Grant Andrews

La Trobe University · La Trobe Academy

The recent Must Fall movements shone a light on how South African universities are exclusionary spaces in many respects. In addition to the focus on racial, financial, and epistemological exclusions, the movements also highlighted how gender and sexual minorities are marginalised in university curricula and spaces. In the wake of these movements, I...

South African cinema is still dominated, both in terms of number and commercial success, by films featuring white Afrikaans-speaking characters. These films are mostly politically voiceless, ignoring the contentious racial and economic dynamics in the country, and they fail to represent queer realities. Skoonheid [Beauty] (2011), the powerful South...

ALT 36: Queer Theory in Filmand Fiction - by Ernest N. Emenyonu November 2018

Before the end of apartheid, queer lives were almost entirely unrepresented in public literary works in South Africa. Only after the fall of institutionalised apartheid could literature begin to look back at the role of queer people in the history of South Africa, and begin to acknowledge that queer people are a part of the fabric of South African...

John Trengove’s film Inxeba (The Wound) was met with public outcry as it represented the sacred tradition of ulwaluko (“initiation”). The film was effectively banned in mainstream South African cinemas following a ruling by the Film and Publication Board (FPB) to assign a rating of X18 to the film. Many rights groups and activists were troubled by...

This discussion paper explores how integrating generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, can address educational disparities faced by equity students in higher education (HE). Equity students, including those from under-represented groups such as non-English-speaking backgrounds, students wi...

This research investigates whether academic integrity can be strengthened through a holistic educative approach that combines compulsory modules on academic integrity, pedagogy that challenges punitive approaches, and an embedded curriculum. We present quantitative and qualitative data from surveys and interview responses from students to investiga...

University diplomas provide pathways into university study for a range of students, including a high proportion of students in so-called equity groups. However, there is a paucity of research investigating how university diplomas impact students and their academic lives. The current study used a mixed-method approach to understand how diplomas bene...

The queer critical literacies (QCL) approach to education aims to meaningfully engage with gender and sexuality diversity in educational settings. This article reflects on an English course for final-year Bachelor of Education students at a South African university. In the course, the QCL framework was introduced and texts with diverse gender and s...

This research investigates whether academic integrity (AI) can be strengthened through a holistic educative approach that combines compulsory modules on AI, pedagogy that challenges punitive approaches, and an embedded curriculum. We present quantitative and qualitative data from surveys and interview responses from students to investigate their ex...

Humanising pedagogy has been a focus of recent research as more universities move to online and blended models of instruction. Online learning has been linked to feelings of isolation, disconnection, and depersonalisation of the learning experience for many students. In South Africa, the shift to online instruction took place in the context of the...

The concept of agency features with increasing prominence in academic discourse, particularly within the field of literacy education. This concept is highly relevant to research which focuses on students who are beginning their postgraduate journey and who need to make a shift from being undergraduates to becoming independent postgraduate students....

This chapter explores the interrelated student youth movements that erupted in the mid-2010s in South Africa, primarily the #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, and the #EndRapeCulture movements. This chapter traces the ways that embodied activism was central to these movements (Shefer, 2018; Marback, 2018; Malebye, 2020), where bodies were strategicall...

In 2020, when the switch to remote teaching and learning required redesigning asynchronous on-line versions of face-to-face courses, we were concerned about whether access to engaged and dialogic learning could be facilitated in this new space. In attempting to address this concern we asked students in a B Ed Honours course to post, in an online fo...

The figure of the patriarchal white Afrikaner male was central to conceptualising and maintaining the system of apartheid in South Africa, and lingers in the imaginary of white identities in the country. Idealised white masculinity, embodied by the patriarch, is marked by strict gender roles and the rejection of same-sex sexualities, as these sexua...

After the end of formal apartheid, a number of South African feature films have explored queer white men in conservative social settings, with a particular focus on Afrikaans-speaking gay men. These films have reflected strict heteropatriarchal values within white Afrikaner culture where homosexuality is still often seen as a taboo topic. In this a...

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused many universities to move instruction online. For the most part, this move has not been based on sound principles and best practices of online teaching, but can instead be characterised as emergency remote teaching (ERT) that aims to continue instruction despite the substantial drawbacks of insufficient planning or...

Shortlisted for the 2023 British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Book Prize This book combines teaching-informed research studies and research-informed teaching accounts which explore English language education that engages with gender and sexual diversity. Informed by critical theories, critical literacy, post-structuralism, queer theor...

Our paper discusses our recent experiences with designing effective assessments for challenging local contexts by using group work portfolio projects. South African universities are experiencing ever-increasing student numbers, diverse student bodies which have different language and literacy skill levels, and limited resources. Simultaneously, the...

This book explores representations of fathers in select South African novels published from the birth of apartheid to the post-transitional moment. Father figures in the texts reflect political and social climates in South Africa – at different times representing the oppressive apartheid government, righteous and authoritative liberation leaders an...

(A)gender and (a)sexual diversity are often viewed as taboo and controversial topics in education, sparking resistance from some teachers, students, and communities to engage with these important topics. Additionally, critical approaches to teaching these topics in schools and universities are still emerging, with many educators feeling uncertain o...

The Covid-19 global pandemic has resulted in many countries moving teaching and learning online. South Africa is a country with major inequalities in terms of access to electricity, internet and information technologies, which have created considerable problems for online learning at institutions of higher learning in the country. In this paper, we...

Parental educational support plays a significant role in the educational success of learners. Research has emphasised the important role of father involvement in educational achievement; however, little is known about how educational support is understood within marginalised contexts such as female-headed households, especially where fathers are ab...

YouTube has provided a platform for many queer vloggers in South Africa to find audiences and to represent queer lives via a public medium. The platform allows for multiple queer identities to be represented in dynamic ways, complicating the ways in which mainstream mass media often stereotype or distort queer lives and experiences, and simultaneou...

This article explores the image of the queer cyborg in two works of speculative fiction about South Africa, Lauren Beukes's Moxyland (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008) and Nicky Drayden's The Prey of Gods (London: Harper Voyager, 2017). These queer cyborg characters inhabit imagined futures where the interface between human and technology is both a condu...

In higher education institutions in South Africa, educators working in the fields of language and academic literacy need to be sensitive and responsive to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the student body, and traditional pedagogical approaches are often inappropriate to meet the needs of students and of the wider call to decolonise higher...

This article traces how the character of the father in post-apartheid South African literature is symbolic of the spectral yet enduring legacy of apartheid and the types of rigid masculinities which underpinned the oppressive system. I use this framing to demonstrate the conflict between the traditional South African father and the queer son. Queer...

This study explores the different ways that South African novels have represented fatherhood across historical periods, from the dawn of apartheid to the post-transitional moment. It is argued that there is a link between narrative power and the father, especially in the way that the father figure is given authority and is central to dominant narra...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the themes of representation and identity in four post-9/11 novels: Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. The novels of Hosseini and Hamid represent the experience of two Muslim protagonists from...