Acknowledgements

This research is first and foremost indebted to the San youth, elders, educators, artists, and community members who shared their time, knowledge, and trust throughout the project. Their generosity, insight, and patience made this work possible. I am deeply grateful for the conversations, performances, silences, and moments of reflection that shaped both the written dissertation and the ethnographic videos presented here. Any value this project holds rests in their willingness to engage with the research on their own terms.

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I extend my sincere thanks to the communities across Ghanzi District, Kgalagadi District, Kweneng, Central and North West who welcomed me into their homes, schools, performance spaces, and everyday lives. I am particularly grateful to the San youth whose creativity, resilience, and critical awareness continually challenged my assumptions and expanded the scope of this research. Their cultural practices are not only the subject of this project but its intellectual and ethical foundation.

 

 

I would like to express my profound gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Angela Impey, for her sustained guidance, intellectual rigour, and care throughout the long development of this research. Her commitment to ethical scholarship, attentiveness to lived experience, and insistence on analytical clarity have shaped this work in ways that extend well beyond the final thesis. I am equally grateful to Professor Lindiwe Dovey, whose expertise in practice-based research and audiovisual methodologies was instrumental in developing the ethnographic video component of this project. Her work on listening, duration, and ethical representation profoundly influenced how film was used not as illustration, but as a mode of knowledge production in its own right. Furthermore, Professor Dovey’s engagement with questions of positionality and emotional entanglement strengthened the methodological and reflexive dimensions of the project.

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Together, both supervisors played a crucial role in guiding the decolonial orientation of this research. Their engagement encouraged sustained reflection on positionality, extractive knowledge practices, and the ethical responsibilities of working with Indigenous communities, particularly in relation to voice, visibility, and refusal. The methodological and analytical coherence of this project owes much to their combined insights.

 

My thanks extend to the San Research Centre at the University of Botswana, the Botswana National Museum, and all educators, cultural practitioners, and local leaders who offered support, permissions, and insight during fieldwork. I am grateful as well to colleagues and peers whose conversations, feedback, and solidarity sustained the project through periods of uncertainty and revision.

 

This research was conducted alongside profound personal challenges, including caregiving, loss, and displacement. I acknowledge the emotional labour carried by my family during this period, particularly my children, whose patience, strength, and presence grounded me throughout the process. I am also grateful to the wider networks of care, friends, collaborators, and community members, who offered support in ways both visible and unseen.

 

Finally, this project is offered with humility. It does not claim to speak for San communities, nor to resolve the structural conditions it documents. Rather, it seeks to listen carefully, to remain accountable, and to create space for San youth voices to be encountered with respect, attentiveness, and care. Any shortcomings in this work remain my own.

I also extend my sincere thanks to all those who engage with this research, whether by reading, listening, questioning, critiquing, or building upon it. Such engagement forms part of the ongoing life of the work, and it is through these encounters that its meanings continue to evolve. It is my hope that this research is approached with the same care, attentiveness, and openness with which it was created.