Racial Desegregation and Schooling in South Africa: Contested Geographies of Class Formation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much research on racial desegregation in South Africa uses residential data to track how richer black South Africans are moving from apartheid spaces to higher income suburbs; how racial privilege is giving way to class privilege. Drawing on geographers' relational conception of space and anthropologist Sherry Ortner's notion of a ‘class project’, in this paper I show the importance of geographies of schooling to class formation. The study tracks how schools and two groups—township residents and poorer shack residents—affect and navigate access to schools in Durban. Of importance to class formation, the study finds that children of relatively poor, but not the poorest, township dwellers can commute very long distances to attend prestigious schools. Consequently, racial mixing is more evident in South Africa's schools than in its residential areas—the opposite scenario to that found in many other countries. Yet children born to very poor residents of urban informal settlements face considerable barriers when trying to access well-resourced schools: although they are legally entitled to attend prestigious schools located close to informal settlements, they can often live with extended families hundreds of miles away in rural areas. This new geography of schooling leads to the marginalization of some children but the perception of, and potential for, intergenerational class mobility among a quite significant group of black South Africans.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".