Making and Shaping Participatory Spaces : Resemiotization and Citizenship Agency in South Africa

• In South Africa, democratic consolidation involves not only building a new state but also new interfaces between state and society. In order to strengthen the agency of citizens at these interfaces, recent approaches to development stress the notion of ‘participatory citizenship’ which recasts citizenship as practised rather than given. The purpose of this paper is to explore the links between such practices of participatory citizenship and possibilities for literacy and language education in state adult learning centres. It draws on an impact study of a capacity building programme for educators of adults in the Northern Cape Province and uses interviews and document analysis to explore the ways in which meaning-making unfolded in new participatory spaces. It argues that such processes can be seen as  a form of ‘linguistic citizenship’ in which individuals and groups re-shaped the multilingual representational resources available to them to validate the authority of subaltern actors and mobilise collective agency. It uses the concept of resemiotisation (Iedema 1999) to investigate how the choice of different semiotic complexes enabled or constrained participation and to offer a set of principles for reconceptualising the provision of adult basic education.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Adult basic education

agency

citizenship

development

linguistic citizenship

literacy

multilingualism

resemiotisation

voice

Bilingualism

Tvåspråkighet

tvåspråkighetsforskning

Bilingualism

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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