Today’s piece of writing will be a reflection. Although we will not directly reflect on the politics of nations or discuss the intricacies of exploitation, it will touch on such matters all the same. It will be a brief reflection on the self, a reflection on the position of a professional intellectual in contemporary society.

According to Gayatri Spivak (in McIntosh, 2007: 2) reflexivity is an important site for thinking responsibly. For this intellectual, to think responsibly involves int...

Anthony Giddens (1991: 21) considers globalisation to be “the most visible intersection of presence and absence, the interlacing of social events and social relations ‘at a distance’ with local contextualities”. The process of globalisation has served to challenge many traditional notions of time and space, and increasingly, geography, by enhancing the real and virtual mobility of people, things and ideas. The new spaces that have emerged, especially through the internet and the realm...

“… Lots of kids are working to get rid of these blues, cause everybody’s sick of the American ruse” – MC5 “The American Ruse” (Cavallo, 1999: 11).

The way in which Jimmy Hendrix played the national US anthem has, without question, become a symbol of the counterculture revolution during the 1960’s. The symbolic distortion in his rendition of the anthem showed the significant alteration of the proud and patriotic American image at the time. A black man playing the anthem of a p...

The end of 2010 was characterised by worldwide reports of the contentious website called Wikileaks. The website gained overnight notoriority for the damming information it was releasing on the World Wide Web.  Wikileaks not only had incriminating information on key political figures, it also gave unlimited excess to confidential documents that were not even known to exist.  The website has been said to have released over 400.000 leaked documents about virtually every single corrupt or rather ...