No goats in the mother city: using symbolic objects to help students talk about diversity and change

This is the accepted version of the following article: Archer. A. 2007. 'No goats in the mother city': using Symbolic Objects to help students talk about diversity and change. English in Education. 41(1): 7-20. DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-8845.2007.tb00806.x., which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-8845.2007.tb00806.x.This paper reports on a first year project in a South African engineering foundation programme which attempted to bring a cultural studies perspective to teaching academic literacy. Students identify and investigate everyday objects that have symbolic meanings in their communities. Objects are seen as catalysts for enabling student narratives to emerge, and are a way of exploring the tensions between convention and change in cultural practices. A project such as this breaks disciplinary frames, working across diverse contexts such as engineering and cultural studies. The aim is to begin to explore some of the complexities around 'development' in contexts of diversity and change, globalization and relocalization