The lack of participation of girls in programming robotics is well documented in the international literature on the subject. The Inspired Towards Science, Engineering and Technology (I-SET) is a community engagement project that promotes science engagement in predominantly disadvantaged communities. In this paper, we present the findings of an action research project. The primary objective of this research project is to monitor and improve this community of practice. This research paper aims to explore whether girls encounter barriers to full participation in robotics competition teams. While educational parity has been reached in STEMI-related subjects at the school level, young women are far less likely to select STEMI fields at the tertiary level compared to young men. The I-SET community of practice is well-situated to promote STEMI fields to girls from an early age. Barriers to their full participation in the I-SET community of practice included male dominance in the everyday activities and speech acts of the teams; a lack of technohabitus; and alienation. Broader constructions of gender identity in schools and the communities that they serve presented a major challenge to coaches keen to actively include girls. These challenges were further compounded by gendered divisions of labour that left little time for girls (particularly those from poorer backgrounds) to practice.

There is a food security crisis in South Africa and black working-class women are the shock absorbers of this crisis. It follows that where food studies are included in the South African curriculum, the relationship between women and food security should be understood and critiqued by learners. Improvements in gender equality have also been identified as one of the primary drivers of improvements in food security. In this paper, the South African curriculum is analysed in terms of food studies, gender studies and the promotion of gender equality. Using the lens of feminist pedagogy, a set of qualitative indicators were developed to assess the content and praxis of the curriculum. While there is content which deals with gender and with food, these are presented separately. In the Geography and Agriculture curricula, there is a marked lack of focus on gender concerns. This article concludes that the curriculum could be reoriented to include an awareness and critique of the nexus of women and food and that more positive representations of women as active and powerful agents are needed in the South African Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS).

The paper reports a case study of a public participation process in Mapela, Limpopo Province, South Africa. A deliberative democracy framework was used to assess the process. Developers relied on a functional managerial approach to the public participation process, but it was found that this was to the detriment of the process itself, as well the long term outlook for members of the affected communities who had been relocated. A technocratic model underpinned the public participation process. In this paper, we explore the perceptions of the affected Mapela community regarding the public participation process. These perceptions are documented and discussed in relation to public participation policy and practices and in relation to the philosophical underpinnings of deliberative democracy.

For this special edition marking the centenary of geography in South Africa, we have documented the communities of practice associated with geography and gender; and we have presented a review of the scholarship emerging from this community. The South African gender and geography community of practice is connected to communities of practice at different scales. We examine the relationship of this community to international initiatives and we examine the contribution of South African feminist geographers to broader feminist discourse. We also document the embeddedness of this community of practice with other local gender-based research communities of practice. Finally, we examine challenges to the South African geography and gender community of practice.

In this article we trace the emergence of road-closures - i.e. the barricading by local residents of public roads ostensibly in response to crime - in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg in the decade after apartheid. We argue that road-closures manifest an attempt at material fixing an urban order of privilege, even as privilege and inequality is increasingly deterritorialised in the city of the global South. While conventionally theorised as part of a broader global trend towards the privatisation and securitisation of urban space, we demonstrate that road-closures contain qualitatively different expectations of the urban order to e.g. private gated communities. Whereas gated communities are premised on and driven by a political economy of self-exclusion from urban life, road-closures simultaneously resist and prefigure this deterritorialised reordering of privilege in the post-apartheid city. Based on archival research in local community newspapers over a 10-year period between and 2004 (the high-water mark of the so-called road-closure debates), we trace shifting discourses about road closures and the city: from anxieties about crime and loss of privilege, to fantasies of abandonment, to the assertion (and rupture) of a mythical suburban utopia. Drawing on a literature on ruins as the material effects of a past order manifest in the urban order of the present, we assert that despite anxieties about the loss of privilege, these enclosed neighbourhoods remain spaces of extreme privilege, now implicated into an emergent geography in which old and new spaces of privilege overlap to reinforce spatial inequalities in post-apartheid Johannesburg.

L’histoire de Johannesburg a été marquée par la ségrégation, les inégalités socio-économiques et le déclin du secteur industriel, laissant en héritage une ville post-fordiste caractérisée par la déconnection entre elles des différentes communautés culturelles. Ceci constitue un défi majeur pour les villes post-apartheid d’Afrique du Sud. L’article vise à montrer que la « ville juste » serait celle qui aurait des institutions démocratiques, dans laquelle les différences seraient nombreuses et acceptées et au sein de laquelle les solidarités et les liens entre les citadins « différents » seraient intégrées dans la vie politique autant que quotidienne. Ces éléments, complémentaires de la justice redistributice, sont les conditions au développement d’un sentiment de citoyenneté urbaine et de la justice spatiale. La littérature internationale, mais aussi les documents produits par la métropole de Johannesburg, reconnaissent à l’espace public un rôle essentiel dans cette perspective ; et les espaces publics (ou espaces d’interaction) se sont multipliés dans la ville de Johannesburg. Ils ont été conçus selon les principes du « new urbanism » c’est-à-dire, notamment, en partenariat public-privé. Le « new urbanism » (ou aménagement urbain néo-traditionnel) a été critiqué par de nombreux auteurs comme favorisant l’exclusion sociale. Une étude de cas nous permet d’entrer ici dans ce débat. Cette étude est donc à replacer dans le cadre d’une réflexion générale sur la ville, et nous pensons démontrer que ces espaces publics nouveaux sont des vitrines conçues pour les besoins de milieux d’affaires, des touristes et de l’élite sociale plus que pour les citadins pauvres. Ceci impose donc une réflexion plus approfondie sur la définition même de l’interaction citadine dans les centres urbains contemporains pour définir comment les espaces publics pourraient être mis au service d’une véritable politique favorisant interaction, engagement citadin et solidarité.

Entre la sécurité ontologique et la bonne différence : Les fermetures de routes, le communautarisme et l’éthique urbaine à Johannesburg, Afrique du Sud Depuis plus d’une dizaine d’années des fermetures de routes sont effectuées dans la ville de Johannesburg. Dans cet article, sont étudiées les conséquences de ces mesures pour les problèmes d’inclusivité et d’éthique urbaine. En étudiant les fermetures de routes et le fait que les citadins des quartiers les plus riches de Johannesburg sont peu disposés à subventionner les zones des plus pauvres, l’auteur s’interroge sur la base éthique du traitement ainsi réservé à ceux considérés comme étant autres, différents de soi. Il est maintenu que le débat sur la fermeture de routes doit être vu comme un élément d’une problématique plus large et relative à la façon dont la différence est abordée dans la ville. Enfin, la question est posée des moyens qui permettraient à Johannesburg de surmonter les préjudices causés par les bases de l’urbanisme moderniste et des stratégies sont étudiées pour la création d’une ville favorable à l’interaction des uns avec les autres.

An examination of development patterns, especially since 1990, leads one to the assertion that not only are racial divisions still firmly entrenched in the spatial order of the metropolis, if anything the location of significant urban facilities, notably, shopping centres, offices, cinemas, and restaurants are now more concentrated in the dominantly white-occupied ‘northern’ suburbs than ever before (…) together they form an ‘enclave’ that constitutes 28.8% of the area of Johannesburg and one that by the close of 2003 contained some 70% of all the shopping facilities located in the large malls of the city (SA Reconciliation Barometer, 2005).

Urban citizenship entails freedom to move, use and express identity in the city. Violence is an extreme instance of the curtailment of these rights. It impairs a sense of safety and restricts choice. In gay mythology, the city embodies an accepting cosmopolitan lifestyle. Young gay men and lesbians are drawn to Johannesburg from smaller towns within South Africa and from other African cities as far afield as Harare, Windhoek, Gabarone, Kampala, Accra and Dar-es-Salaam. The chapter places homophobic violence on the agenda of urban policy makers as well as informing future research around violence, fear and safety. M. Brown classifies homophobic crime as systemic violence and argues that it disallows gay men and lesbians full participation in the city. Skelton locates her work on homophobic elements in Jamaican ragga "within wider discourses that debate race, sexuality and masculinity". Homophobic victimisation is endemic in violent, masculine cultures and has extensive implications for gay men and lesbians.

A critique of South African research on the compound provides a valuable entry point for the analysis of interviews collected over an 18 month period in a South African women’s prison. Drawing on the theoretical questions raised in this literature and geographical concepts of the interrelationship of identity and space, the prison is mapped out in terms of the physical space and the signification that these spaces hold for prisoners and prison authorities. Using the Foucauldian concept of panopticism, the prison is examined as an example of a complete and austere institution. Prisoner resistances to the institution are documented and the prison codes of conduct around masculine and feminine sexual identities are critiqued. The response of prison staff and heterosexual prisoners to same-sex sexuality and butch-femme roles is analysed in terms of Butler’s concept of performative transgressions and the geographical work on social exclusion.

It has been argued that in terms of local economic development, the fortress city of Johannesburg is seeking to transform itself into a creative city. The initiatives which I examined in the process of assessing the potential of Johannesburg to become a centre for cultural and media excellence all had the common vision of Johannesburg at the centre of the African renaissance. Not only did the interviewees express the desire for Johannesburg to become the most competitive city in the country, they extended this desire to the whole of Africa.