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Item Open Access J R Bowen, a new anthropology of Islam(University of the Free State, 2014) Solomon, H.Abstract not availableItem Open Access Isak Niehaus, witchcraft and a life in the new South Africa(University of the Free State, 2014) Du Plooy, S.Abstract not availableItem Open Access ‘Home and away’: the international and its ‘publics’(University of the Free State, 2014) Vale, PeterThe paper explores how the academic study of International Relations (IR) seeks out and develops its ‘publics’ and how these serve to propagate the discipline’s founding purpose. The history of the founding of IR, in the immediate post-First World War years, is discussed. Using a social constructivist approach, the article then tracks how the idea of the ‘international’ emerged in two separate (but closely linked) approaches to understanding social relations at this level of organisation, viz., International Law and International Relations. Throughout, the argument stresses that those who founded IR understood that it was essential to enlist the interest of the ‘public’ if they were to succeed in the founding purpose. Intermittently, references to the discipline’s South African life form are made.Item Open Access ‘It’s not just the unions that are cut off from people, but the media too’: reconstituting South Africa’s mediated public sphere(University of the Free State, 2014) Duncan, JaneThis article draws on the early press coverage of the Marikana massacre to explore the extent to which South Africa’s media transformation has delivered an inclusive public sphere that allows for deliberative debate on issues that really matter to the country. While adopting a critical approach to the normative assumptions underpinning the Habermasian public sphere, this article will argue that South Africa’s negotiated ‘miracle’ transition has provided a framework for media transformation that has both opened up spaces for media democratisation and constrained their ability to transform to the extent that they established common public spaces for deliberative debate. South Africa’s media transformation has shaped and been shaped by the growing division of South Africa into a two tier society of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, fuelling social instability, especially among the youth. This article traces the roots of this troubling picture back to the nature of South Africa’s incomplete transition.Item Open Access Julius Malema and the postapartheid public sphere(University of the Free State, 2014) Posel, DeborahJulius Malema has been one of the most prominent and controversial public figures in post apartheid South Africa. This article examines his impact within the post apartheid public sphere as a space of spectacle. Working with a notion of the public sphere as constituted through a hybrid of rational and affective modes of communication, the article shows how a politics of spectacle articulated commercial and cultural changes in the country’s mass media after 1994. This confluence shaped Malema’s public persona and impact on the terms of public debate during his tenure as president of the ANC Youth League. The angry, unruly bad boy of post apartheid politics, Malema’s racial populism provoked garrulous public talk, often with far more heat than light, and traversed by racist invective that the earlier years of public dialogue had largely held at bay; yet he also exposed the force of old and emergent fault lines in the new social order more directly and acutely than many others have done. I argue that, symbolically, Malema entered the public sphere as a counterpoint to Nelson Mandela unsettling the iconography of non racialism, reasserting an angry and confrontational version of race that reinstated the spectre of violent conflagration that Mandela’s ‘miracle’ held at bay.Item Open Access Rethinking the publics, rethinking politics(University of the Free State, 2014) Lange, LisAbstract not availableItem Open Access Acta Academica, critical views on society, culture and politics(University of the Free State, 2014) Lange, LisAbstract not availableItem Open Access Higher education and the public good: precarious potential?(University of the Free State, 2014) Singh, MalaConcerns about, and critiques of neo liberal policy regimes in higher education have heightened the search for alternative normative and organisational models, many of which have coalesced around the necessity to re imagine and defend the public missions of higher education. This has given the notion of the public good greater resonance as an alternative or supplementary frame of reference in debates on higher education and social change. This article identifies some frequently raised issues in the analytical literature on the public good in order to indicate the range of conceptual and operational challenges at stake. It is argued that the ideological constraints and practical difficulties in moving towards a public good regime make the potential and prospects of the notion uncertain and almost precarious in constituting a new foundational basis for considering the social value of higher education. Nevertheless, resisting or mediating public ‘bads’ and increasing or joining up a variety of public good interventions remain as necessary and valuable tasks in the face of contending social purposes of higher educationItem Open Access Rethinking Marx rethinking the public(University of the Free State, 2014) Higgins, JohnThis essay argues that the young Marx’s defence of press freedom in the repressive Germany of his day is more important than the tradition of Orthodox Marxism has generally allowed, and is best considered as a crucial constitutive feature of the massively influential career as critical thinker and political activist to come. Furthermore, it is in and through Marx’s reconfiguring of the idea of the public in these early writings that his work may make a significant contribution to today’s most pressing debates around the practice and elusive ideal of democracy, and notably those in South Africa involving the so called Freedom of Information bill.Item Open Access Vox populi: On the idea of a popular public, somewhat paradoxically(University of the Free State, 2014) Kistner, UlrikeUnprocedural strike action accompanied by high levels of violence pose challenges to union collective bargaining and other representative structures and institutions, evoking notions of the unruly crowd threatening constitutional values, political legitimacy, and public order. This article critically examines the oppositional terms in which this scenario tends to be constructed, and probes the limits to the political along different lines. While wishing to withhold an unproblematical attribution of ‘political’ from populist mobilisations, this article will explore the spaces in, and modes through which the democratic people appear. In particular, it will chart, in outlines, a genealogy of popular sovereignty, which could impel a revisiting and revising of notions of revolting populism.Item Open Access Theorising emergent public spheres: negotiating democracy, development, and dissent(University of the Free State, 2014) Barnett, CliveThis article outlines an analytical framework for investigating the variable formation of public life. It suggests that theoretical accounts of the public sphere and related ideas should be thought of less as normative models to be applied to new contexts, and more as providing questions as to how different values of publicness emerge in new situations. It is suggested that the South African experience of public formation since the 1990s can inform the development of this type of framework, insofar as it challenges some of the normative assumptions built into academic, activist and policy understandings of the form and context of public life. The plurality of values associated with ideas of publicness is elaborated through a discussion of the grammars of public value; the specifically public content of publicness is shown to revolve around ideas of sharing as partaking, and three paradigms of public action are identified. The article concludes by identifying three dimensions around which the investigation and evaluation of emergent public formations might be organised.