Sisanda Nkoala

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of the Western Cape

This study examines online violence against South African female journalists on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), focusing on language as a tool for mob censorship. The study analyses 600 posts directed at selected female journalists targeted because of their gender and their reporting on high-profile individuals and events. Through q...

This paper examines a specific unconferencing methodology designed for the HELTASA (un)conference, an international online event held in 2021 in South Africa. Drawing from the principles of unconferencing and decolonisation, the description of the unconferencing methodology in this paper is interspersed with collective autoethnographic reflections,...

This article explores the experiences of doctoral students juggling parental and professional roles. It proposes a balanced-integration approach in the reflective supervisor framework to tailor support. The research focuses on identifying challenges and evaluating the approach’s effectiveness, suggesting supervisors should serve as advocates for we...

The work of American television producer Shonda Rhimes is influential both in terms of on-screen representations and the wider media industry. In the contemporary moment, women working in television and film are fighting against many social injustices, and Rhimes, through her advocacy work, is a powerful ally in the fourth wave feminist movement. A...

This volume adds to a growing corpus of research on radio in South Africa. To our knowledge, this volume forms the first comprehensive work that tackles the issue of radio in South Africa focusing exclusively on community radio and the digital milieu, highlighting the undercurrents of community radio and some of the evolving trends necessitated by...

South Africa has three tiers of broadcasting, namely public, commercial, and community broadcasting. Accordingly, the country essentially has three forms of radio stations. In recent years, however, the internet and its streaming technology have introduced other forms of audio broadcasting such as internet radio and more lately podcasts. Therefore,...

Radio broadcasters in South Africa are often more than mere announcers who inform the audiences about what is coming up on the programme. They have been instrumental in helping South Africans make sense of developments in this context. They also play an essential role in developing and uplifting indigenous languages. At many pivotal moments in the...

The increasing availability of digital tools and improved internet access in South Africa have facilitated the growth of podcast consumption alongside radio, the dominant media platform. Podcasts, which are essentially digital audio programmes available for download or streaming, have gained popularity as an accessible medium for content creators a...

That radio is Africa’s most popular and beloved medium is not contestable. It has become a friend of the people. This is evident if you look at the statistics regarding the number of people who listen to the radio. Recent research finds that 80% of South Africans listen to the radio weekly. Globally, the number of people who listen to the radio is...

Even though radio continues to be the most dominant media platform for black South Africans, the rise in indigenous language podcasts marks a significant milestone in the South African media landscape for speakers of these languages who have previously been afforded limited agency in the sector. The place of podcasts in South Africa must be underst...

Contemporary organisations have embraced a wide variety of social media platforms. Social media provide companies, institutions and government departments with the quickest way to communicate with employees. The platforms allow for instantaneous, two-way and cost-effective communication. This paper uses Grunig’s two-way symmetrical as a lens to und...

Digital tools have evolved into a way of life, and as a result, they have become a growing area of interest for academics who research teaching and learning. Scholars increasingly agree that because digital tools affect human-to-human connection, a greater emphasis on understanding their function in engagement from an interdisciplinary viewpoint is...

Digital media applications have significantly reconfigured power relations between journalists and youth audiences, with the latter increasingly taking centre stage in news production ecologies. Using the concept of participatory journalism, this chapter examines the appropriation of digital media technologies in micro spaces of community radio sta...

This paper explores the emergency remote learning experiences of journalism students. It discusses how disparities in access to digital tools and participation in online learning, caused by the digital divide, influenced how some benefitted from the student-centred learning approaches adopted while others could not. The study seeks to answer this q...

This paper draws on Philippe-Joseph Salazar’s work in Words are Weapons: Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror (2017) on ISIS’s persuasive self-presentation on social and traditional media, to consider the rhetoric of the terrified Farmers evident in the framing discourse of selected South African television news reports on Farm attacks. Scholars who st...

Since the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in 2020, universities worldwide have undergone unanticipated changes in how they operate and deliver the academic programme. Chief among these changes has been a wide-scale adoption of emergency remote teaching (ERT). This phenomenological study draws on critical pedagogy to an...

This qualitative multi-case study analyses how two African newspapers engaged in self-presentation of African countries and other-presentation of Western countries when reporting on the outbreak of diseases. Using van Dijk’s ideological square as a framework, the study undertakes a discourse analysis of news reports on the 2014 Ebola outbreak and t...

More than 20 years since the birth of Nelson Mandela’s dream of a rainbow nation, race-thinking continues to be one of the most defining features of life in South Africa. From its centrality in the framing of concerns in the public domain to how it still directs public policy, the race categories conceptualised under apartheid are a driving force i...

The #RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement of 2015 and 2016 challenged universities across the nation to interrogate how the curriculum serves as an alienating and marginalising device that stymies student success. Consequently, the HE sector has been challenged to respond to student calls for decolonisation by reviewing existing university curricula which...

Knowledge remains timely in education. The need for academics to contemplate its relevance, worth, use and everything in-between deems a continuous intellectual project, rather than a conundrum to be solved. This book takes the South African context by the horns as it challenges the often dormant and traditionalist ways in which higher education sp...

This chapter explores the persuasive effect of various audiovisual communication strategies featured in television news reports on economic matters and the extent to which these strategies carry the same persuasive appeal when they move from television to YouTube. Using classical rhetoric, the study undertakes an analysis of economic news reports t...

This chapter explores the extent to which South African talk radio stations fulfil their normative role of ensuring disparate groups participate in shaping narratives around the structure and direction of the country’s economy through the content they broadcast, and the production practices they employ in their coverage of economic matters. Using a...

This study explores how South African television news reports communicate on sentence proceedings criminal cases involving violent acts against children. These kinds of crimes tend to attract public interest, and the outcomes can be a litmus test on the community's views concerning the justice system. By using cluster criticism to consider the disc...

Background: The year 2020 will mark five years since the watershed #FeesMustFall protests in South Africa. This was a student-led series of protests, at campuses across the country, calling for higher education to be made accessible through free decolonised education for black people. In light of this, the time has come to ascertain how students pe...

As one of the largest broadcasters on the African continent, the content aired on the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s television channels has a wide reach; and hence, has great potential to shape perceptions and influence a variety of audiences. This paper examines SABC News broadcasts for occurrences of the broadcaster’s use of Aristotle’...

Struggle songs are a fundamental part of South Africa’s political past, present and future. Being such significant entities in South African politics, much research has been done into tracing the history and significance of liberation songs. However, to date, not enough scholarly work exists which has discussed struggle songs as musical texts, and...