Browsing by Author "Wiebesiek, Lisa."

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Addressing the "standard English' debate in South Africa : the case of South African Indian English.
(2007) Wiebesiek, Lisa.; Rudwick, Stephanie Inge.; Zeller, Jochen Klaus.
This dissertation is an investigation into the 'Standard English' debate in South Africa using South African Indian English (SAlE) as a case study. I examine the 'Standard English' debate from both a sociolinguistic and a syntactic point of view. Since English underwent a process of standardization in the eighteenth century, the concept of 'Standard English' has influenced peoples' attitudes towards different varieties of English and the speakers of those varieties. 'Standard English' has, since this time, been used as a yardstick against which other varieties of English have been judged. In South Africa, where during the apartheid era, language as well as skin colour and ethnicity were used as a basis for discrimination, the 'Standard English' debate and the standard language ideology need to be explored in order to draw attention to areas of potential discrimination. Through an extended review of the literature on the 'Standard English' Debate and a particular focus on South African Indian English, as well as interviews with South African Indian participants, I investigate how the 'Standard English' debate is, more often than not, a debate about ideology, power and inequality, rather than simply about 'good' or 'correct' language usage. I argue that language attitudes are, in many cases, attitudes towards speakers, making them a potential vehicle for discrimination and prejudice. I examine the social history of the South African Indian community and SAIE and argue that the unique history of the South African Indian community has affected the development of SAlE and attitudes towards its speakers, and the attitudes of speakers of SAlE toward their own variety. Furthermore, I explore how this history has affected the syntactic structure of SAlE and provide, through a syntactic analysis of South African Indian English wh-questions, evidence for the fact that these constructions are formed on the basis of a systematic and rule-governed grammar that is different to that of 'Standard English', but is not, as a result of this difference, incorrect.
South African Indian English: a qualitative study of attitudes.
(International Association for World Englishes Inc., 2010) Wiebesiek, Lisa.; Rudwick, Stephanie Inge.; Zeller, Jochen Klaus.
This paper focuses on attitudes towards South African Indian English (SAIE), an L1 variety of English spoken in South Africa. The attitudes of the participants are considered against the backdrop of the socio-political history of this variety and its speakers, and in contrast to their attitudes to what they perceive as ‘good’ English. While the research methodology is primarily based on lengthy, semi-structured interviews with twenty young South African Indians (i.e. ingroup members), the paper also includes a discussion of some of the linguistic features of SAIE, which is mainly motivated by methodological considerations. Through an examination of SAIE wh-questions, we show that the grammar of this variety differs systematically from that of the reference variety. Using examples of these wh-questions, we elicited grammatical judgments from participants and compared these judgments to the attitudes of the participants as expressed in response to open-ended questions in interviews. On the basis of the empirical data that we obtained and analysed, we argue that the young South African Indian students who participated in our study have a profoundly ambiguous attitude towards the variety associated with their own ethno-linguistic group.
Using participatory visual methodology to explore girlhood and the construction of femininities with girls and young women in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
(2021) Wiebesiek, Lisa.; Moletsane, Relebohile.
The study reported in this thesis was located within the ambit of a larger, international and interdisciplinary partnership project between McGill University in Canada and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa. The Networks for Change and Well-being: girlled, from the ground up policy-making to address sexual violence in Canada and South Africa project used participatory visual methodologies (PVM) to work with girls and young women in Canada and South Africa to better understand sexual violence in their communities, and facilitate and support girl-led social and policy change. The focus in South Africa was on working with girls and young women from rural areas who are particularly marginalised due to a combination of factors that intersect in complex ways, including their age, their distance from services and resources, their gender, and the traditional cultural norms and values that still dominate social relations in these areas. My role in the project was project co-ordinator in the South African arm of the partnership. My study had two aims: the first was to analyse how girls and young women construct and reimagine their femininities within a context of rurality, poverty, and GBV; and the second to investigate how PVM might be used to engage girls and young women in challenging normative gender roles that facilitate or constrain the choices available to girls and young women in their communities towards facilitating social change. Located within the critical and transformative paradigm, the overall approach in this qualitative study was framed feminist postcolonial theory. I also used social constructionist theories of gender to analyse the data. Over a period of approximately three-and-a-half years, I used PVM to work with a group of 15 girls and young women in a deep rural area in the Drakensberg region of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I used a number of visual methods to work with my co-researcher participants, including cellphilms, digital story-telling, and policy posters and action briefs to co-produce knowledge and create visual products to be used as tools for advocacy and awareness-raising towards social and policy change. Building on and using this co-produced knowledge and using the visual products created by my co-researcher participants, between February 2019 and March 2020, we engaged in a process of girl-led community-based policy-making which involved holding a number of community engagement meetings and a community dialogue in an effort to bring about social and policy change. In addition to the visual products created by my co-researcher participants, sources of data included transcripts of post-screening and participatory data analysis discussions, detailed meeting notes taken during community engagement meetings and community dialogues, and my field notes. I conducted an inductive thematic analysis of this data set. The findings of the study suggest that girls and young women construct their femininities in relation to masculinities and in relation to idealised constructions of femininities, and heavily influenced by the convergence of poverty and ideas about tradition and culture. Girls and young women are required to construct their gendered identities as they navigate the precarity of girlhoods shaped by poverty, gender inequality, and ideas about culture and tradition that silence, commodify, and devalue girls and young women. In combination, these factors form the adverse social and material circumstances that influence girls’ constructions of their femininities in relation to masculinities and idealised constructions of femininities, and shape the options available to them to cope with, manage, or respond to such adversity. Importantly, however, the findings of the study also suggest that as social constructionist theories of gender suggest, formed as they are in particular social and historical contexts locally-specific idealised constructions of gender and hegemonic gender relations can and do change over time. Further, the findings and outcomes of the study also suggest that PVM enabled my co-researcher participants to challenge gender and cultural norms that were previously thought of as unassailable, and imagine alternative identities and futures in which their health and well-being is not always at risk. PVM was also crucial to the process of girlled community-based policy-making that ultimately led to the development and signing of a community reporting and response protocol to address early and forced marriage. The findings of this study have important implications for the development of sustainable, holistic, responsive, and context-relevant policy, programming, and interventions to effectively support and promote the health and well-being of girls in the global South.