Not Yet Uhuru! Attuning to, re-imagining and regenerating transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis across times Khapa(ring) the rising cultures of change drivers in contemporary South Africa

The “Not yet Uhuru!” project positions itself as emancipatory African research in motion. It is a regenerative project that responds to the concern that whilst dominant discourses can articulate what African states, societies and economies are not, we still know very little about what they actually are. This is a particularly important gap in how research on Africa is conceptualised, especially as it pertains to apprehending the futures that the majority of young people on the continent are instinctively leading themselves to (Mbembe, 2001, p.9). The project seeks to forgo youth development strategies that act as a form of containment by prescribing normative aspects of citizenship on young leaders in ways that stifle the transgressive impulses they have reason to value (Kelley in Tuck and Yang, 2014, p.89). The study traces rising cultures in transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis across times, as a way of “khapa(ring)” or accompanying the contemporary questions that Change Drivers in South Africa hold at the edge of their praxis. The study co-conspired with 21 Change Drivers in South Africa who were interested in regenerating and re-imagining what transgressive decolonial praxis could be in these times based on their experiences and learnings. Residential art-based workshops that explored each co-conspirator’s offerings on the subject were distilled through the medium of film. These in turn were analysed using an “ethics of attunement” that produced songs as a reflexive pedagogical tool (Lispari, 2014, p.176). Sharing the resonate echoes of their praxis through song created another iterative reflection on their praxis two years after their initial offerings. As a way of weaving together the findings with a historical perspective, the resonant praxis of Change Drivers was put into conversation with three unconventional reviews that trace impulses around transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis through fictional texts, political theory, poetry and intergenerational analysis, in order to surface resonant themes in praxis that echo across different times in history. This methodology sought to engage the question of the archive in pluriversal ways that appealed to different sensibilities, including the imaginative and hermeneutical, the traditionally analytical as well as the gifts of the lyrical and the erotic as different conceptual threads needed to resource the study. The reviews additionally spanned periods in the history of the continent that hold questions around precolonial and nascent colonial encounters, efforts to transgress within the liberatory movements and the intergenerational transmissions embedded in women and queer people’s struggles. The themes that coalesced across times were leveraged into capsules of rising cultures that form an experimental nexus for the practice of transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis that is already underway. These rising cultures were conceptualised as meditations on what it means to live into a vision of home built on the explorations of a paradigm of peace, humanness, pluriversality and decolonial love for those like and unlike us that strive for freedom on this continent (Dlala, 2017, p.52; Ndlovu- Gatsheni, 2013, p.142; Gqola, 2017, pp.197, 199). The rising ultures were reconciled through the creation of a litany that chronicles different refrains in transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis in contemporary times. The litany is a tool that charts particular experiences that are surfacing as symptomatic. It seeks to generously surface the contradictions that we are collectively starting to see past, whilst acknowledging the tensions that we need to straddle, integrate and navigate towards greater synthesis. The litany is an honest way of acknowledging the glimpses gained of who we are in this present moment, while we continually challenge ourselves to open up to questions about what it means to grapple towards decolonial futures. This stance has influenced my role as an educator to unconditionally embrace movements that already underway, and reflect these back to those that I am conspiring with in ways that promote an ethic of care, solidarity and critical engagement. The study celebrates what is possible when we do not theorise ourselves away from the questions embedded in our current praxis. This is an ethic that chooses to stay close to the phenomena arriving at present, whilst acknowledging the historical experiences that echo it as a collective pulse for meaningful experimentation and praxis. The study believes by being faithful to ways of amplifying, integrating and reflecting what has been emerging for us over time, we build our capacity to better respond with an ethic centred on transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis. This is the kind of accompaniment and care that Change Drivers across the continent deserve as they make the way towards a future worthy of their longing (Rushdie, 1999).

Great Equalizer or Great Selector? Reconsidering Education as a Moderator of Intergenerational Transmissions

A long-standing consensus among sociologists holds that educational attainment has an equalizing effect that increases mobility by moderating other avenues of intergenerational status transmission. This study argues that the evidence supporting this consensus may be distorted by two problems: measurement error in parents’ socioeconomic standing and the educational system’s tendency to progressively select people predisposed for mobility rather than to actually affect mobility. Analyses of family income mobility that address both of these problems in three longitudinal surveys converge on new findings. Intergenerational mobility is significantly lower among high school dropouts than among others, but there are no significant differences in mobility across higher education levels. This is consistent with compensatory advantage processes among the least educated in which individuals from advantaged backgrounds use family-based resources to compensate for their lack of human capital.

Scaling Occupations in Intergenerational Research - An Evaluation with Swedish register data

We evaluate how different occupational scales prevalent in the literature can capture intergenerational transmissions in Sweden. Previous research is limited by not taking competing dimensions of SES transmission into account when assessing performances of occupational scales. Using Swedish administrative data, we find, in contrast to classical findings, that the composite International Socio-Economic Index of occupational status (ISEI) has the highest intergenerational correlations net of other SES dimensions (education, income and wealth), followed by Treiman measure of occupational prestige (SIOPS). The now popular measure of occupational education following from Hauser and Warren (1997) suffer from slightly larger overlap with education; more of its intergenerational correlation is explained by parents’ education. However, similar to Hauser and Warren, we find monetary scales of occupations based on earnings or wages to have lower intergenerational significance. The CAMSIS scale for status lies in between occupational earnings and education.

Contingent Socialization and the Process of Engagement

Individuals can experience substantial upward and downward mobility despite persistent and widespread intergenerational transmissions. I lay the theoretical groundwork for the hypothesis of contingent socialization to help explain these empirical phenomena. In this framing, institutions of secondary socialization do not seek to socialize all candidates, nor do they seek to simply socialize viable candidates from various social backgrounds differently. Rather, powerful actors in these institutions determine the worthiness of candidates by evaluating whether those candidates engage in the work and social life of the institution. Those evaluations are shaped by race and social class distinctions, and perceptions of engagement are important for the candidate’s future successes. I present preliminary descriptive evidence in favor of this hypothesis and detail the many diverse future research directions necessary for confirming or disconfirming its viability as a useful social theory that can help address a range of empirical questions.

Introduction: Intergenerational Transmissions of Infant Mortality using the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS)

It has previously been shown that infant mortality clusters in a subset of families, a phenomenon which was observed in historical populations as well as contemporary developing countries. A transmission of death clustering across generations has also been shown in Belgium, but it is unknown whether such effects are specific to the studied context or are also found in other areas. The current article introduces a special issue devoted to analysing intergenerational transmissions of infant mortality across the maternal line in Belgium, the Netherlands, northern and southern Sweden, and Norway. Taking advantage of the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS), the five empirical studies created datasets for analysis and ran statistical models using exactly the same programs, which are also published within the special issue. These works are the first set of studies using the IDS on several databases for comparative purposes. Consistent results across the studied contexts were shown: transfers of infant mortality across the maternal line were seen in all five areas. In addition, the works have shown that there are large advantages of adopting the IDS for historical demographic research. The structure has in fact allowed researchers to conduct studies which were fully comparable, transparent and replicable.

Intergenerational Transfers in Infant Mortality in Southern Sweden, 1740-1968

Studies conducted in historical populations and developing countries have evidenced the existence of clustering in infant deaths, which could be related to genetic inheritance, early life exposures, and/or to social and cultural factors such as education, socioeconomic status or parental care. A transmission of death clustering has also been found across generations. This paper is one of five studies that analyses intergenerational transmissions in infant mortality by using a common program to create the dataset for analysis and run the statistical models with data stored in the Intermediate Data Structure. The results of this study show that in five rural parishes in Scania, the southernmost province of Sweden, during the years 1740-1968 infant mortality was transmitted across generations. Children whose maternal grandmothers experienced two or more infant deaths had higher risks of dying in infancy. The results remained consistent when restricting the sample only to cases where the grandmother had been observed for her entire reproductive history or when controlling for socioeconomic status. When running sex specific models, significant effects of the number of infant deaths of the grandmother were observed for girls but not for boys.

Program for Studying Intergenerational Transmissions in Infant Mortality Using the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS)

Studies conducted in historical populations and developing countries have evidenced the existence of clustering in infant deaths, which could be related to genetic inheritance and/or to social and cultural factors such as education, socioeconomic status or parental care. A transmission of death clustering has also been found across generations. One way of expanding the knowledge on intergenerational transfers in infant mortality is by conducting comparable studies across different populations. The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) was developed as a strategy aimed at simplifying the collecting, storing and sharing of historical demographic data. The current work presents two programs that were developed in STATA to construct a dataset for analysis and run statistical models to study intergenerational transfers in infant mortality using databases that are stored in the IDS. The programs use information stored in the IDS tables and after elaborating such information produce Excel files with results. They can be used with any longitudinal database constructed from church books, civil registers, or population registers.