Metaphorical sense-making: visual-narrative language portraits of South African students

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on a creative visual-narrative approach to understanding South African students’ lived experiences of languages. Data were collected in two interviews: the first entailing a biographical history and the drawing of a linguistic portrait on a simple body outline and the second a narrative interview utilising the portrait generated in the first as a basis for talking about language and identity. Framing the research process in this creative visual mode shifts the focus of narrative talk, simultaneously grounding it in affective, embodied experience, and enabling a reflexive position from which to analyse the taken-for-granted role of language in the minutiae of everyday life. The theoretical lenses of identity and subjectivity are invigorated through these metaphorical representations, and new creative possibilities are released for analysing the role of language in mediating shifting power dynamics in post-apartheid and postcolonial South African life.

KEYWORDS:

• embodiment
• identity
• language
• metaphor
• narrative
• subjectivity
• Visual methods

Notes

^1. The Fallist student movement emerged countrywide in 2015 as a political response to these systemic exclusionary effects, demanding free, quality decolonised education.

^2. The interviews for this larger empirical study were conducted by the first author of this article, Hannah Botsis (2016).

^3. In South Africa, domestic workers often work exclusively for a single family and live in staff accommodation on their property.

^4. “Model C” refers to well-resourced schools formerly reserved for white children only and situated in white suburbs that were only conditionally opened to black children in the 1990s.

^5. It is a fairly commonly held belief in South Africa that success should not be flaunted as envious people may “bewitch” you causing you to lose your advantageous gains.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah Botsis

Hannah Botsis is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University, and a research associate of the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests include postcolonial language biographies and theories of power and subjectivity.

Jill Bradbury

Jill Bradbury is an associate professor of psychology and head of postgraduate studies in the School of Human and Community Development at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research and teaching focuses on narrative psychology, youth identities, and socio-historical theories of learning and change.