s; two focus groups with middle-class African women immigrants in Edinburgh; and working-class women (the dominant profile of the male leader, Mario Wanza, has often overshadowed the role of the women's leadership in Proudly Manenberg).
Prevalence of Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute Care Hospitals in Jacksonville, Florida
- Shelley S. Magill, Walter Hellinger, Jessica Cohen, Robyn Kay, Christine Bailey, Bonnie Boland, Darlene Carey, Jessica de Guzman, Karen Dominguez, Jonathan Edwards, Lori Goraczewski, Teresa Horan, Melodee Miller, Marti Phelps, Rebecca Saltford, Jacquelyn Seibert, Brenda Smith, Patricia Starling, Bonnie Viergutz, Karla Walsh, Mobeen Rathore, Nilmarie Guzman, Scott Fridkin
-
- Journal:
- Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology / Volume 33 / Issue 3 / March 2012
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 January 2015, pp. 283-291
- Print publication:
- March 2012
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Objective.
To determine healthcare-associated infection (HAI) prevalence in 9 hospitals in Jacksonville, Florida; to evaluate the performance of proxy indicators for HAIs; and to refine methodology in preparation for a multistate survey.
Design.Point prevalence survey.
Patients.Acute care inpatients of any age.
Methods.HAIs were defined using National Healthcare Safety Network criteria. In each facility a trained primary team (PT) of infection prevention (IP) staff performed the survey on 1 day, reviewing records and collecting data on a random sample of inpatients. PTs assessed patients with one or more proxy indicators (abnormal white blood cell count, abnormal temperature, or antimicrobial therapy) for the presence of HAIs. An external IP expert team collected data from a subset of patient records reviewed by PTs to assess proxy indicator performance and PT data collection.
Results.Of 851 patients surveyed by PTs, 51 had one or more HAIs (6.0%; 95% confidence interval, 4.5%–7.7%). Surgical site infections (n = 18), urinary tract infections (n = 9), pneumonia (n = 9), and bloodstream infections (n = 8) accounted for 75.8% of 58 HAIs detected by PTs. Staphylococcus aureus was the most common pathogen, causing 9 HAIs (15.5%). Antimicrobial therapy was the most sensitive proxy indicator, identifying 95.5% of patients with HAIs.
Conclusions.HAI prevalence in this pilot was similar to that reported in the 1970s by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Study on the Efficacy of Nosocomial Infection Control. Antimicrobial therapy was a sensitive screening variable with which to identify those patients at higher risk for infection and reduce data collection burden. Additional work is needed on validation and feasibility to extend this methodology to a national scale.
Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2012;33(3):283-291