Date/Time
Date(s) - Wed - 28 Jun
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Categories
Dear friends of the UFC,
Please join Mark Hunter’s Seminar presentation entitled,’ Entering Harry Potter’s Schools: Social Mobility among White Durbanites’., Hosted by DUT’s Urban Futures Centre.
PRESENTER: Mark Hunter
TOPIC: Entering Harry Potter’s Schools: Social Mobility among White Durbanites
DATE: Wednesday, 28th June 2017
TIME: 12H00-13H30
VENUE: Steve Biko Campus – DUT, UFC offices, S2 Block, Level 4, Room DP4.01B (UFC Common Room). Entrance Gate 1 & 2. 79 Steve Biko Road
Abstract:
A recent study by Lombard and Crankshaw found that only 1% of white Durbanites were unemployed, and, perhaps more remarkably, the proportion of whites in high-skilled, high-income jobs actually increased from 60% to 78% from 2005 to 2014. This contradicts the view that affirmative action policies would severely damage the prospects of white South Africans. What explains these figures? Addressing social im/mobility among whites, this talk is based on research on schools and communities in working-class formerly-white areas of South Durban. It argues, first, that we need to make a conceptual shift from simply studying white people to studying whiteness. Second, we need to understand the dynamics of a semi-privatised schooling system that gives a high value to a school’s “white tone.” With important exceptions, including poorer children and children of single mothers, the market for schooling drives the daily movement of white learners from South Durban into more “traditional” and centrally located “Harry Potter schools”—ones their parents may well have been excluded from previously. Third, we need to explore changes in family forms using concepts typically applied to black but not white South Africans, such as the “extended family.” Fourth, we need to understand how advantageous social networks are grounded in local places. The talk concludes with some thoughts on the role of schooling in South Africa’s race-class-space transformations.
Bio:
Mark Hunter is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is the author of Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa, and is currently working on a book about the history of schooling desegregation in Durban.
Kindly take note of the venue (UFC Common Room).
Please feel free to share this invitation with others who might be interested.
Kindly RSVP your attendance to fathimaa1@dut.ac.za
We look forward to seeing you at the seminar!
**We are now only having one seminar on the last Wednesday of each month**
Kind Regards
Fathima Ally
Durban University of Technology
Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment
Urban Futures Centre
Administrator
031 373 2100