The subject of human well-being continues to gain traction in disciplines as diverse as psychology, sociology, development studies, and economics. Current scholarship, however, is still largely framed by normative assumptions about what being well means, and the overwhelming majority of conceptual approaches to well-being being have been conceived and applied by researchers in the industrialized, wealthy contexts of the global North. We critique the current conceptualizations of well-being and assess their applicability to research in the global south, particularly in contexts marked by poverty and inequality.

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This article investigates how the domestic worker sartorial trope is reflected and embodied in contemporary South African culture. Domestic work has received very little public or media attention from feminists, trade unionists, or even political activists broadly until the recent movement of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). This article observes how the South African political party, the EFF, use the domestic worker dress as a subversionary tactic in sociopolitical culture. By appropriating the archetypal domestic worker dress, the EFF demonstrate both identification with the domestic worker and a subversion of what the domestic worker dress has, for so long, inferred. In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, the author examines the domestic worker trope and the significance of dress. This article uses critical discourse analysis and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus to explicate both the personal and political significance of the domestic worker dress in contemporary South Africa.

As much as South African struggles for freedom and transformation can be termed emancipatory, not all attempts to research and record them can be similarly described. This article documents the research methods employed in a qualitative study that followed 80, mostly Black students, over 5 years in order to document the struggles to succeed faced by students in South Africa. The study ultimately interrogated the centrality of race in the quest for education and emancipation with a view toward understanding what drives self-determination and success in universities. A central intention of the study was for it to be research as intervention through the use of conscious research methods that would contribute to developing agency and action among students. Each of the participatory methods chosen, it was hoped, would contribute toward helping students develop wider networks and self-reflectivity in a quest for success in university. The five interactive methods used included an annual in-depth participant interview, social network interviews with an array of peers and stakeholder, a Facebook weblog to which participations made written and photographic submissions, a written reflection at the end of the fifth year, and an autoethnographic documentary in which participation was optional. Each of these activities was designed to have outcomes which can be described to varying extents as participatory and/or emancipatory.

Mindful of 2020's global focus on questions of systemic racism, this article looks at the continuing salience of the South African activist Steve Biko's ideas about Black Consciousness and consciousnessraising as they impact young people's empowerment in African countries. In the context of the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI GCRF) Accelerate Hub (2019-24), a project exploring interventions in adolescents' lives across the continent, it considers the ongoing relevance of Biko's thought in changing mindsets, challenging institutional racism, interrogating the dependency relations that underpinned 20thcentury African aid programmes, and transforming the narratives young people in Africa tell about themselves. The article outlines how Hub workshops introduce young people to the Biko-inspired practice of storytelling as speaking from where you stand, resisting negative stereotyping. It offers recommendations concerning agency and intervention drawn from Biko's key text, I Write What I Like (1978).

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