Papers by Geoffrey Nsanja
No ubuntu here
Routledge eBooks, Jun 2, 2021
This project explores the dialectic between the identities which social essayist literacy traditi... more This project explores the dialectic between the identities which social essayist literacy traditions encourage and novice writers’ view of such identities (Lillis, 2001) as novices transition to university education in a Malawian university. To do this, the study adopts the view of academic writing as social semiosis with identity implications (Ivanic, 1998). This position is predicated on the view that saying something is a performative act which hails a social being (Gee, 1996). Therefore, in asking novice writers to write in a certain way, the academy implicitly asks them to take on new discoursal identities. The study examines the dialectic that ensues from this. Such dialectic is largely examined from an Ubuntu perspective which stipulates that selfhood is brought about in interaction with and because of the “other” (cf., Swanson, 2007, 2009). To achieve this, the study adopts “ethnography as method” (Lillis, 2008) or “talk around text”. Novice academic texts were analysed to i...
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Papers by Geoffrey Nsanja