Negotiated denizenship: foreign nationals’ tactics of belonging in a Cape Town township

This article draws on interviews and ethnographic research conducted in early 2010 in a Cape Town township to study the establishment and first stages of a newly formed organisation representing the interests of foreign nationals. It examines how and to what extent its early work has shown the potential to prise open alternative spaces for its members to participate meaningfully in local affairs without being “captured” by South African interests. Faced with intergroup distrust and the considerable pressures to assimilate into the prevailing political culture, the newly formed organisation adopted what I term “negotiated denizenship” as a distinctive tactic of belonging in an environment in which foreign migrants must earn access to certain basic rights and resources. By simultaneously engaging with existing nodes of authority in the community and establishing their own resource node, early evidence suggests that foreign migrants might be able to gradually influence local events and help to improve intergroup tolerance in the community.     

“Now It's Not School,It's For Real!”: Negotiated Participation in Media Vocational Training

By taking up the strand in Lave and Wenger's writing on situated learning that directs attention to social dynamics and issues of power and positioning, the present article argues for the fruitfulness of including the concept of negotiated participation in approaches to teaching and learning. Based on a fieldwork in vocational media production projects, this study demonstrates the tensions and contradictions that came out of the hybrid nature of these vocational practices in high school. Establishing the professionally relevant modes of participation in the projects was fraught with struggles in which the project members had to bracket institutionalized school routines as well as handle and negotiate particular work life conditions (including cooperation with old timers in the target professions). It is argued that the way institutional contradictions are manifested and negotiated in everyday teaching and interaction can inform our understanding of the premises for multifunctional educational praxis.