BackgroundMany young men continue to disregard the importance of contraception and family planning in South Africa. The fact that even university students also do not take contraception and family planning seriously poses a serious threat to their own health and well-being.AimThis paper aims at investigating the attitudes of male students towards contraception and the promotion of female students’ sexual health rights and well-being at the University of Venda.MethodsQuantitative research method is used to determine how attitudes of 60 male students towards contraception can jeopardise the health and well-being of both male and female students.ResultsThis study reveals that the majority of 60 male students at the University of Venda have a negative attitude towards contraceptives. As a result, male students at the University of Venda are not keen on using contraceptives. Male students’ negative attitude and lack of interest in contraceptives and family planning also limit progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals on primary health care, especially with regard to sexual and reproductive health and well-being of female students at the University of Venda.ConclusionThe fact that more than half of the male students interviewed did not take contraception and family planning seriously poses a serious threat to health and well-being of students, including violation of female students’ sexual and reproductive health rights in South Africa. This calls for radical health promotion and sexual and reproductive rights programmes which should specifically target male students at the University of Venda.
In this paper, we critically reflect on our conceptualization and operationalization of “rapid photovoice” as a close-up, emancipatory, action research methodology which has multiple, intersecting social-justice goals; and consider the methodology’s potential for helping to achieve such goals. We first consider photovoice in relation to its typical use in public health research, as well as in prior research into student experiences of higher education. We then consider our pragmatic redesign of the methodology as rapid photovoice (RPV), which we conceptualized in response to the goals, parameters, and constraints inherent in our project, which studied student movement violence and wellbeing. In the third part of the article, we describe and discuss our operationalization of RPV in this study on four university campuses in South Africa. In the fourth section, we reflect on some of the ethical considerations arising from the topic and the methodology. In the final section of the article, we critically assess the interim outcomes of our use of RPV in terms of (1) psychologically empowering students to reflect on traumatic experiences in a safe space and enhancing their self-awareness of wellbeing, wellbeing resources and coping strategies; (2) the politically emancipatory potential of photovoice to represent student experiences authentically and with immediacy to higher education policy role-players, and (3) its ability to co-create artifacts of collective memory that provide authentic empirical material for making trustworthy knowledge claims.
La democratización de la educación superior en Sudáfrica ha revelado desigualdades profundamente arraigadas e inherentes al sistema derivadas del Apartheid (sistema de segregación racial en Sudáfrica y Namibia en vigor hasta 1992), en las que los jóvenes negros no pueden acceder a la educación sin enfrentarse a una miríada de obstáculos. En todo el mundo, los estudiantes han salido a las calles para mostrar su descontento con las autoridades, con la esperanza de generar conciencia y reconocimiento sobre los problemas con los que se encuentran en la educación superior. Sudáfrica no ha sido una excepción. En 2015, el movimiento conocido con el hashtag ‘#FeesMustFall’ (para la reducción de tasas académicas en la educación universitaria) envió un mensaje a los políticos para que priorizaran el necesario cambio que necesita la educación superior en Sudáfrica, ya que sigue siendo un sistema elitista y accesible solo para unos pocos elegidos. Aunque el programa sudafricano para incrementar la tasa de participación y expansión de la educación superior puesto en marcha a final de los años 90 del siglo pasado ha producido algunos beneficios en las últimas décadas, el número de estudiantes africanos en las instituciones de educación superior sigue sin aumentar. Las autoridades no han respondido a las desigualdades estructurales a la que estos estudiantes se enfrentan. En este artículo se detallan los desafíos que llevaron a los estudiantes universitarios sudafricanos a participar en la violenta protesta “#FeesMustFall” y se hacen propuestas sobre cómo superar estos desafíos para generar mejoras a largo plazo.
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