Mpofu
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 45821 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Mpofu |
| APELLIDO | Mpofu |
| FIRMA | MPOFU |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Limpopo |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5924-5721 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 26 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2011 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Visual art and rethinking the future in anthropogenic climate change debates
In this paper I interview four of the eleven artists who participated in the first instalment of the Black the New Green exhibition in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, intended to raise awareness on issues around climate change. The study anchors visual art as a way of communicating climate change. I further use the trash/rubbish and framing theories to illustrate how trash re-enters the economy of things as a prized thing both in terms of economic value and …
“They Will Do Anything for These Votes”
Political electoral campaigns in Africa are largely performative. Political leaders frequent churches to attract the sympathy and support of the faithful masses as they perform belonging to the same family of the children of God. In addition, populism has been one of the strategies used by politicians to sway public opinion. Populism is used as a performative and discursive trope to communicate authenticity. These performances lead to ordinary pe…
Money Does Not Stay, It Is a Visitor
This article uses archival material from the South African reality television show 'I blew it' to explore the notion of happiness and consumption as it relates to township masculinities in the South African context. The program follows the lives of people who inherited fortunes from their deceased parents, got compensated by government for being involved in a road accident, or played lottery and won millions of Rand. Most of the beneficiaries ble…
Ruling from the Grave? The Political Instrumentalization of Robert Mugabe's Corpse in Contemporary Zimbabwean Politics
This qualitative research is a critical analysis of news media reports, political debates, and political and family behaviours to interrogate the centrality of death, corpses, funeral and mortuary rituals in African politics by using the death of Zimbabwe's former President, Robert Mugabe as a case study. At death, it became clear what a polarizing and yet unifying figure Mugabe was. His dead body became a contested political asset. The paper exp…
Remembering Mass Atrocities
Religious and political intersections
This article discusses the critical intersection of Christianity with Zimbabwean politics during the 2018 harmonised elections. Christianity and politics play an important role in organising or polarising society. Major problems arise when the church becomes more “political” than spiritual or becomes silent on political matters affecting society. Religion has been used for various purposes in Zimbabwean politics, such as holding on to power, cont…
Populism From Below and Social Movements
This study examines a new wave of populisms arising in the digital era using Pastor Evan Mawarire's #ThisFlag movement: What are they, and how do they express themselves? How does the hegemony react to them? Non-mainstream, digitally born movements, especially in dictatorships, are dismissed by the political elite as ill-mannered disruptors whose political interventions are detrimental. To analyse the cleric's populism and its meaning to the Zimb…
Booty Power Politics
This article analyses the concept of booty power, objectification and consumption of the female body in popular culture. Booty power is used here to refer to discourses around the Stocko Sama2K, initially a group of five women who were caught on camera dancing the "John Vul' igate" song and dance challenge, and their sexualized dance routines. I draw on digital ethnography and interviews to argue that objectification presents us with complexities…
Mediating Xenophobia in Africa
Pornographic intersections
Post-Apartheid South Africa has been characterized by fractious relationships between the races that compose this society and also between the rulers and the ruled. Society has devised many strategies to cope with, understand, resist, and oppose this, but also to bring about change. One of these strategies is the expression of personal viewpoints through elections, social media, protests and humour. This paper is concerned with the deployment of …
Jesus Comes to South Africa
This is a qualitative study where purposefully sampled hashtags and memes gathered through virtual ethnography as shared on Twitter during the Local Government Elections 2016 (LGE2016) and the 105th anniversary celebrations of South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) are analysed as political communication. Through the use of qualitative content analysis and the concept of "citizen" and "voter" voice, which neatly links with citizen …
For a nation to progress victims must ‘move on
This qualitative research article is about the meaning of debates on the yet to be officially discussed the Zimbabwean genocide. The main focus is on the meanings of discourses of resistance made by social media interactants and activists; those who either never experienced the genocide or those who experienced it as first-generation survivors and victims and through collective memory passed from generation to generation. My main interest is find…
FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa
Additional informationNotes on contributorsShepherd MpofuShepherd Mpofu is a senior lecturer at the Department of Language, Communication and Media at the University of Limpopo. His research interests are on the intersection of media and identity, new media and politics, media, violence and memory
Imaginations and Narrations of the Nation
This paper analyses Raymond Majongwe’s and Brian Muteki’s music to investigate the different ways in which these two musicians narrate and imagine the post-2000 Zimbabwean nation. A narrative analysis is carried out of specific songs that address issues related to the nation. Since the late 1990s and through the 2000s Zimbabwe has experienced socio-economic and political challenges that have greatly affected its citizens, leading to a mass exodus…
Mandelaism in Newspaper Advertising that “Pays Tribute” to Mandela after his Death
Former South African President, Nelson Mandela's death in 2013 saw an extraordinary outpouring of local and global grief. This reflected the worldwide iconisation of Mandela as a popular cultural and political symbol for human rights, political messiah-hood, sainthood, dignity, peace and forgiveness. Noting that in his lifetime, even, Mandela attempted to deflect and qualify this iconisation, we present critical views of what we call “Mandelaism”…
Disruption as a communicative strategy
In 1994 South Africa became a miracle in the world of postcolonies as a newly independent ‘rainbow’ nation state. Apartheid was replaced by an informal but still identical system which I refer to as apartheid. Good governance, democracy, peace, civility and quiet are framed by the media and regarded by investors and political elite among others to be the preferred set-up of things. Using the rage in the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student p…
Art as Journalism in Zimbabwe
The mediations on the postcolonial culture of violence in Zimbabwe remain contentious. This culture has helped to sustain the ruling ZANU-PF stranglehold on power. ZANU-PF has refused to be held accountable especially in those violent episodes where it has been the perpetrator. This paper offers an analysis of key themes in Bulawayo-based artist Owen Maseko’s works as an alternative form of journalism challenging and resisting the status quo. The…
Making heroes, (un)making the nation
This article explores the post-2000 national identity formation through the use of national heroes narrative and the Heroes’ Acre shrine in Zimbabwe. The Heroes’ Acre marks the country’s physical reminder of the past and acts as a tool for national identity and its symbolic maintenance through state-presided rituals that happen at the shrine. Attached to the Heroes’ Acre as a permanent physical symbol of nationhood are the people the burial site …
Participation, citizen journalism and the contestations of identity and national symbols
This article constitutes an examination on how citizen journalism has challenged Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian regime on issues pertaining to national heroes and usages of the Heroes’ Acre as central national identity markers. Under Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, Zimbabwe has seen the public being limited from directly participating in salient national debates. ZANU-PF’s control of the official public sphere has also constrained alternative views from ventila…
Zimbabwe’s state-controlled public media and the mediation of the 1980s genocide 30 years on
Since the end of genocide in 1987 Zimbabwe has remained a zone of ‘conflicts’, and the enduring debates surrounding this genocide, especially in public-owned but state-controlled media, call for critical attention. Three years after independence, in 1980, Zimbabwe was plunged into a genocide named ‘Gukurahundi’ (meaning the rain that washes the chaff away after harvest) that lasted until 1987. This article argues that there has been a clash of ‘i…
Citizen journalism and moral panics
This article hinges on empirical qualitative data gathered from an illustrative sample to determine perceptions on enforcing ethics on social media from people who acted as citizen journalists during South Africa’s 2015 xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals. The April 2015 attacks were mediated through userdriven social media platforms such as WhatsApp, where truthful and untruthful information on xenophobia was disseminated to warn targeted re…
Toxification of national holidays and national identity in Zimbabwe's post-2000 nationalism
National holidays are some of the oldest known forms of nation-mythologizing used for managing, producing and reproducing national memories and identities. They are calendrically set aside days free from work where people pause and reflect on who they are as a nation. A study of national holidays in the Zimbabwean context exposes the malleability, fragility and contestability of 'official' notions of nationhood as imagined by Zimbabwean president…
When the subaltern speaks
Using qualitative data drawn from newzimbabwe.com and a listserv comprising mostly Ndebele-speaking people of Zimbabwe, this article investigates how the Web 2.0 era has given subaltern voices platforms to discuss issues rendered taboo in authoritarian contexts. The study is anchored on the concept of the subaltern public sphere and the metaphor of the ‘voice’ in cyberspace. The subaltern, as used here, refers to those people who perceive themsel…
Social media and the politics of ethnicity in Zimbabwe
(2013). Social media and the politics of ethnicity in Zimbabwe. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies: Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 115-122
New media, old news
Additional informationNotes on contributorsShepherd Mpofu Shepherd Mpofu is a PhD candidate in media studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and a staff development fellow at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Zimbabwe. His research interests include new media, memory and identity, media and elections, media representations, and media and politics
Toxification of national holidays and national identity in Zimbabwe's post-2000 nationalism
National holidays are some of the oldest known forms of nation-mythologizing used for managing, producing and reproducing national memories and identities. They are calendrically set aside days free from work where people pause and reflect on who they are as a nation. A study of national holidays in the Zimbabwean context exposes the malleability, fragility and contestability of 'official' notions of nationhood as imagined by Zimbabwean president…
Jesus Comes to South Africa
This is a qualitative study where purposefully sampled hashtags and memes gathered through virtual ethnography as shared on Twitter during the Local Government Elections 2016 (LGE2016) and the 105th anniversary celebrations of South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) are analysed as political communication. Through the use of qualitative content analysis and the concept of "citizen" and "voter" voice, which neatly links with citizen …
Making heroes, (un)making the nation
This article explores the post-2000 national identity formation through the use of national heroes narrative and the Heroes’ Acre shrine in Zimbabwe. The Heroes’ Acre marks the country’s physical reminder of the past and acts as a tool for national identity and its symbolic maintenance through state-presided rituals that happen at the shrine. Attached to the Heroes’ Acre as a permanent physical symbol of nationhood are the people the burial site …
For a nation to progress victims must ‘move on
This qualitative research article is about the meaning of debates on the yet to be officially discussed the Zimbabwean genocide. The main focus is on the meanings of discourses of resistance made by social media interactants and activists; those who either never experienced the genocide or those who experienced it as first-generation survivors and victims and through collective memory passed from generation to generation. My main interest is find…
Art as Journalism in Zimbabwe
The mediations on the postcolonial culture of violence in Zimbabwe remain contentious. This culture has helped to sustain the ruling ZANU-PF stranglehold on power. ZANU-PF has refused to be held accountable especially in those violent episodes where it has been the perpetrator. This paper offers an analysis of key themes in Bulawayo-based artist Owen Maseko’s works as an alternative form of journalism challenging and resisting the status quo. The…
Booty Power Politics
This article analyses the concept of booty power, objectification and consumption of the female body in popular culture. Booty power is used here to refer to discourses around the Stocko Sama2K, initially a group of five women who were caught on camera dancing the "John Vul' igate" song and dance challenge, and their sexualized dance routines. I draw on digital ethnography and interviews to argue that objectification presents us with complexities…
Remembering Mass Atrocities
Populism From Below and Social Movements
This study examines a new wave of populisms arising in the digital era using Pastor Evan Mawarire's #ThisFlag movement: What are they, and how do they express themselves? How does the hegemony react to them? Non-mainstream, digitally born movements, especially in dictatorships, are dismissed by the political elite as ill-mannered disruptors whose political interventions are detrimental. To analyse the cleric's populism and its meaning to the Zimb…
New media, old news
Additional informationNotes on contributorsShepherd Mpofu Shepherd Mpofu is a PhD candidate in media studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and a staff development fellow at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Zimbabwe. His research interests include new media, memory and identity, media and elections, media representations, and media and politics
Money Does Not Stay, It Is a Visitor
This article uses archival material from the South African reality television show 'I blew it' to explore the notion of happiness and consumption as it relates to township masculinities in the South African context. The program follows the lives of people who inherited fortunes from their deceased parents, got compensated by government for being involved in a road accident, or played lottery and won millions of Rand. Most of the beneficiaries ble…
Pornographic intersections
Post-Apartheid South Africa has been characterized by fractious relationships between the races that compose this society and also between the rulers and the ruled. Society has devised many strategies to cope with, understand, resist, and oppose this, but also to bring about change. One of these strategies is the expression of personal viewpoints through elections, social media, protests and humour. This paper is concerned with the deployment of …
Citizen journalism and moral panics
This article hinges on empirical qualitative data gathered from an illustrative sample to determine perceptions on enforcing ethics on social media from people who acted as citizen journalists during South Africa’s 2015 xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals. The April 2015 attacks were mediated through userdriven social media platforms such as WhatsApp, where truthful and untruthful information on xenophobia was disseminated to warn targeted re…
African media and the digital public sphere
Fred Mudhai, Wisdom Tettey and Fackson Banda, eds. New York: Palgrave. 2009. pp. 276 ISBN: 978-0-2306-1486-4 (hardcover only)
Social media and the politics of ethnicity in Zimbabwe
(2013). Social media and the politics of ethnicity in Zimbabwe. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies: Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 115-122
New media, old news
Additional informationNotes on contributorsShepherd Mpofu Shepherd Mpofu is a PhD candidate in media studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and a staff development fellow at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Zimbabwe. His research interests include new media, memory and identity, media and elections, media representations, and media and politics
When the subaltern speaks
Using qualitative data drawn from newzimbabwe.com and a listserv comprising mostly Ndebele-speaking people of Zimbabwe, this article investigates how the Web 2.0 era has given subaltern voices platforms to discuss issues rendered taboo in authoritarian contexts. The study is anchored on the concept of the subaltern public sphere and the metaphor of the ‘voice’ in cyberspace. The subaltern, as used here, refers to those people who perceive themsel…
Participation, citizen journalism and the contestations of identity and national symbols
This article constitutes an examination on how citizen journalism has challenged Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian regime on issues pertaining to national heroes and usages of the Heroes’ Acre as central national identity markers. Under Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, Zimbabwe has seen the public being limited from directly participating in salient national debates. ZANU-PF’s control of the official public sphere has also constrained alternative views from ventila…
Zimbabwe’s state-controlled public media and the mediation of the 1980s genocide 30 years on
Since the end of genocide in 1987 Zimbabwe has remained a zone of ‘conflicts’, and the enduring debates surrounding this genocide, especially in public-owned but state-controlled media, call for critical attention. Three years after independence, in 1980, Zimbabwe was plunged into a genocide named ‘Gukurahundi’ (meaning the rain that washes the chaff away after harvest) that lasted until 1987. This article argues that there has been a clash of ‘i…
Citizen journalism and moral panics
This article hinges on empirical qualitative data gathered from an illustrative sample to determine perceptions on enforcing ethics on social media from people who acted as citizen journalists during South Africa’s 2015 xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals. The April 2015 attacks were mediated through userdriven social media platforms such as WhatsApp, where truthful and untruthful information on xenophobia was disseminated to warn targeted re…
Toxification of national holidays and national identity in Zimbabwe's post-2000 nationalism
National holidays are some of the oldest known forms of nation-mythologizing used for managing, producing and reproducing national memories and identities. They are calendrically set aside days free from work where people pause and reflect on who they are as a nation. A study of national holidays in the Zimbabwean context exposes the malleability, fragility and contestability of 'official' notions of nationhood as imagined by Zimbabwean president…
Mandelaism in Newspaper Advertising that “Pays Tribute” to Mandela after his Death
Former South African President, Nelson Mandela's death in 2013 saw an extraordinary outpouring of local and global grief. This reflected the worldwide iconisation of Mandela as a popular cultural and political symbol for human rights, political messiah-hood, sainthood, dignity, peace and forgiveness. Noting that in his lifetime, even, Mandela attempted to deflect and qualify this iconisation, we present critical views of what we call “Mandelaism”…
Disruption as a communicative strategy
In 1994 South Africa became a miracle in the world of postcolonies as a newly independent ‘rainbow’ nation state. Apartheid was replaced by an informal but still identical system which I refer to as apartheid. Good governance, democracy, peace, civility and quiet are framed by the media and regarded by investors and political elite among others to be the preferred set-up of things. Using the rage in the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student p…
Art as Journalism in Zimbabwe
The mediations on the postcolonial culture of violence in Zimbabwe remain contentious. This culture has helped to sustain the ruling ZANU-PF stranglehold on power. ZANU-PF has refused to be held accountable especially in those violent episodes where it has been the perpetrator. This paper offers an analysis of key themes in Bulawayo-based artist Owen Maseko’s works as an alternative form of journalism challenging and resisting the status quo. The…
Making heroes, (un)making the nation
This article explores the post-2000 national identity formation through the use of national heroes narrative and the Heroes’ Acre shrine in Zimbabwe. The Heroes’ Acre marks the country’s physical reminder of the past and acts as a tool for national identity and its symbolic maintenance through state-presided rituals that happen at the shrine. Attached to the Heroes’ Acre as a permanent physical symbol of nationhood are the people the burial site …
FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa
Additional informationNotes on contributorsShepherd MpofuShepherd Mpofu is a senior lecturer at the Department of Language, Communication and Media at the University of Limpopo. His research interests are on the intersection of media and identity, new media and politics, media, violence and memory
Imaginations and Narrations of the Nation
This paper analyses Raymond Majongwe’s and Brian Muteki’s music to investigate the different ways in which these two musicians narrate and imagine the post-2000 Zimbabwean nation. A narrative analysis is carried out of specific songs that address issues related to the nation. Since the late 1990s and through the 2000s Zimbabwe has experienced socio-economic and political challenges that have greatly affected its citizens, leading to a mass exodus…
Pornographic intersections
Post-Apartheid South Africa has been characterized by fractious relationships between the races that compose this society and also between the rulers and the ruled. Society has devised many strategies to cope with, understand, resist, and oppose this, but also to bring about change. One of these strategies is the expression of personal viewpoints through elections, social media, protests and humour. This paper is concerned with the deployment of …
Jesus Comes to South Africa
This is a qualitative study where purposefully sampled hashtags and memes gathered through virtual ethnography as shared on Twitter during the Local Government Elections 2016 (LGE2016) and the 105th anniversary celebrations of South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) are analysed as political communication. Through the use of qualitative content analysis and the concept of "citizen" and "voter" voice, which neatly links with citizen …
For a nation to progress victims must ‘move on
This qualitative research article is about the meaning of debates on the yet to be officially discussed the Zimbabwean genocide. The main focus is on the meanings of discourses of resistance made by social media interactants and activists; those who either never experienced the genocide or those who experienced it as first-generation survivors and victims and through collective memory passed from generation to generation. My main interest is find…
Mediating Xenophobia in Africa
Religious and political intersections
This article discusses the critical intersection of Christianity with Zimbabwean politics during the 2018 harmonised elections. Christianity and politics play an important role in organising or polarising society. Major problems arise when the church becomes more “political” than spiritual or becomes silent on political matters affecting society. Religion has been used for various purposes in Zimbabwean politics, such as holding on to power, cont…
Populism From Below and Social Movements
This study examines a new wave of populisms arising in the digital era using Pastor Evan Mawarire's #ThisFlag movement: What are they, and how do they express themselves? How does the hegemony react to them? Non-mainstream, digitally born movements, especially in dictatorships, are dismissed by the political elite as ill-mannered disruptors whose political interventions are detrimental. To analyse the cleric's populism and its meaning to the Zimb…
Booty Power Politics
This article analyses the concept of booty power, objectification and consumption of the female body in popular culture. Booty power is used here to refer to discourses around the Stocko Sama2K, initially a group of five women who were caught on camera dancing the "John Vul' igate" song and dance challenge, and their sexualized dance routines. I draw on digital ethnography and interviews to argue that objectification presents us with complexities…
Remembering Mass Atrocities
Ruling from the Grave? The Political Instrumentalization of Robert Mugabe's Corpse in Contemporary Zimbabwean Politics
This qualitative research is a critical analysis of news media reports, political debates, and political and family behaviours to interrogate the centrality of death, corpses, funeral and mortuary rituals in African politics by using the death of Zimbabwe's former President, Robert Mugabe as a case study. At death, it became clear what a polarizing and yet unifying figure Mugabe was. His dead body became a contested political asset. The paper exp…
Money Does Not Stay, It Is a Visitor
This article uses archival material from the South African reality television show 'I blew it' to explore the notion of happiness and consumption as it relates to township masculinities in the South African context. The program follows the lives of people who inherited fortunes from their deceased parents, got compensated by government for being involved in a road accident, or played lottery and won millions of Rand. Most of the beneficiaries ble…
Visual art and rethinking the future in anthropogenic climate change debates
In this paper I interview four of the eleven artists who participated in the first instalment of the Black the New Green exhibition in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, intended to raise awareness on issues around climate change. The study anchors visual art as a way of communicating climate change. I further use the trash/rubbish and framing theories to illustrate how trash re-enters the economy of things as a prized thing both in terms of economic value and …
Political science (24 obras) · Sociology (23 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Politics (19 obras) · Law (16 obras) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (13 obras) · Media studies (13 obras) · African history and culture studies (10 obras) · Gender Studies (9 obras) · Gender Studies (8 obras)