Using Critical Realism, this article looks at articles from selected South African newspapers which reported on the #FeesMustFall protests. The study established that, arising from the protests, was a culture characteried by tensions and distrust amongst stakeholders such as students, university management and the government. This, the article argues, was a result of how each of these stakeholders perceived, and went on to exercise, their agency in an attempt to resolve the conflict arising from the protests. To avert a recurrence of negative consequences of student protests such as the destruction of property and development of toxic and adversarial relationships amongst different stakeholders, the article recommends collaborative approaches to conflict resolution in South African higher education. These approaches need to be framed differently from those in which some stakeholders seek to use their agency to achieve outright victory over other stakeholders -a recurring mode of engagement during the #FeesMustFall protests.

This article examines the metaphors that the Zimbabwean Shona speakers created to communicate various messages concerning the socio-economic and political crisis that has been occurring in their country since the year 2000. The data for this study came from two sources, namely, field notes from participant observations taken of naturally occurring interactions in the public and private spheres from August to December of 2008 and semistructured interviews conducted with Shona speakers of varying age groups, educational status, religious and political affiliation, and gender. This article considerably draws analytical insights from the Cognitive Grammar (CG) framework which looks at metaphor as a conceptual and linguistic phenomenon that involves a mapping relation between two domains, namely, the source domain and the target domain. This theory argues that metaphor, as a cognitive tool enabling us to draw on our previous experience of the world with familiar issues and mapping them on less familiar ones, occupies a prominent place in our thought process.

Using a qualitative research design, the study sought to establish how second-year students and lecturers' teaching first-year modules perceive the contribution of under-preparedness to low success rates at first-year level. Data were gathered by means of focus group interviews with second year students studying Education, Financial Accounting, Public Management and Governance, Entrepreneurial Studies and Management as well as with five lecturers teaching at first-year level at a campus of the university which is located in a township area. It was established that while both the students and lecturers, in the main, agree that under-preparedness contributes significantly to low first-year success rates, they also agree that it can also be attributed to psycho-social and institutional factors some of which have very little or no link at all to the first-years' basic education background. The study recommends the need for measures to be taken to solve the problems in South African basic education as well enhancement of institutional efforts aimed at improving first-year success rates by universities.

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