• Development, Conflict and Political Change
  • Film and Environment
  • Topics in South African Economic History
  • Public Policy
  • Comparative Public Administration
  • Local Government Policy
  • Comparative Transitional Justice
  • African Politics
  • Labour Regulation
  • Development Theory
  • Globalisation and Labour Relations
  • Development Sociology in Practice
  • Social Development Theories and Applied Approaches
  • Introduction to Social and Economic Development
  • Development Planning

AXL4103S DEVELOPMENT, CONFLICT AND POLITICAL CHANGE

Convener: Ms Y Clarke (HEQSF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours or Master’s programme.
Course outline: This course explores the politics of development from a gender perspective through a focus on the links between politics, conflict and peace-building in African contexts. The course will address issues such as peace building, human rights, violence, and security in order to provide a critical reading of the ways in which development is gendered in selected African contexts. A key objective is to explore how development trajectories, gender equality, and peace are inextricably connected. The course will particularly focus on the links between conflict, peace-building, and political initiatives in order to offer new approaches to the theories on gender and development in African contexts.

FAM4036S FILM AND ENVIRONMENT

Convener: Dr I-M Rijsdijk (HEQSF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours or Master’s programme.
Course outline: This course examines several debates concerning the representation of the natural environment in film, particularly narrative film. Taking the eco-critical debate that has grown in scope and intensity in literary criticism since the early 1980s as a departure point, the course will investigate the value of this discourse and its applicability to films that either explicitly or implicitly use the natural environment as a key component of the film narrative. Equally important is the analysis of the films in terms of film language, and the extent to which film produces original representations of environmental debates that characterise the current age. In this second aspect of the course lies the history of the natural environment in film (its place in well-established and popular genres like the Western and Science Fiction, for example), as well as the representation of people in relation to the nonhuman environment. The course includes a practical exercise in which students will produce a visual artefact that applies the idea of the course to local situations.

HST4054F TOPICS IN SOUTH AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY

Convener: Professor A Mager (HESQF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course Entry Requirements: Acceptance for an Honours programme.
Course Outline: Economic development and change in the post-apartheid period has generated a host of new questions for South African Economic History. What role did imported technology, technological innovation and economic sanctions play in South Africa’s industrialisation? What was the significance of sharecropping for the development of South African agriculture? What were the economic consequences of the collapse of reserve agriculture and environmental degradation in the reserves? What was the economic rationale for welfare under apartheid and beyond? How did South Africa re-join the global economy after 1994? These issues have generated rich debate and exciting new studies.

POL4006F PUBLIC POLICY

Convener: A Butler (HESQF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course Entry Requirements: Admission to an Honours or Master’s programme, and by permission of the course convener.
Course Outline: This first semester course explores academic research on the policy process and critically examines the central writings in the public policy literature. In addition, students investigate in comparative context the formulation and implementation of policy in contemporary South Africa, the operations of key departments of state, intergovernmental relations, and the power of organised interests in the policy process. Lectures introduce concepts, theories, and comparative materials, while student-led seminars address issues in contemporary South African public policy.

POL4013S COMPARATIVE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Course Convener: Dr V Naidoo (HESQF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course Entry Requirements: Admission to an Honours or Master’s programme, and by permission of the course convener.
Course Outline: This course examines the emergence, evolution and contemporary debates surrounding the ‘comparative’ study of public bureaucracies, or Comparative Public Administration. This will include the emergence of an interest in comparing public bureaucracies globally, analytical approaches to and methodological challenges of comparative study, and reviewing the empirical record in comparative research.

POL4015S LOCAL GOVERNMENT POLICY (Not offered in 2016)

Course Convener:  Professor R Cameron (HESQF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course Entry Requirements: Admission to the Justice and Transformation Honours programme, and by permission of the Convener.
Course Outline: This course is an advanced study of local government. The first part of the course will look at some major theoretical debates such as the relation between democracy and decentralisation, public participation, intergovernmental relationships and local democracy. The second part of the course will be a detailed study of contemporary South African local government. Major debates such as metropolitan government, the role of traditional leaders and decentralisation will be examined.

POL4032F COMPARATIVE TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

Course convener: Dr H Scanlon (HESQF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course Entry Requirements: Admission to an Honours or Master’s programme. Relevant background studies in the areas of human rights, conflict and conflict-resolution, social and political theory.
Course outline: This course will explore the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) process in a comparative and critical perspective. The TRC, itself the result of a comparative learning experience derived from similar processes in Latin America, now serves as an international model for unresolved conflicts in other parts of Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. The first part of the course provides an introduction and overview of the sub-field of transitional justice, locating this in relation to criminal and retributive justice as well as social and restorative justice. Part 2 will consider the historical conditions for, and political implications of, the quest for justice and truth in the context of transitions from authoritarian rule with reference both to the aftermath of the 2nd World War and the “third wave” of democratisation from the 1980s. It will also consider the relevance of transitional justice methods to post-conflict reconciliation in societies not engaged in democratic transition. Part 3 will take the form of more specific case studies including the Nuremburg Trial, the Latin American truth commissions and the South African TRC. The final part of the course will address a number of central moral and political debates around key issues of transitional justice (the relation between memory and history, amnesty and forgiveness, truth and reconciliation, procedural justice and accountability etc.

POL4033F AFRICAN POLITICS

Course convener: A/Prof J Akokpari (HESQF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course Entry Requirements: Admission to an Honours or Master’s programme, and by permission of the course convener.
Course Outline: The course aims at introducing students to the major forces shaping post-colonial African politics. A further objective is to assist students to understand what is now commonly referred to as the ‘African crisis’ and the prospects of overcoming the crisis. Africa’s crisis has generated a perception of the continent as a theatre of conflicts, destruction and underdevelopment. A related objective is to help students to develop critical insights into, and judgement on, the dominant debates and paradigms on Africa. Some of the themes to be addressed in the course include alternative approaches to the study of African politics, the political economy of colonialism and decolonisation, the state and governance in Africa, internal conflicts and reconstruction, civil society and democratisation and some aspects of Africa’s international relations, especially the continent’s growing relations with China.

SOC4003S LABOUR REGULATION

Convener: B Tame (HEQSF level 8, 12 NQF credits)
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours or Master’s programme.
Course outline: The focus of the course is on how key areas of the new labour regulatory framework are impacting on the labour market and economic development, particularly small business development. The course draws on current research and has strong legal and empirical themes. These are situated within an examination of the broader policy context within which the labour regulatory framework is operating, for example, macroeconomic policy and industrial policy. A central issue is how the concept of 'regulated flexibility' has sought to balance competing pressures.

SOC4010F DEVELOPMENT THEORY

Convener: A/Prof X Mangcu (HESQF level 8, 12 NQF credits)
Course Entry Requirements: Acceptance for an Honours or Master’s programme
Course Outline: What is development? In this course students will be introduced to the various schools of thought about the meaning of development - from modernization theory and neoliberal perspectives to the concept of the development state and the capabilities framework that is now envisaged in South Africa’s National Development Plan. Students will be expected to critically analyse the relevance of these frameworks for South Africa in light of the wave of protests in communities throughout the country. Particular attention will therefore be on the role of local government in development. A comparative perspective will be adopted with examples from other countries in both the South (e.g. India) and the North (U.S.A).

SOC4014S GLOBALISATION AND LABOUR RELATIONS (Not Offered in 2016)

Convener: Professor A Sitas (HESQF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course Entry Requirements: Acceptance for an Honours or Master’s programme
Course Outline: Globalisation is a process that is changing how firms network with each other internationally and increasing the phenomenon of global commodity chains. It is also having an effect on economic, political and social relations around the world. All these changes impact on the workplace and how industrial relations are conducted. The course examines these processes. It starts with a global perspective and then focuses in on particular regions including Southern and South Africa.

SOC4027S DEVELOPMENT SOCIOLOGY IN PRACTICE (Not offered in 2016))

Convener: TBA (HEQSF level 8, 12 NQF credits)
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours or Master’s programme.
Course outline: Links an academic training in Development Sociology to the needs of development practitioners. Introduces literature that explores the interface between academic knowledge and practitioner knowledge. Provides opportunities to learn how to use academic training in work situations and to acquire a range of skills useful to development practitioners. Students will do internships in development organisations operating in the Cape Peninsula.

SWK4013F SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT: THEORIES AND APPLIED APPROACHES

Convener: TBA (HEQSF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours in the Department of Social Development.
The course is also open to Honours students in cognate fields.
Course outline: This course is designed to give students an understanding of Social Development, within the framework and constraints of a national and global development environment. The following aspects are dealt with:

  • Basic concepts in the field of Social Development;
  • The historical framework of development as a discipline;
  • Globalisation of social and economic development;
  • Some theoretical models which are used to overcome poverty;
  • Poverty and underdevelopment in South Africa, and possible strategies for reducing and overcoming these, and
  • Models for people-centred development.

SWK4014S INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Convener: Adjunct Associate Professor E Atmore (HEQSF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours in the Department of Social Development.
The course is also open to Honours students in cognate fields.
Course outline: This course is designed to develop students’ knowledge and understanding of social and economic reconstruction and development within a people-centred development framework. It includes:

  • Social development facilitation through projects and programmes, as well as social mobilisation;
  • Community driven development;
  • Skills development;
  • Micro-finance;
  • Entrepreneurship;
  • Poverty eradication strategies;
  • Strategies of economic empowerment

The course promotes learning about the multiple linkages between social justice and social and economic development and focuses on the socially and economically excluded.

SWK4026S DEVELOPMENT PLANNING

Convener: Associate Professor V Taylor (HEQSF level 8, 24 NQF credits)
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an Honours in the Department of Social Development.
The course is also open to Honours students in cognate fields.
Course outline: This course is designed to improve students' knowledge and understanding of the broad field of social development planning. Social development planning includes development planning, social planning, strategic planning and programme planning. The course provides:

  • A theoretical framework as well as applied techniques in planning;
  • The macro planning context of South Africa is examined and the impacts of globalisation on both planning processes and outcomes are analysed;
  • Planning and planning tools that could be used in promoting people centred development within the framework of reconstruction and development in South Africa;
  • It challenges the purely technocratic approach to planning. It emphasises the need for an understanding of the socio-political processes involved in development planning; and
  • The dilemmas facing post-apartheid South Africa as we engage in a global political economy.