Running the Soweto Half-Marathon was a drastic step in my sporting life, and I achieved more than crossing the finishing line. Before the starting gun, I told myself that everything I had done while preparing for this race was behind me. Now was the time to give my best and make this race my magnum […]
discipline
Posted inGeneral
Is state surveillance only about violating the right to privacy?
In a recent article (sent to me by an astute and observant friend) on “Totalitarian paranoia in the post-Orwellian Surveillance State”, the renowned “critical pedagogics” intellectual, Henry Giroux, dwells at length on the implications of state surveillance on the part of agencies such as the American NSA. Giroux provides a thorough analysis of the relation […]
Posted inGeneral
You don’t build a family with a stick
By Lorenzo Wakefield The title of this column is taken from a Zulu saying that contradicts Khaya Dlanga’s defence of the manner in which black parents discipline their children. Corporal punishment is a concept that was brought to Africa and South Africa by the British colonialist in the form of a common law defence of […]
Posted inGeneral
Update on attempt by MMU to suspend Ian Parker (2)
Here is the rest of the account regarding events surrounding Ian Parker at MMU in the UK: “The worst outcome for the neoliberal university is that it fails to persuade its staff that anyone who complains has a problem, and MMU has done its level best to make it seem that the problem here was […]
Posted inNews/Politics
On ANC discipline
By Justice Phatse Piitso On the occasion of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the triumph of the Cuban revolution, the leader of the Communist Party of Cuba, General Raul Castro, conveyed the following profound words to his people: “Never let the enemy siren songs make you go soft. Always be aware that the enemy, by […]
Posted inGeneral
Foucault on the functioning of discourse in society
If Foucault and other poststructuralist thinkers are right (and I believe they are), one is never outside of countervailing power relations in society, which means that, ineluctably, one is always enmeshed in multilayered, overlapping grids of discourses that function in an ambivalent manner to enable, and simultaneously control, direct, disseminate and domesticate human action and […]