Multilingual higher education Van der Walt, Christa
Multilingual Matters,
2013., 2013, 2013-04-12, Letnik:
91
eBook, Book
The general perception that a good command of English is enough to gain access and to be successful in higher education hides the complexity of learning and teaching in multilingual environments, and ...this book shows that all higher education environments are multilingual to some extent. Strategies like translation, interpreting and switching from one language to another not only support learning but also build competence for multilingual professional environments. Whether institutions focus on widening access to minoritised communities or whether they want to attract more international students, the book argues that a multilingual pedagogy is needed to improve student access and success. Building on work by Nancy Hornberger, Colin Baker and Ofelia Garcia, the book extends strategies and techniques from bilingual education at school level to multilingual higher education.
Can Africa develop businesses beyond the extractive or agricultural sectors? What would it take for Africa to play a major role in global business? By focusing on recent changes, Scott D. Taylor ...demonstrates how Africa's business culture is marked by an unprecedented receptivity to private enterprise. Challenging persistent stereotypes about crony capitalism and the lack of development, Taylor reveals a long and dynamic history of business in Africa. He shows how a hospitable climate for business has been spurred by institutional change, globalization, and political and economic reform. Taylor encourages a broader understanding of the mosaic of African business and the diversity of influences and cultures that shape it.
Human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are by definition not part of the state. Rather, they are an element of civil society, the strands of the fabric of organized life in countries, and ...crucial to the prospect of political democracy. Civil society is a very recent phenomenon in East African nations, where authoritarian regimes have prevailed and human rights watchdogs have had a critical role to play. While the state remains one of the major challenges to human rights efforts in the countries of the region, other problems that are internal to the human rights movement are also of a serious nature, and they are many: What are the social bases of the human rights enterprise in transitional societies? What mandate can human rights NGOs claim, and in whose name do they operate?Human Rights NGOs in East Africacritically explores the anatomy of the human rights movement in the East African region, examining its origins, challenges, and emergent themes in the context of political transitions. In particular, the book seeks to understand the political and normative challenges that face this young but vibrant civil society in the vortex of globalization. The book brings together the most celebrated human rights thinkers in East Africa, enriched by contributions from their colleagues in South Africa and the United States. To date, very little has been written about the struggles and accomplishments of civil society in the nations of East Africa. This book will fill that gap and prove to be an invaluable tool for understanding and teaching about human rights in this complex and vital part of the world.
Why do ethnic politics emerge in some ethnically diverse societies but not others? Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, Dominika Koter argues that the prevailing social structures of a country play a ...central role in how politicians attempt to mobilize voters. In particular, politicians consider the strength of local leaders, such as chiefs or religious dignitaries, who have historically played a crucial role in many parts of rural Africa. Local leaders can change the electoral dynamics by helping politicians secure votes among people of different ethnicities. Ethnic politics thus can be avoided where there are local leaders who can serve as credible electoral intermediaries between voters and politicians. Koter shows that there is widespread variation in the standing of local leaders across Africa, as a result of long-term historical trends, which has meant that politicians have mobilized voters in qualitatively different ways, resulting in different levels of ethnic politics across the continent.
Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2002, George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had "sought ...significant quantities of uranium from Africa" (later specified as the infamous "yellowcake from Niger"). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did that admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? In this book, Gabrielle Hecht lucidly probes the question of what it means for something--a state, an object, an industry, a workplace--to be "nuclear." Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear--a state that she calls "nuclearity"--lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between "developing nations" (often former colonies) and "nuclear powers" (often former colonizers). Nuclearity, she says, is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one.Hecht follows uranium's path out of Africa and describes the invention of the global uranium market. She then enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? With this book, Hecht is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. Doing so, she remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.
This book shows how cosmopolitan Christian converts and East African patriots struggled to define political community in the mid-twentieth century. Derek Peterson traces the history of the East ...African Revival, an evangelical movement that challenged patriots' effort to root people in place as inheritors of a cultural heritage.
An extraordinary outbreak of xenophobic violence in May 2008 shocked South Africa, but hostility toward newcomers has a long history. Democratization has channeled such discontent into a non-racial ...nationalism that specifically targets foreign Africans as a threat to prosperity. Finding suitable governmental and societal responses requires a better understanding of the complex legacies of segregation that underpin current immigration policies and practices. Unfortunately, conventional wisdoms of path dependency promote excessive fatalism and ignore how much South Africa is a typical settler state. A century ago, its policy makers shared innovative ideas with Australia and Canada, and these peers, which now openly wrestle with their own racist past, merit renewed attention. As unpalatable as the comparison might be to contemporary advocates of multiculturalism, rethinking restrictions in South Africa can also offer lessons for reconciling competing claims of indigeneity through multiple levels of representation and rights.
Wild religion Chidester, David
2012., 20120324, 2012, 2012-04-23, 20120101
eBook
Wild Religion is a wild ride through recent South African history from the advent of democracy in 1994 to the euphoria of the football World Cup in 2010. In the context of South Africa's political ...journey and religious diversity, David Chidester explores African indigenous religious heritage with a difference. As the spiritual dimension of an African Renaissance, indigenous religion has been recovered in South Africa as a national resource. Wild Religion analyzes indigenous rituals of purification on Robben Island, rituals of healing and reconciliation at the new national shrine, Freedom Park, and rituals of animal sacrifice at the World Cup. Not always in the national interest, indigenous religion also appears in the wild religious creativity of prison gangs, the global spirituality of neo-shamans, the ceremonial display of Zulu virgins, the ancient Egyptian theosophy in South Africa's Parliament, and the new traditionalism of South Africa's President Jacob Zuma. Arguing that the sacred is produced through the religious work of intensive interpretation, formal ritualization, and intense contestation, Chidester develops innovative insights for understanding the meaning and power of religion in a changing society. For anyone interested in religion, Wild Religion uncovers surprising dynamics of sacred space, violence, fundamentalism, heritage, media, sex, sovereignty, and the political economy of the sacred.
