Masters Degrees (Education Policy Studies)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (Education Policy Studies) by Subject "African youth -- Identity"

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    Navigating their way : African migrant youth and their experiences of schooling in Cape Town
    (Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2011-03) Foubister, Caroline Ann; Badroodien, Azeem; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Education. Dept. of Education Policy Studies.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Migration has been described as “the quintessential experience” of the contemporary period (Berger, 1984). Across the world this global phenomenon has been chiefly driven by conflict, persecution and poverty resulting from destabilisation in the various home countries of millions of individuals. Within the process of worldwide migration, South Africa receives perhaps the largest number of asylum seekers in the world and according to the UNHCR (2010) the majority of migrants entering South Africa are children or youth. Crucially, this increased migration into South Africa is occurring at a time when the majority of South Africa's general populace is still struggling with the aftermath of apartheid and increased levels of poverty and unemployment. In this qualitative, interpretative study I focus on how a group of 20 African migrant youth that live in Cape Town and attend one local school engage with the migratory experience and navigate their way through local receiving spaces. I assert that these spaces, which include both home and school, mark the youth in very particular ways and bring into focus key aspects of identity, culture, social worlds, imagination and aspiration. The main conceptual contribution of the thesis is the idea that we are all migrants in the current world, whether we physically move or whether our lives are moved by the impact of increasing global flows. Consequently, we need to develop, it is argued, a frame of thinking that makes the migrant central, not ancillary, to historical process. For that purpose I utilise the theoretical lenses of Pierre Bourdieu, Arjun Appadurai, and Tara Yosso to argue that the African migrant youth in the study are not passive recipients bombarded by the forces of globalization and migration, but are active agents in the shaping of their local realities. By linking individual biographies to the questions they raise about larger global, social and historical forces I attempt to offer a temporalized account of late-modern life that incorporates the contemporary conditions that the African migrant youth face as they navigate urban social arrangements, and the daily educational challenges of their local school. A further contribution of the thesis is the documenting of the particular internal and external resources that the 20 African migrant youth drew on to motivate and assist them to navigate their schooling and social lives, as they faced up to the growing uncertainties of their new "foreign‟ spaces.