Doctoral Journey

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Educators world-wide find themselves in the challenging position of educating young adolescents for a future in which exponential knowledge doubling will become a reality. Together with the medical prognosis of a much longer life span for this age group and a radical restructuring of the global economy, the implication is that today’s youth will need the skills to negotiate a much longer career of self-employment through a succession of jobs, often collaborative in nature and mostly Internet-driven.

Cyberspace is expanding at a rapid pace and extends its reach into the functioning of society. The pervasive nature of cyberthreats poses a significant security challenge to governments, businesses, organisations, and individual users. The contribution this study makes to the field of cybersecurity lies in its methodological approach to focusing on South African military officers, which is a hitherto under-researched subject in the South African domain.

The legacy of father absence impacts the functioning and well-being of adult children in various ways. One fundamental pathway through which father absence affects adult children is through establishing and enacting their families.

This study aims to contribute to the grammatical description of Xitsonga, an often-neglected language in Bantu linguistics. Drawing theoretical insights from comparative Bantu linguistics, such as Hyman’s (2003) Causative-Applicative-Reciprocal-Passive template hereafter abbreviated as CARP and Cocchi’s (2009) grouping criteria of verbal extensions into syntactic and lexical categories, the study’s main focus is on the descriptive analysis of the verbal extensions and their impact on the form and morpho-syntactic structure of Xitsonga.

This study examines the processes through which sacred cultural practices and people were made subjects of ethnological studies. It considers these histories through a renewed examination of the contexts under which the chisungu female initiation ceremony of the Bemba-speaking people of northern Zambia came to be studied, and how the sacred belongings of the ceremony were collected and turned into objects of ethnography in museums.

The legacy of imperialism on Indigenous belief systems has imprinted an arguable influence on the identity and traditions of religiosity in the histories of Africa. The phenomenon of religion entails socio-political and cultural realities, some of which may overlap, correspond, or compete with different fields of study, which ultimately bears an impact on the conventional understanding of religious meaning, practice, and function.

Wildfires have increasingly become a point of concern, especially with notable incidents like the 2017 Knysna fire. These naturally occurring phenomena, despite their disruptive nature, are crucial for the sustainability of certain ecosystems. At the heart of understanding wild-fires lies the relationship between climate, vegetation, topography, and human land use, with topography standing out as a significant determinant. This thesis delves into the fundamen-tal role of topography, emphasizing its effect on the ignition, propagation, and behaviour of wildfires.

NIHSS PhD Graduates