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ABSTRACT
After nearly 25 years of democracy, lives of young South Africans are still profoundly shaped by the legacies of apartheid. This paper considers how these differences are produced, maintained and disrupted through an exploration of changing narratives developed by a small group of South African pre-service teachers, with a particular focus on the narratives developed around discourses of fatherhood generally and absent fathers in particular. We draw on interviews conducted with three students in which we discussed their digital stories and literature reviews. In this paper, we draw attention to the limitations of digital storytelling and the risks such autobiographical storytelling presents of perpetuating dominant narratives that maintain and reproduce historical inequalities. At the same time, in highlighting ways in which this risk might be confronted, the paper also aims to show the possibilities in which these dominant narratives may be challenged.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 While we reject these racialised and racist categories, they remain salient in dominant discourses in terms of imperatives around redress, are implicated in experiences on campus and are clearly in common and normative use by students and their families. We use these categories in order to contextualise the narrators within South African historical and contemporary contexts. In this context Coloured refers to a specific racial category, relating to people of Malaysian, mixed-race, and from Khoisan ancestry.
3 Tik is the slang name given to the stimulant drug, Methamphetamine. This drug is a much more potent version of its parent drug, amphetamine. It is a widely used in the townships around Cape Town. Dagga is a Southern African slang term for marijuana.