Dr. Florian Elliker

Becoming a minority
More than 20 years after the transition to a democratic order, South Africa still faces many challenges related to the legacy of apartheid. As evidenced by recent widespread student protests at South African universities, reforms are still needed in many areas of the education system. Using an ethnographic approach, this project examines the processes of transformation in post-apartheid South African universities, with a particular focus on student dormitories. These dormitories in South Africa provide a unique opportunity to examine a process of larger global significance, namely how historically privileged populations experience the process of becoming less powerful and less advantaged-and how these experiences shape their engagement with and perceptions of (politicized) ethnicity.

The residence halls that form a central part of local university cultures are composed of students from increasingly diverse backgrounds. Life in these highly segregated groups requires intense participation: Students are immersed in a comprehensive lifeworld in which they practice community life and political participation in largely self-organized and self-managed ways. In these "small publics," South African society and its multiple social positions and relations are simultaneously manifested, represented, affirmed, and contested. In these dormitories, white students, and especially white Afrikaans-speaking students, experience the process of becoming a minority. However, as highly sensitive and contested terrain, these student residences are difficult to access and remain largely unexplored. With a particular focus on white students and how they negotiate forms of belonging and participation, the project aims to analyze how they deal with the associated experiences of precarity and what forms of (politicized) ethnicity structure their perceptions, self-understandings, and practices.
 
Against the background of an interpretative theoretical framework, two main qualitative research methods are used: While in-depth interviews will serve to reconstruct and analyze students' experiences, perceptions, and self-understandings, participant observation and ethnographic interviews will provide a dense ethnographic description of the dormitories, i.e., in terms of their symbolic, cultural, interactional, and material infrastructure in the context of which belonging and participation are negotiated. The study focuses on two historically white Afrikaans universities. The project is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNFS project database).

Dr. Elliker is a private lecturer in sociology at the Institute of Sociology at the University of St.Gallen and co-leader of the research collective Unexplored Realities.