Venitha Pillay

Academic mothers finding rhyme and reason

In this paper I argue that the ‘balancing two lives’ approach to motherhood and work has particular limitations for academic mothers. I interrogate the perceived oppositionalities in being mother, traditionally associated with nurturing, love and emotion, and being academic, traditionally associated with reason and logic. My purpose is to show that motherhood needs to be inscribed into intellectual work if the academic mother is to find a wholeness of self. A related point I make is that separating motherhood from intellectual work is tantamount to abandoning thinking and intellectual labour to be the preserve of a masculine terrain from which motherhood, emotion, love, nurturing is excluded.

Narrative style: the inseparability of self, style and text

This paper arose in response to a request from my colleague who supervised my doctoral thesis. He suggested that I explain my choice of narrative style. I discovered that, contrary to my immediate reaction that I did not use a particular style, I had made textual decisions about style throughout the writing process. When I looked at my other writings, they too revealed a choice of style. The question I had to ask was how did I make these choices and decisions, and to what extent were such choices conscious and deliberate decisions and what were the political implications, if any, of my style. I make a single point in this paper: that narrative style cannot be separated from the self and the inscriptions of the text. The point is founded on two parallel and current discussions on feminisms and postmodernism. I argue that the feminist call to de‐center the self while simultaneously seeking self reflexivity in order to fulfill the mandate of resistance postmodernism to transform society, do not necessarily sit comfortably with each other. The disjuncture that these two imperatives, to de‐center and to transform, may reveal, points to the need for a recognition of a form of essentialism that seeks to call the writer to assume responsibility for the text she writes. It is this responsibility for the text that forms the core of the politics of narrative style.

Writing in policy, writing out lives

In this paper we argue that education policy on HIV and AIDS is policy about life. As such, the contexts and the realities of teachers and learners in the classroom need to be embedded in the policy. We make a case that HIV and AIDS policy needs to extend beyond the prevention mode to one that includes care and support in the policy context. Through the stories of three HIV positive teachers in Zimbabwean primary schools, we show the real people and the real bodies that inhabit the classrooms where policy seeks to find expression. In so doing we illustrate that policy on HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe is blind to the lives and contexts of teachers and learners.

2010 FIFA World Cup: Gender, politics and sport

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Masculinities and mergers: losing ground through territoriality

This paper examines the extent to which masculinity played a role in the incorporation of an education college into a university in South Africa. I adopt the theoretical stance that masculinity is not a biological phenomenon that is peculiar to males but the socially constructed behaviour of masculine subjects that is contextually driven, and that the masculinity of institutions, and not only the masculinity of individuals, plays a role in shaping the outcomes of a change process. I go on to show: first that the discourse of power and control underpinned much of the behaviour of senior managers; second, the discourse of territoriality shows that the battle for asserting rights over space is linked to the masculine assertion of power. Finally I argue that masculinities survive and gain predominance, at the expense of other potentially beneficial social practices.

Multilingualism at South African universities: a quiet storm

Abstract This article seeks to reinforce the urgency for a multilingual academy in South Africa. It draws on recent quantitative data to unpack the dramatic decline of language enrolments and graduates of the 11 official languages. We explore the racial patterns in enrolments in the 11 official languages, given the scarcity of recent research articles that offer a quantitative comparison of the patterns of enrolment in this regard. We show that that while post-apartheid South Africa has seen a continuous rise in the popularity of English and Afrikaans, this has happened at the expense of all other official languages. We are mindful that the language policy in South Africa has political currency, which is not echoed in practical implementation. We suggest that while universities cannot ignore the politics of policy, it is the politics of practice in the form of what students choose to study that plays out in higher education institutions across the country. Our purpose therefore is to offer some insight into such practice. We argue that universities, in asserting their ‘public good’ mandate, should not be guilty of aiding and abetting the decline in indigenous languages by prioritising an efficiency mindset instead of a social justice one.

White Women Speak, Black Women Write: The Politics of Locution and Location in the Other Researching the Not Other.

This paper scrutinizes a rare methodological moment when I found myself, an unseasoned black woman scholar, researching the lives of three white women. In this reflective process, I make a single point: that the locution of race is limiting if it persists in being a point of struggle for marginalized scholars. In so doing, I distinguish between race as the site of intellectual engagement and race as a point from which to engage in scholarship. I begin with a brief explanation of how I came to take the decision to research three white women and of (dis)locating myself as other to the respondents. I then examine my actions in the context of concerns raised by other black scholars in their engagement with the academic establishment. Finally, I draw on the works of feminist scholars and argue that politicized and strategic understandings of otherness can potentially create challenging means for intellectual activism.