Making and Shaping Participatory Spaces: Resemiotization and Citizenship Agency in South Africa

Abstract

In South Africa, democratic consolidation involves not only building a new state, but also new interfaces between state and society. To strengthen the agency of citizens at these interfaces, recent approaches to development stress the notion of “participatory citizenship.” The purpose of this article is to explore the links, rarely achieved in practice, between such practices of participatory citizenship and possibilities for literacy and language education. The article draws on a study of a capacity-building program for educators of adults in the Northern Cape Province. It uses the concept of resemiotization to explore the ways in which participants reshaped the multilingual representational resources available to them to legitimize the authority of subaltern actors and mobilize collective agency. Finally, it argues that such semiotic practices can be seen as a form of “linguistic citizenship,” which could promote locally rooted and participatory democracy under a radically reoriented adult basic education system.

Keywords:

• adult education
• citizenship
• development
• literacy
• multilingualism
• resemiotization

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Department for International Development in Southern Africa. A preliminary version of this article was presented at the 15th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, Essen, Germany, August 25, 2008. I thank Christopher Stroud, Elsa Auerbach, Lucy Alexander, Zannie Bock, and Lena Green for insightful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

¹In South Africa, the terms Black, African, and coloured are used variously and never without contestation. For statistical purposes, the present government reluctantly retains the former apartheid “race” categories in order to be able to assess development needs and implement policies designed to ensure redress and equity.

²Despite some evidence of a recent emergence of pride in Nama identity (anthropologist E. Boonzaier, as cited in Traill, 2002, p. 34), the language used in the workshop was Afrikaans.

³This later became an anchor project in the Galeshewe Urban Renewal Program (Address by Deputy Minister Botha at the opening of this program, February 2, 2002).