South Africa remains challenged by persistent poverty and inequality, the ramifications of which are felt across the higher education (HE) sector. Many students enter universities already hindered by socio-economic inequalities as well as discriminatory and oppressive cultural practices which continue to impact on their studies.

This thesis explores how diverse ways of knowing and being with the Kuils River, located in Cape Town, South Africa, are shaped and in turn shape the river. The management of water (in pipes and rivers) and the development of water infrastructure are deeply rooted in societal development agendas that, over time, have been embedded in discourses of empire, economic growth, state formation, sustainability and technological efficiency.

My research is on regionalism among Congolese migrants of South Africa with the focus on the tensions between Baswahili (Kivu inhabitants) and Bato ya mangala (Kinshasa inhabitants) in the city of Cape Town. The two groups incarnate the geopolitical East and West of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), respectively.

In this thesis, I problematize whether Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Philosophy, reread as an affective and psychic Foucauldian technology of the self can operate as a strategy of psychic repair and transformation for pathological racialised subjects, produced by Necropolitical governmentality in the South African colony and postcolony.

Achilles Tatius’ novel, Leucippe and Clitophon (2nd c. CE), is a product of the literary experimentation in prose fiction during the Greek intellectual renaissance under the Roman Empire known as the Second Sophistic. For all appearances, the story follows the usual narrative course of the ancient Greek ...

This thesis offers an analysis of the official discourse of two post-apartheid commissions of inquiry investigating state violence – the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Marikana Commission of Inquiry.

Salt-Water-Bodies: From an Atlas of Loss is a response, through photomedia(tions) and live art, to material-affective encounters with/in littoral death zones along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean of the South African West Coast and seven adjacent islands – sites haunted by violent legacies and unchecked exploitation, where heightened precarity marks the lives of earth others.

In this study, an artistic research methodology is employed to identify principles of clowning as they are practiced in contemporary clown training workshops, to then offer applications of these within a South African theatre context. Autoethnographic accounts and fictional narratives offer an exploration of the practice of clowning from a personal perspective in multiple roles as clown performer, student, educator and observer, supplemented by an interpretive analysis of existing literature.

Mental health is a crucial part of the overall wellbeing of persons. Recovery is increasingly recognised worldwide as an essential approach to mental health. In this study recovery is regarded as personal recovery, a multidimensional construct differing from remission. In high-income countries, the study of recovery has developed and expanded to raise individuals' awareness of, and involvement in, their own recovery and to change mental health services to have a recovery orientation.