Discourses of ‘service delivery protests’ in South Africa: an analysis of talk radio

Understanding community violence: A critical realist framework for community psychology

“…In this article, we develop a critical realist framework for studying community violence from within community psychology (see Table 2), whereby structurally violent causal mechanisms are understood as shaping direct violence and attendant epistemic violence within communities. We then applied this framework to our own work by using Bhaskar's (1979) notion of retroduction to analyse how community members used a participatory documentary film to represent xenophobic violence and community-led antiviolent activism, as well as how this film was utilised to foster political solidarities and build community in ways that conceptualised justice beyond State-centric and/or capital-friendly discursive logics (see Day et al, 2021).…”

“…However, in insisting that '[i]t's not all the people that are xenophobic', Kabede rejects dominant discourses which construct xenophobia as a ubiquitous, community-wide sentiment in Thembelihle (see Malherbe et al, 2020). In other words, by attributing xenophobic violence to certain-perhaps opportunistic-protesters, rather than to the character of protest as such, Kabede rejects dominant discourses in South Africa which conflate violence with collective insurgency (see Day et al, 2021;Duncan, 2016). In this regard, Kabede does draw on a discourse that debases individual responsibility for xenophobic violence, but rather notes how the intersection of precarity and social turbulence can foster the conditions in which people enact xenophobic violence.…”

“…In short, at documentary screening events, audiences engaged those who produced the documentary in developing a nuanced interpretation of xenophobic violence, one that did not relegate such violence as evidencing an essentially violent, low-income community (as is the case in many epistemologically violent news media reports, see Day et al, 2021;Malherbe et al, 2020), but as a means through which to explore notions of agency and structural violence in the making and resisting of direct xenophobic violence. It was at screening events that community activists could communicate-and expand upon-their political demands to a wider audience, potentially garnering greater support and legitimacy for their antiviolent interventions.…”

Analyzing Discursive Constructions of Community in Newspaper Articles

“…In a similar manner to other South African media platforms-such as talk radio-which are informed by neoliberal discursive frameworks (see Day, Cornell, & Malherbe, 2019), the above excerpt positions protest with respect to how it disrupts society (i.e., the flow of road traffic), with the particularities of the protest itself rendered a secondary concern (the article vaguely notes that it is "believed" that the protest is concerned with electricity, presumably illegal electricity connections, but even this is not explicated). It is in this sense that the article might more appropriately be considered a traffic report, with a suitably neutral tone, encouraging motorists to work around this momentary, but typical, nuisance.…”

“…This is not to say that the article gives credence to elite subjects. Certainly, many workers-especially precarious workers-are invested in the smooth functioning of the neoliberal status quo (Day et al, 2019). Rather, it draws attention to how the community comes into public consciousness when it, constructed as a monolithic entity, engages in protest.…”