Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction and rationale -- 1 The view of South African youth before #FeesMustFall -- 2 Were the 2015 student protests a revolution? -- 3 What the 2015 protests actually were and how they were possible -- 4 Ikhohlisan'ihlomile: FMF students' engagement with power and their ideological differences -- 5 Can South Africa's declining economy inspire student-led new revolution? -- 6 Youth's declining news consumption levels and ideologically divided media -- 7 Youth's polysemic interpretation of the ANC regime and the limits of the new revolution -- 8 Youths' declining participation levels in the public sphere: the constraints of new revolution -- 9 Conclusion: FMF protests will not lead to a revolution per se (at least not yet), but to wide ranging reforms -- References -- Index

South Africa is characterised by a youthful population, and the challenges and possibilities that characterise the young generation are both warning signs and beacons of hope for a nation founded on social justice. Youth in South Africa: Agency, (in)visibility and national development takes stock of the nation's development as it affects young people. Authors offer both personal and professional insights into the ways in which the youth navigate their own pathways to adulthood. These include formal and informal engagements with politics, as well as protest, (un)employment, entrepreneurship, education, religion, experiences with sexuality and violence and a multitude of other life experiences. Contributors paint a picture of the initiative, agency and resilience of the youth, as well as the challenges before them. Authors also identify the state of "waithood" faced by those unable to make the transition out of youth into full adulthood as a result of their socio-economic circumstances and political context. By engaging these experiences and insights, and primarily informed by the inputs of young people, the authors highlight the limitations of existing youth policies and frameworks. The case is made for policy instruments to be informed by the lived experiences of the youth as they navigate a complex macrosocial environment, and by the messages the youth communicate about the limitations of current approaches.

"The edited collection focuses on the links between young people and African popular culture. It explores popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. And by "culture," we mean all kinds of texts or representations-visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual-created by African youth, mostly about their lives and their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the larger public, and shared locally and globally. We proceed from the premise that cultural texts not only function as "social facts" as Karin Barber argues, but that they double as "commentaries upon, and interpretations of, social facts. They are part of social reality, but they also take up an attitude to social reality" (2007, 04). So, the work focuses specifically on what African youth produce as popular culture, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, how they produce those texts, why they produce them, the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts, and why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as cultural symbols of the general cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world, a world where the global cultural economy is the prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come to shape political-economic and social systems"--

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction and rationale -- 1 The view of South African youth before #FeesMustFall -- 2 Were the 2015 student protests a revolution? -- 3 What the 2015 protests actually were and how they were possible -- 4 Ikhohlisan'ihlomile: FMF students' engagement with power and their ideological differences -- 5 Can South Africa's declining economy inspire student-led new revolution? -- 6 Youth's declining news consumption levels and ideologically divided media -- 7 Youth's polysemic interpretation of the ANC regime and the limits of the new revolution -- 8 Youths' declining participation levels in the public sphere: the constraints of new revolution -- 9 Conclusion: FMF protests will not lead to a revolution per se (at least not yet), but to wide ranging reforms -- References -- Index

Higher Education and the COVID-19 Pandemic explores how higher education institutions and systems around the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, managed transition to online learning, and adjusted to the new post-COVID reality.

In this timely, original and sophisticated collection, writers from the Global South demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied The notion that societies mediate issues through certain kinds of engagement is at the heart of imaginings of democracy and often centers on the ideal of the public sphere. But this imagined foundation of how we live collectively appears to have suffered a dramatic collapse across the world, with many democracies apparently unable to solve problems through talk – or even to agree on who speaks, in what ways and where. In the 10 essays in this timely, original and sophisticated collection, writers from southern Africa combine theoretical analysis with the examination of historical cases and contemporary developments to demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied. They propose new concepts and methodologies to analyse how public engagements work in society. Babel Unbound examines charged examples from the Global South, such as the centuries old Timbuktu archive, Nelson Mandela as a powerful absent presence in 1960s public life, and the challenges to the terms of contemporary debate around the student activism of #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall. These show how issues of public discussion span both archive and media, verbal debates in formal spaces and visual performances that circulate in unpredictable ways.

This book explores how social media is used in South Africa, through a range of case studies exploring various social networking sites and applications. This volume explores how, over the past decade, social media platforms have deeply penetrated the fabric of everyday life. The author considers South Africans’ use of wearable tech and use of online health and sports tracking systems via mobile phones within the broader context of the digital data economy. The author also focuses on the dating app Tinder, to show how people negotiate and redefine intimacy through the practice of online dating via strategic performances in pursuit of love, sex and intimacy. The book concludes with the use of Facebook and Twitter for social activism (e.g. Fees Must Fall), as well as networked community building as in the case of the #imstaying movement. This book will be of interest to social media academics and students, as well as anyone interested in social media, politics and cultural life in South Africa.