Deadline: 29-Mar-22
The Tshisimani Centre has launched a short course “what is Democracy” for community-based paralegals.
It is a course about South Africa today – why it is the way it is, why this matters and crucially, what we can do to overturn this dismal situation.
It is Designed specifically for community-based paralegals and fieldworkers who provide a range of services to the communities they serve – including information access, support with gender based violence cases and matters, assistance with evictions, labour, consumer and social security matters as well as different kinds of dispute resolution – this course will locate the historical roots of the day-to-day issues that advice offices contend with and contextualise them within broader contestations, resistance and imaginations about democracy.
Approach
This course will complement the knowledge and experience acquired by community-based paralegals in their practice with conceptual tools designed to better understand why the South Africa we live in today, is a nightmare for so many and what can be done to change this. Between the two residential modules participants will engage in online contact, tasks and support.
A range of creative techniques – interactive games, role plays and scenario exercises, seminars, film screenings, fireside chats, reading circles, guest lectures, activist panels, discussion groups and debates – will be used in delivering the course. The course is residential and has two modules, each running over five days. Between the two residential modules participants will engage in online contact, tasks and support.
Course Summary
- Module 1: Why Democracy Then and Now (held in Western Cape) – 24 – 29 April 2022: This module is about the realities that confront activists in South Africa today – inequality, racism, uneven patterns of land ownership, spatial segregation and endemic violence. The aim of the module is to ask questions about the persistence of these realities after the installation of a democratic government in 1994 – a government ushered in with the promise of “a better life for all”. By the end of this module, participants would have grappled with:
- What were the key demands of ordinary people in the struggle against apartheid
- What do these realities reveal about how our society functions, who rules South Africa today, different group interests and the nature of the post-1994 state.
- In what ways are the everyday issues that community-based paralegals deal with linked to unfolding struggles for dignity and democracy.
- Module 2: Remaking democracy Alternatives and strategies (held in Gauteng) – 18 – 23 September 2022: This module, participants will examine some of emerging responses to the social and economic crisis besieging SA today, including a growing disillusionment with politics as a vehicle for change; greater appeal of authoritarian politics and the yearning for “strongmen” as well as a defense of the Constitution at all costs. This module hopes to foreground questions about strategy and tactics for radical social transformation and hone-in on real world cases and attempts to craft expansive notions of democracy that give ordinary people power over the political and economic forces that govern their lives. By the end of this module, participants should be able to:
- critically assess the different responses to the ongoing crisis in their respective communities and in SA more broadly,
- map the social formations and struggles in their different communities and identify, starting with their own experience, the layers in society today that are invested in and most capable of ushering in a radically different SA,
- Locate the role of their practice in unfolding struggles to change the nature of South African society today.
Eligibility Criteria
- Participants must be engaged in community paralegal work and provide legal assistance and dispute resolution services to communities on a range of issues. In selecting the participants, Tshisimani will consider geographic spread, gender, age and period of service to the community. They will make every effort to draw participants from different age groups and with different levels of experience, aiming for a diverse mixture in the learning space.
- Participants are expected to commit to attending the entire duration of the course, which runs over two blocks: the advice office or place of work needs to approve leave for the applicant to attend these two residential modules’.
For more information, visit https://www.tshisimani.org.za/2022/03/20/what-is-democracy/
