by Sandy on 24 May 2013
Anna McCord, author of Public Works and Social Protection in Sub-Saharan Africa: Do public works work for the poor?, has co-written a paper which asks, “What is the evidence on the impact of employment creation on stability and poverty reduction in fragile states”.
The paper is freely available from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI):
This systematic review identifies and synthesizes the current literature on the evidence of the impacts of employment creation on stability and poverty in fragile states. The review assesses the empirical evidence available, in terms of content and quality, and identifies critical research gaps, proposing priority areas for future research in this area.
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by Mafeno on 24 May 2013
Agenda Feminist Media is offering gender studies learners and educators free access to back issues of the Agenda journal, which is published four times a year. Contact admin@agenda.org.za to submit a request. Please note that you will need to cover the cost of postage.
Learners and Educators in gender studies who are interested in back copies of Agenda Journals to e-mail your request to admin@agenda.org.za.
Unfortunately, Agenda does not have a budget for postage – hence postage will have to be covered by recipient.
by Adele on 23 May 2013
Palesa Morudu chaired the “Prodigal Daughters” session at the Franschhoek Literary Festival last weekend and has written about her highlight from the festival for Business Day.
Morudu chaired Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Bell, Ruth Carneson, Gonda Perez and Annemarie Wolpe’s discussion of Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile. Describing the book, she says that “These women poured their hearts out in the book, narrating harrowing stories of escape, attempts to settle in foreign lands, the politics of exile, coming of age and the confusion about where and what is home.”
Morudu writes that “the highlight was witnessing the meeting of Ngcobo and Wolpe, who came face to face in Franschhoek for the first time, despite having shared a similar life experience spanning almost 50 years…Seeing these two women, both in their 80s now, hug each other after discovering how their histories intertwined, was one of those truly special South African moments.”:
This past weekend was the annual meeting for lovers of fiction, history, politics, poetry, humour, wine and food. The Franschhoek Literary Festival is growing as a meeting place to contemplate the history and future of the written word in South Africa. World-renowned historian and the author of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin, Antony Beevor, provided a welcome antidote to the all-too-common South African tendency to navel-gaze. His account of the battle for Stalingrad during the Second World War makes the fight against apartheid seem like a walk in the park.
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by Mari on 23 May 2013
Starting eight million years ago, Understanding Africa provides an accurate and detailed account of the natural, political and social forces that have created the Africa we know of today and which have shaped the continent’s destiny through the ages.
About the author
Rob Marsh was born and bred in Wolverhampton, England and graduated from Manchester University with a Bachelor of Education degree in 1973. In 1976 he relocated to Zambia in order to take up a teaching post. He moved to Cape Town in 1979, which is where his writing career took off. He currently resides in Johannesburg.
Marsh has been a full-time writer since 1993 and is the author of 22 published books – both fiction and non-fiction – and more than 300 radio programmes. He has a special interest in matters crime-related, and is the author of both Famous South African Crimes (Struik) and With Criminal Intent: the changing face of crime in South Africa (Ampersand Press).
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by Adele on 22 May 2013
UKZN Press has shared an excerpt from Polarization and Transformation in Zimbabwe: The Counter-Movement for Land Redistribution and Constitutional Change by Erin McCandless. In the excerpt polarization in Zimbabwe is broken down into a few concepts and the aims of the book are discussed.
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by Sandy on 22 May 2013
Rob Brooks has written an article for The Conversation about a paper in the most recent edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal, which “suggests the evolution of cooperation led also to the evolution of lying.”
While Brooks says that the paper may seem simplistic, he does say that “models of this nature do a great service by putting our intuitions to the test. And they can later be developed and elaborated to illuminate more difficult questions.”
“Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature.”
Thus concludes the abstract of a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that considers the evolution of “tactical deception” using a theoretic model and a comparative study of primates.
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