Rachel Masika

Building Student Belonging and Engagement: Insights into Higher Education Students' Experiences of Participating and Learning Together.

ABSTRACT Student belonging and engagement has received increased attention in the context of an expanding and more diverse higher education student population. Student retention is regarded as a priority with many universities augmenting their retention strategies to instil a sense of belonging. This article provides insights into first year Business Management students’ experiences of starting their degrees and retention interventions at a university in the South of England. It is based on findings from an ongoing study that applied Wengers social theory of learning and adopted an appreciative inquiry approach to focus group interviewing to investigate students’ perceptions. Students developed a sense of belonging, constructed learner identities, made sense of their learning and gained confidence, but also experienced instances of tension and frustration that raise questions about the extent to which sociality practices within evolving communities of practice can address diverse engagement and identity development needs and mitigate disengagement.

Negotiating Women’s Agency through ICTs A Comparative Study of Uganda and India

Abstract In the early wave of optimism surrounding “ICTs and development” beginning 2000, much attention was paid to the potential of ICTs for empowering women. It was suggested that new technologies could help marginalized women in developing countries in areas ranging from agriculture to education, empowering women both economically and socially. However, subsequent research illustrated that such a straight outcome was not always the case. ICT interventions could equally result in a negligible or even negative impact on existing gender relations. This research argues a third point: In many cases women decide the extent to which they will adopt a particular technology on the basis of how they think it will affect the gender equilibrium. Based on our respective doctoral fieldwork on the use of mobile phones by female street traders in urban Uganda and an IT center and community radio in rural India, we ask: How strategically do women in developing countries negotiate agency through ICTs? Through these two case studies, we apply two concepts of agency, namely, “adaptive preference” and “patriarchal bargain” to understand how women decide to adopt ICTs. Empowerment through ICTs is not unproblematic, nor is it impossible; it is, however, illustrative of contextual, situated agency.

Threshold crossings and doctoral education: learning from the examination of doctoral education

CITATION: Wisker, G., Kiley, M. & Masika, R. 2016. Threshold crossings and doctoral education: learning from the examination of doctoral education, in L. Frick, V. Trafford & M. Fourie-Malherbe (eds.). Being Scholarly: Festschrift in honour of the work of Eli M Bitzer. Stellenbosch: SUN MeDIA. 117-124. doi:10.18820/9781928314219/11.