Reflecting critically on the researcher-participant encounter in focus groups: Racialized interactions, contestations and (re)presentations of South Africa’s “protest culture”

ABSTRACT

South Africa has a considerable history of public protest from which a contemporary “culture of protest” has emerged. Despite the wide-ranging body of research on protest in South Africa, few studies have considered critically the discursive space in which researchers and participants are embedded. In this article, we use discursive psychology to examine reflexively how South African protesters discursively contest, (re)produce, and negotiate South Africa’s culture of protest in the presence of their comrades and researchers. Our analysis focuses on the making of “protest culture,” discursive resistance in the research setting, and the effect of researcher silence. We conclude by calling for protest researchers to remain sensitive to power differentials operating in research settings, while establishing a discursive space within these settings wherein participants feel heard and researchers do not attempt to mute their presence to achieve “neutrality”.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical reflexivity
• discursive psychology
• focus groups
• culture of protest
• protest violence
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Royal Lekoba and Sizakele Buthelezi for their assitance with translation.

Notes

¹ The 1976 Soweto Uprising was a response to the Bantu Education Act, which was a piece of apartheid-era legislation that prescribed Afrikaans as the language of instruction in all South African schools. The police fired live ammunition on the peacefully marching students and many were killed (the official figure given by the apartheid government was 23 but it is thought to be closer to 200). Following this, protests — many of which faced violent backlash from the apartheid state — spread across the country (South African History Online, n.d.).

² Although we understand racial categories (such as 'black', 'white', 'coloured', and 'Indian') as both socially constructed and discriminatory products of the apartheid system of classification, we use these terms here to reflect the social and structural divisions and inequalities that are a legacy of South Africa’s apartheid system.

³ Beginning as a strike for wage increases by Lonmin platinum mineworkers, the Marikana Massacre saw the South African Police Service kill 34 striking miners.

⁴ On 21 March 1960, a peaceful crowd of between 5 000 and 7 000 protestors arrived at a police station. Their intention was to voluntarily give themselves up for arrest for refusing to carry their passbooks, which were issued to black South Africans by the apartheid state as a means of controlling their movement while obtaining their labor in rural and urban areas. In response, the South African Police fired live ammunition into the crowd, killing 69 people and injuring 180 others (South African History Online, n.d.).

⁵ Two of South Africa’s 11 official languages.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project is supported by the South African Medical Research Council Intramural Research Fund [grant number 47541]; and Unisa Ukuphepha 2: Demonstrating Compassionate and Safe Communities in Africa [project code 822500].