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I would like to express my utmost appreciation to those who have contributed to the completion of my Masters Dissertation. To my supervisor, Anthony Collins, the angst assassin! Thank you for all that you have invested in my potential. Your critical conceptualisations and innovative ideas have fundamentally shaped my thinking. Without your guidance and ongoing support I would not be half as creative nor self-insightful. To editing extraordinaire, Tarryn Frankish. Your ability to create coherence and consistency within any piece of work is incredible. Thank you for always answering my twenty (million) questions so graciously (irrespective of the hour!) and for the comprehensive feedback, the panic that ensued was well worth it in the end. To my friends and colleagues Sam Howlett, Tarryn du Randt and Michelle Tofts. Samo, your warm heart (and occasionally blazing finger guns) will continue to lift my mood on the darkest of days; you are such a joy to work with! Tdog, your ongoing optimism and level-head brought so much stability to our team; with your support "we will get there together eventually" has finally arrived. My Mill-Ram, we are the phantom! Without you I would have drowned in literature a long time ago, thank you for all that you do for me always. Well done girls, it's been a challenging journey. To my family and friends. Thank you for your patience, your encouragement and your neverending faith in my abilities. To all my participants, thank you for the many laughs (and the occasional lies). Your ability to be vulnerable with me has taught me so much about the strength of my own vulnerability.

This paper explores contemporary South African masculinities and how aspects of consumer culture interweave the self and body-image where “the prime purpose of the maintenance of the inner body becomes the enhancement of the appearance of the outer body” (Featherstone, 1991, p. 171). It details a study of young men in Durban, using a qualitative research design and a social constructionist theoretical framework to explore the discourses participants use when discussing their own and other male bodies. It highlights the ways in which consumerism, the media, and other social dynamics promote and silence different discourses around what constitutes a desirable man in 21st century South Africa. The paper presents a detailed exploration of the ‘healthy body’ discourse, discussing how it shaped men’s engagement in self-sculpting practices and provided a means by which the participants came to understand and manage their gendered identities

While the deaths of Mlungisi Nxumalo and Lucky Sefali barely registered in the media and public consciousness, they can be read as an exemplar of South African violence. The more closely we examine this incident, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between those fighting for justice, and those undermining it. The imagined boundaries between law-abiding citizen and criminal become unclear, as does the distinction between the use of force to protect citizens, and the use of violence to damage the social fabric. This leads to a critique of the conventional attributions of criminality and ideas about effective criminal justice, and instead reframes the problem of violence as one of the constructions of certain kinds of subjects, persons for whom the normalised exercise of various forms of unrecognised or legitimated violence is part of the texture of everyday life.

Purpose: Healthiness is constructed, in Western culture, as a moral ideal or supervalue. This paper will interrogate the assumption that health and the pursuit of healthiness is always and unquestionably positive, by exploring how discourses of health and freedom interact to reinforce the current inequalities and detract from social transformation. Method: Twenty young South African adults were interviewed about their understandings and experiences of health. These discussions were analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis. Results: Participants constructed healthiness as facilitating the experience of freedom, while at the same time being dependent on a personal orientation towards freedom (as opposed to merely submitting to dominant health authorities). Freedom discourses also played a role in connecting health to neoliberal discourses idealizing economic productivity and hard work. Participants were able to construct a self that is active, productive, valuable, hopeful, and self-assured when talking about health using discourses of freedom. However, these discourses also functioned to moralise and idealise healthiness, which contributed to blaming poor health on its sufferers. Conclusion: Health/freedom discourses can further reinforce the neoliberal value of individual responsibility by constructing self-improvement and self-work as the solution to ill-health, thereby contributing to victim-blaming and weakening support for public health interventions.

The International Centre for Nonviolence at Durban University of Technology is a major player in the study of peacebuilding and nonviolence in Africa. ICON’s overall aim is to help African communities achieve sustained peace, which means that its teaching, research and community engagement are transformational in their methods and outcomes, with an immediate impact on the lives of those involved. In practice, this means the use of transformative learning processes in our undergraduate teaching and participatory action research in the research theses which we supervise at master’s and doctoral level. This chapter explains the theory, experience and challenges of transformative learning and participatory action research. It then reflects on the effects which these approaches have had on our students and the contributions which they have made to the building of sustained peace across the continent.