Funding needed for TYI

Sharlene Swartz has recently accepted a position at the Human Sciences Research Council. The Youth Institute is therefore looking for a motivated person to pioneer this important work. More importantly it needs some seed funding to allow us to find sustainable funding to keep TYI happily operational. TYI can operate on a budget of R1.2 million rand a year. For financial information click here

What's moral for township youth?

Being good in a bad world: What’s ‘moral’ for township youth?

How does growing up in a township affect your moral formation? Does it impact negatively or positively? Are township youth more or less moral than their middle-class counterparts? These were the key questions that led SHARLENE SWARTZ to conduct her doctoral research on the moral lives of South Africa’s township youth.

Over 15 months, 37 young people, aged between 15 and 19 who live in the Langa-Khayelitsha corridor of Cape Town, spoke openly and in a sophisticated way of their understanding of morality. They exhibited conventional values in areas such as substance use, violence and crime, while questioning conservative values around sex, money and respect. Despite self-identifying much of their behaviour as ‘wrong’, young people locate themselves as overwhelming ‘good’ while positioning others as either protected ‘mommy’s babies’, ‘right ones’, ‘skollies’ or ‘kasi boy/girl’.


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International award for Swartz's Cambridge PhD dissertation

Dr Sharlene Swartz's dissertation, "The Moral Ecology of South Africa's township youth", completed at the University of Cambridge, has been awarded the Association for Moral Education’s 2008 Kuhmerker Dissertation Award. The award will be made at the AME's 34th annual conference to be held this at Notre Dame University, Indiana. The dissertation will shortly be published as “Ikasi: The moral ecology of South Africa’s township youth”.

ANC meeting as divided as South Africa

I attended my first meeting this evening as a member of the ANC. The Speaker of Parliament and national Chair of the ANC Baleka Mbete was the guest speaker. The Mowbray town hall was packed – but conspicuously divided between leather-jacketed and sharply attired comrades driving mercs and beemers - and public trnasported workers and homeless people. The meeting told us to resist the ‘mischief’ of the media whose view that the ANC was divided was false asserted Mbete. Ironically in the questions that followed, the truth was present in the room. People asked for houses and jobs while others, those in mercs and beemers, asked for patience. On a more positive note, I did feel like the central issues were being addressed – poverty, social security, not using ANC membership for personal gain, and replacing Helen Zille and the Democratic Alliance as the head of the city and the Province. It was a pity that more of middle-class suburbia were not in attendance.