South Africa is now in its third decade of democracy and is characterised by a social and political dispensation based on the principles of freedom of expression, non-racialism and non-sexism. These values ought to be entrenched in all aspects

The end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 saw many higher education institutions identifying opportunities to increase their intake of international students by introducing student exchange programmes. Based on South Africa's ethnically diverse society, cultural differences pose various challenges for international students. This results in intercultural communication apprehension and therefore, a negative experience for international students. The aim of this research is to examine the cultural challenges faced by international exchange students studying at a university in South Africa. A quantitative descriptive methodology was employed for this study. Themes emanating from the literature review were used to develop a research questionnaire that consisted mostly of closed-ended questions followed by a few open-ended questions. The questionnaire was administered to ninety nine international students. The findings of the investigation indicate that the majority of international students experience culture as a challenge, which impacted on their ability to communicate and to be understood. To add credence to the international students' experiences and the exchange programme, this paper therefore, suggests that issues around culture and intercultural communication is introduced as a core study module for all first-time international students before they arrive in South Africa.

Media are powerful agents of socialisation. Through representation, media helps in constructing and reproducing gender identities. The representation of how women are constructed by the media has travelled due to globalization. The 2006 Global Media Monitoring Project reveals that women are under-represented in news. The media are therefore construed as constructing gender subjectivity. For example, women are literally absent in news, politics and economics and hardly ever appear as spokespersons or as field experts. These subjective representations are often framed though the lenses of the media producers and are influenced by the political economy of the media. Media are therefore seen as representing a distorted version of women. Gallagher (2004), however states that in South Africa, the process of changing gender in the newsroom has started and media audiences, texts and institutions have changed, largely due to the persistent gender advocacy. Based on this, this paper sets out to investigate how Indian women are represented in a South African newspaper targeted at a cross-national ethnic readership. A qualitative methodology was used to analyse content and photographs appearing in ten consecutive publications of the newspaper. Themes emanating from the literature review were used to analyse newspaper content. The major findings of the investigation indicate that representations of the South African Indian woman has undoubtedly expanded, taking into account new roles and offering new identities, however certain stereotypical identities continue to prevail.

The overall aim of this paper is to explore my experiences as a novice postgraduate supervisor through the process of reflection. This study adopts a qualitative approach and uses self-reflection as a method of enquiry by reflecting and documenting personal experiences and practices of postgraduate supervision. The findings are analysed so as to give meaning and to make sense of the supervision process. The results reflect that the journey of postgraduate supervision, in part, has not only resulted in the development of the student, but has also resulted in the academic journey of development of myself. This process has entailed the re-establishment of my academic identity of working within a redefined context of a University of Technology (UoT). Whereas, in the past my key role at a Technikon was undergraduate study only, I have had to reconstruct and re-negotiate my identity to integrate the scholarship of research, which has to an extent, contributed positively to my professional development. Based on these findings I suggest that, to add credence to the supervisory process and to the novice supervisors experiences, a postgraduate supervision module is introduced as a core study module for all first-time supervisors before they embark on their journey of supervision. This process could possibly assist the novice researcher to renegotiate an identity for possible inclusion into the broader academic community and to build supervision capacity at the newly established UoT's in South Africa.