http://hdl.handle.net/11189/3493 2026-09-22T14:15:51Z http://hdl.handle.net/11189/2397 Title: Plagiarism as an expression of agency Authors: Barris, Ken Abstract: The high incidence of plagiarism in South African universities has been attributed to increased opportunity in the digital age, peer group pressure, confusion about what constitutes plagiarism, and questions of language proficiency. Cultural differences regarding originality and authority have been cited as motives. It has also been argued that language proficiency implies more than an absence of technical ability, in that the issue is interwoven with the more complex one of membership in a discourse community. In this paper, I argue that plagiarism can reflect a quest for agency that is informed by strategic components, and that conscious choices are implicated in the performance of plagiarism. This discussion is based on a questionnaire given to students at a university of technology, which found that students choose to plagiarise in order to minimise time pressure and anxiety about language proficiency. The discussion is also informed by a case study of a teaching intervention in the same university, which focuses on the extreme persistence in plagiarising behaviour. This persistence is taken as further evidence for intentionality as a causative factor in plagiarism. In explaining these findings, the views of Ashworth et al (1997), Rudolph and Radcliff (2007), and Power (2009) are discussed, leading to the conclusion that agency is partly influenced by a ease of opportunity arising from contradictions within the university system, and by institutional incapacity to control plagiarism; and partly by alienation from the academic process, and from the value system that students associate with academic staff, but do not identify with at a personal level. Description: Second Biennial Conference of the South African Society for Engineering Education (SASEE) 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11189/2309 Title: Broken bodies, fixed spaces : rescripting maleness in the smell of apples by Mark Behr, and bad sex by Leon de Kock Authors: Barris, Ken Description: 1st Global Conference Time 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11189/2297 Title: Every place is three places: Bursting seams in Cabin Fever by Diane Awerbuck, and Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes Authors: Barris, Ken Description: Rhodes University English Department Seminar 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11189/1938 Title: Eating out: Food as a troupe of exclusion in the novels of Zakes Mda Authors: Barris, Ken Editors: McCulloch, A; Radia, P Abstract: In his novel Ways of Dying (1995), the South African writer Zakes Mda uses food as a marker of tension between spatial access and exclusion. The trope fuses social and economic spaces from which his characters are barred by material deprivation. The only access they have is through a satirically drawn imaginative feast of their own construction. In a modification of the trope, diet is used to mark out a space of carnivalesque identity for Toloki, the protagonist of this novel. Related devices are used in Mda’s subsequent novels The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and The Whale Caller (2005). This raises the question whether wishfulness can energise sufficient social agency, or whether a strategy of transcendence can be justified, in a literature of deprivation. Indeed, Mda has been criticised for refusing the documentary burden of antiapartheid radicalism while writing about life in black townships so constrained by poverty that their present economic disenfranchisement resembles the political exclusion of apartheid. I argue that Mda collapses the opposition between engaged and carnivalesque writing, retaining a critique of apartheid and its post-apartheid aftermath while resisting the rhetoric of engagement. Description: Eating out: Food as a troupe of exclusion in the novels of Zakes Mda McCulloch A & Radia P (eds): Food and Appetites: The Hunger Artist and the Arts Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp 31-43, ISBN 978-1-4438-4154-2 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z