Positioning (in) the discipline: undergraduate students' negotiations of disciplinary discourses

Abstract

This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which the authors have tracked the progress of 20 Social Science students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a historically 'white' South African university. The students are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/or speakers of English as a second language. The paper draws on post-structuralist and postcolonial theory to trace the process by which students position and reposition themselves in relation to disciplinary discourses over the course of their senior years. The students both absorb and resist the values of their disciplines. The authors argue that the process of writing in their disciplines is also a process of working out their own identities as they try to reconcile their home discourses with those of the institution and their peers, or in some cases, confirm or shed their home identities.

An exploration of the impact of students’ prior genre knowledge on their constructions of ‘audience’ in a Marketing course at postgraduate level

“…The first is a threeyear longitudinal study in which a colleague and I tracked the ways in which twenty Social Science students negotiated the literacy practices of their various undergraduate disciplines (see Kapp & Bangeni, 2009 for a detailed description of this study). The second study, my doctoral research project, focuses on six students from this group who proceeded to register for postgraduate studies.…”

Designing First-year Sociology Curricula and Practice

“…They may confront students' existing beliefs or their past practices. For example, students in first year must be introduced to the discourses of sociology but these discourses might clash with the discourses that the students experience at home or through the media (Kapp & Bangeni, 2009). They may also differ from the discourses that students employ in other disciplines, especially if they are taking a general degree like a Liberal Arts degree, Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Social Science (Williams, 2005).…”

Steps Towards Decolonial Higher Education in Southern Africa? Epistemic Disobedience in the Humanities

“…Unsurprisingly, given this notion of students as somehow both academically and culturally deficient, UCT as an institution is also often experienced as alienating by black students, despite the fact that it now has over 50% black enrollment (Kapp and Bangeni, 2009). The shift in numbers does not reflect a shift in legitimate access by the unspoken terms of the institution.…”

“…The shift in numbers does not reflect a shift in legitimate access by the unspoken terms of the institution. Kapp and Bangeni (2009: 588) thus note of English-speaking South African universities that ‘many of the dominant institutional academic and cultural practices are still “white”, English, middle class and male (even Oxbridge) in character.’ The effects of this on the learner can be seen in the words of a student interviewed by Kapp and Bangeni (2009: 587): ‘(usually) I only participate when I am forced…but sometimes I feel that I belong to a certain topic…and I then participate in that.’ Why do black students so seldom feel that they do belong to the topics covered in universities, or that the topics belong to them? Perspectives from the sociology of knowledge can allow for an examination of the ways in which knowledge is formulated and valued in the postcolonial humanities, and the ways in which it is still deeply entangled in what Mignolo (2011: ix) would term ‘the colonial matrix of power.’ It is to this that I now turn.…”