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Responding to the Needs of the Republic: Investigating the Democratic/Social Role of the University in Contemporary South Africa
Abstract
In South Africa, the university is constituted by law under the Higher Education Act of 1997. This instrument, while clearly recognising the role of the university to include pedagogy, research and obligation to the republic, does not outline how the university should enact/dispense its responsibility to the republic in the same fashion that it outlines organisational audit or appointment procedures for example. What then is the obligation of the university in the face of an insidious culture of violence? How can the democratic/social role of the university be more clearly defined in situations where the university itself is also a perpetrator of violence? Considering these two questions posed, I argued that the position of the university is a state of personhood both legally (juristic personality) and morally (in loco humanus) hence the university indeed has an obligation to society. The notion of ubuntu is advanced as a possible way for the university to actualise its social role and moral obligation to the republic, especially in the face of violence.
... South Africa has a well-documented history of violence against women in the country (Oparinde & Matsha, 2021;Simba, 2020). As Martin (2022, p. 302) states, South African women face "habitual misogynies and violence/s . . . in the domestic and public spaces of their everyday lives". ...
The gendered dynamics of informal work in southern cities across the globe has been well documented. Women in the informal sector, usually already marginalised through racialised and class positionalities, face predictable work challenges in patriarchal society, lower pay, longer work hours, more family responsibilities, less social protections, and safety concerns linked to workspaces. In this article, we explore the specific challenges that women waste pickers in the inner city of Durban, South Africa, experience. The study draws on ethnographic research with eight waste pickers. Beyond the challenges, the narrative data illustrates how and why women waste pickers navigate and negotiate for space and safety in the inner city of Durban. We highlight how women build social relationships as a mitigation strategy against material and varied safety concerns. These social relationships work across formal business linkages and relationships on the street. These mitigation strategies are simultaneously gendered responses to work in the city and innovative business practices. The experiences of women waste pickers in the city indicates that it is left to the women themselves, individually and in small collectives, to find ways to navigate issues of discrimination and exclusions linked to work, gender and space in the city. Ultimately, we draw on the experiences of women waste pickers in inner city Durban to ask questions about what lessons can be learnt to advocate better municipal planning that proactively deals with gender and justice in the city.
Social identity, social ethics, and African relational ontology.
As scholars, we are trained and disciplined to build theory through telling particular stories of the people we research. Although these stories are often packaged as ‘science’, ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’, we ought to recognise that these stories are rooted within broader dynamics of power. Drawing on the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and other critical scholars, we seek to explore the dangers of a singular narrative, present in both public and academic feminist discourse, about Black men. In relation to feminist stories, it is particularly important to acknowledge that many of the stories that are told are rooted in a Western hegemony, measuring gender equality according to western ways of knowing and serving to legitimise neo-colonial forms of domination (Brenner, 2003 Brenner J (2003) ‘Transnational feminism and the struggle for global justice’, in New Politics, IX, 2, 1-11. [Google Scholar]). A western-centric, universalist feminism has resulted in a rigid understanding of hegemonic masculinity that is situated within a moralistic binary of victim and villain. In line with a desire to promote critical feminist scholarship beyond this binary, in this open forum article we examine the implications of popular movements such as the ##TheTotalShutdown and #MenAreTrash for boys, men and masculinities. As a conclusion we offer an invitation for further engagement around the possibilities of advancing a feminism that is committed to the promoting of positive masculinities rather than simply the surfacing of toxic masculinities.
A significant amount of literature on student movement within the South African Higher Education (SAHE) landscape has often been characterised by two limitations. Firstly, a significant amount of this literature is found in un‑academic and non‑peer‑reviewed sources, such as social media, online newspapers, blog posts and other platforms. Secondly, some of this literature is often characterised by an absence of theory in offering us critical analysis at the emergent conditions of the student movement as a phenomenon within the SAHE. In this article, we respond to the above gaps by contributing to the scholarly development and critical analysis of the student movement in SAHE. In order to respond to the above two gaps, we firstly provide a brief historical and contextual environment that has contributed
to the emergence of the student movement phenomenon in SAHE. Secondly, we introduce Nancy Fraser’s social justice perspective, in offering us the theoretical and conceptual tools we need to look at the struggles and challenges that confront student movements, focusing in particular on the challenges that frustrate them in relating and interacting as peers on an equal footing in society. Using Fraser’s
social justice framework to look at the #MustFall movements will allow us to better understand them as complex phenomena within the SAHE and allow us to properly understand their emergence.
The term blended learning is used frequently, but there is ambiguity about what is meant. What do we mean by blended learning? What, how and why are we blending? In this paper different definitions, models and conceptualizations of blended learning and their implications are discussed. Inclusive definitions and models, and diverse conceptualizations, mean that essentially all types of education that include some aspect of face-to-face learning and online learning is described as blended learning in the literature. Blended learning has become an umbrella term. Blended learning is also used to describe other blends, such as combining different instructional methods, pedagogical approaches and technologies, although these blends are not aligned with influential blended learning definitions. Since blended learning has many meanings, it is important that researchers and practitioners carefully explain what blended learning means to them. It is also suggested that alternative, more descriptive terms, could be used as a complement or replacement to blended learning.
Misrecognition of South African university students is at the heart of this article. Misrecognition refers in this article to the exclusionary institutional discourses and practices of this country’s universities, which continue to prevent the majority of their (Black) students’ from achieving a successful education. It is a conceptual account of the ways in which these misrecognized students develop a complex educational life in their quest for a university education. The article argues that at the heart of students’ university experiences is an essential misrecognition of who they are, and how they access and encounter their university studies. I suggest that gaining greater purchase on their (mis)recognition struggles may place the university in a position to establish an engaging recognition platform to facilitate their educational success. Divided into four sections, the article starts with a rationale for bringing the institutional misrecognition of students into view. This is followed by a theoretical consideration of the notion of recognition, which opens space for what I call the recognitive agency of the education subject, who remains largely unknown to the university. The third section provides an account of the nature and extent of Black students’ survivalist educational navigations and practices in their family, community, school, and university contexts. The final and concluding section of the article presents a normative argument for developing an education platform for facilitating a productive encounter aimed at animating students’ educational becoming. This, I argue, should proceed on the basis of a decolonizing knowledge approach, involving curriculum recognition, which would accord students the conceptual tools for developing the epistemic virtues necessary for complex decolonized living.
In 2012 thirty-four of the thousands of miners who were participating in a strike at Lonmin Platinum Mine in Rustenburg, South Africa were killed by the police. The Marikana massacre was the first massacre to take place in South Africa after the end of apartheid and it evoked the violence of the apartheid regime and the massacres that took place at Sharpeville in 1960, in Soweto in 1976 and in Boipatong in 1992. In many ways, the Marikana massacre can be understood as marking the end of the first period of the South African transition and it has been followed by waves of protests against the persistence of colonial and apartheid era ideologies and structures, and against the corrupt practices of the current state. This essay focuses on the work of visual activists who have responded to the Marikana massacre and argues for the importance of these responses in critiquing the failures of the transition and in configuring the post-apartheid public sphere. The essay engages with Rehad Desai’s documentary film, Miners Shot Down and with the work of the Tokolos Stencils collective, who have produced a series of graffiti works in public space that insist that the massacre is not forgotten.
After centuries of “Eurocentric” linguistic ideology, the South African government has formulated African language development and multilingualism as one priority in the education system. While only English, and decreasingly Afrikaans, are the only “established” languages of instruction at tertiary level, most universities in the country have revised their language policies in order to show commitment to South Africa’s evident multilingualism. This article provides a critical analysis of particular language and identity politics in one of the leading tertiary institutions of the country. The theoretical framework is based on a critical sociolinguistic approach that draws attention to polarizing identity politics in relation to language policy, planning and implementation. Methodologically grounded in ethnography, the article has a two-fold perspective. First, it analyses particular language policy rhetoric at the University on focus and argues that its essentialist approach to Africanisation triggers contested identity politics. Second, the article provides insights into the developments of specific implementations, pointing to ideological as well as practical challenges at the university on focus.
How should we teach controversial issues? And which issues should we teach as controversies? In this paper, I argue that educators should heed what I call a ‘psychological condition’ in their practical efforts to address these questions. In defending this claim, I engage with the various decision criteria that have been advanced in the controversial issues literature: the epistemic criterion, behavioral criterion, political criterion and politically authentic criterion. My argument is that the supporters of these various criteria have focused too closely on the socio-political and epistemic qualities of controversial issues in deriving their controversial issues pedagogies and have thereby overlooked the necessary subjective conditions for teaching controversial issues. If our pedagogical efforts to cultivate students’ reason by means of controversial issues are to be successful, then we must understand controversy as fundamentally a psychological phenomenon consisting in an intellectual tension in the minds of students. In the final pages, I conclude by recommending several forms of directive teaching that promise to be instrumental for creating such intellectual tension.
The #FeesMustFall Movement in 2015 invoked old calls for free education, decolonization and Africanisation of the curriculum, which have deep roots in African political history. From the 1920s, Africans expressed utmost discomfort about the fact that their education systems had been relegated to the periphery and replaced by Western education systems. The school curriculum did not resonate with the reality on the ground and university colleges taught a foreign curriculum. At independence in the 1960s, African countries engaged in intense debates regarding the decolonisation and Africanisation of the curriculum at national universities. Against this backdrop, in this article, we look at Political Science as an academic discipline and extrapolate what it would entail to decolonise and Africanise its curriculum. Using the experiences at the Federal University of East Africa as a reference point, we conclude that the task is not insurmountable and propose a vanguard approach in making this happen.
This essay discusses whether an indigenous African ethic, as expressed in ubuntu, may serve as an example of how to decolonise Western knowledge. In the first part, the key claims of decolonisation of knowledge are set out. The second part analyses three strategies to construct models of ‘African’ (business) ethics, namely transfer, translation and stating of a substantive rival model as contained in ubuntu ethics. After a critical appraisal of this substantive proposal, part three indicates the potential and limitation of the decolonisation project: possibilities lie in the (re)-contextualisation of knowledge, whereas limitations are related to constructing an alternative to what is known as ‘scientific’ knowledge. As far as the author knows, this is the first attempt to frame (business) ethics in terms of the epistemological search for ‘decolonised’ knowledge.
Student unrest has been a major problem in Kenya for the government, public universities, the community, society, and even students themselves for several decades. However, the student leaders, majority of who are undergraduates in their late teens to early twenties, lack governance and leadership skills and experience. This study focused on principles of governance and leadership among student leaders in public universities. The study was anchored on positivist research philosophy and adopted a cross sectional design. The target population was all the 35 public universities in Kenya and data was collected from 70 student chairpersons and their deputies. Data was mainly collected from primary source using structured questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive and regression analysis. The study established that student leaders exhibited both performance and accountability principles of governance albeit weakly. The study however found no significant relationship between and student leadership and governance principles of legitimacy and voice; direction; and fairness. This study thus concludes that when student leaders are articulating their fellow students’ issues, the leaders are guided by responsiveness, effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, and information flow. The leaders however lack appreciation for rule of law; equity; consensus orientation and mediation; as well as long-term strategic vision for the student body. The study therefore recommends that public universities should immediately train all incumbent student leaders on leadership concepts and principles of governance. However as a long-term measure, universities should introduce curriculums on principles of governance and leadership concepts contextualized to undergraduate students’ area of study.
This paper questions Oyeronke Oyewumi’s (1997) claim in her thought-provoking work, ‘The invention of women: Making an African sense of Western gender discourse,’ that gender in African societies is a colonial project. It interrogates Oyewumi’s project of contesting meanings that lack understandings and appreciation of history and culture. Using conceptual analysis and desk reviews interlaced with anecdotal snippets, the paper attempts a re-reading of Oyewumi interrogations of social relationships, linguistic differences and modes of knowing as well as their implications for meaning making and impact on conceptual creations in the West and in Africa. Drawing from the works of critics such as Said (1997/79), McFadden (1994), Dei (1994) and Scott (1992), the paper corroborates Oyewumi’s assertion that historical and cultural differences impinge on and shape meanings. It however cautions against an essentialized relativist position for its potential dangers. These dangers include the premature foreclosure of discourse, culturalization of gender, caricaturization of opposed views, romanticization of ethnic culture and the simplification of difference. It argues that the threat of
colonialism is real and that historically taking an essentialist position can deny benefits of cultural crossings and fertilization. Hence, it concludes with McFadden (1994) that writing must be responsible.
This paper deals with the question of what the goal of African philosophy ought to be. It will argue that African philosophy ought to be instrumental in the project of decolonising the African mind. In order to argue for this conclusion, there will be an investigation with regards to what it might mean to decolonise one’s mind, and, more precisely, what the relationship is between the decolonisation of the mind and the decolonisation of the intellectual landscape. The intellectual landscape refers to universities and other institutions of knowledge production. The claim is that the decolonisation of the intellectual landscape will result in the decolonisation of the mind. It will be argued that African philosophy has the ability to develop concepts with their roots in Africa, and that this is African philosophy’s main project if taken from a perspective of understanding of African philosophy as “philosophy-in-place”. The development of concepts rooted in Africa has the prospect of working towards the decolonisation of the African intellectual landscape and so eventually the African mind. As a philosophy which aims for health, African philosophy therefore has a responsibility to focus on such a development of concepts rooted in Africa.
The great topmost sheet of the mass, where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one, a shifting harmony of subpatterns.
Education in many African states is comparatively characterised by inadequate availability, accessibility, acceptability, and adaptability of education. Nevertheless, evaluations focusing on lack of educational infrastructure and personnel usually ignore the contextual inadequacies of educational provision in the region, and the inability of such education to equip its citizens to fit in with and benefit the societies they live in. This educational incompatibility has led to a significant level of un/underemployment, underdevelopment and ‘brain-drain’, as well as some erosion of languages and cultures.
The colonial experience reduced education to a tool of communication between the coloniser and the colonised. Emphasis on the individual and de-emphasis on community and culture, resulted in ideological dissonance. Despite post-independence attempts to reverse this, vestiges of post-coloniality in contemporary education remain and perpetuate a myth of inferiority of indigenous knowledge and methods. This deprives the world of a wider range of ways of knowing, pedagogy and epistemologies. The CESCR envisions education for the full development of the human personality of all people all over the world. Therefore international initiatives promoting the right to education in Africa should take into account the particular positionality, historicity and needs of populations.
Using theories of deconstructive post-colonialism, this article will examine Africa’s education narrative, and suggest a critical Freirian approach for decolonising education in Africa. This article contends that un-decolonised education results in epistemic violence/injustice and is thus pedagogically and ethically unsound – violating the right to education.
The question about the existence or non-existence of African philosophy has almost died a natural death in the past few years. It is now a question of African and non-African thinkers putting their attention on actually doing African philosophy instead of “flogging the dead horse” by continuing to grapple with the question about whether African philosophy exists or not. However, in that quest for doing African philosophy, only recently has there been some growing consensus on the thinking that the content and curriculum of philosophy in Africa ought to be transformed and Africanised. In this article, I critically interrogate the question of what Africanising philosophy ought to reasonably entail. Much of the discussion on Africanisation eventually leads towards somewhat anthropological and ethno-philosophical interpretations of African cultural heritage. However, I transcend these interpretations as I seek to critically situate African philosophical thinking within universal philosophical discourse. Although I admit the danger of romanticising African indigenous value systems in the pursuit of the agenda of Africanisation of the philosophy curriculum, I seek to argue that the idea of Africanising philosophy ought to be understood as being compatible with, and consistent with, the requirement of philosophy as a critical discourse. Also, I argue that an Africanised philosophy curriculum must be relevant to the African condition. Overall, I propose some possibilities and ways by which the agenda of Africanising the current philosophy curriculum in Africa could be pursued.
Universities, in their multiplex roles of social, political, epistemological and capital reform, are by their constitution expected to both symbolise and enact transformation. While institutions of higher education in South Africa have been terrains of protest and reform – whether during apartheid or post-apartheid – the intense multiplex roles which these institutions assume have metaphorically come home to roost in the past 2 years. Not unlike the social-media-infused rumblings, coined as the ‘Arab Spring’, the recent cascades of #mustfall campaigns have brought to the fore the serious dearth of transformation in higher education and have raised more critical questions about conceptions of transformation, and how these translate into, or reflect, the social and political reform that continues to dangle out of the reach of the majority of South Africans. What, then, does transformation mean and imply? How does an institution reach a transformed state? How does one know when such a state is reached? These are a few of the concerns this article seeks to address. But it hopes to do so by moving beyond the thus far truncated parameters of transformation – which have largely been seeped in the oppositional politics of historical advantage and disadvantage, and which, in turn, have ensured that conceptions of transformation have remained trapped in discourses of race and racism. Instead, this article argues that the real challenge facing higher education is not so much about transformation, as it is about enacting democracy through equipping students to live and think differently in a pluralist society.
ABSTRACT
This article addresses the challenge of reclaiming higher education
(HE) as a public good for building effective democracies. We use
Bernstein’s model of pedagogic rights and Fraser’s model of social
justice to develop a normative framework for discussing how
universities in unequal societies might mitigate social injustice.
Referring to recent student protests in South Africa, we show the
extent of student anger and frustration at the misrecognition they
experience due to the reproduction of colonial hierarchies at
postcolonial universities. The article is an attempt to respond to
students’ calls about ‘black pain’, ‘black debt’ and for the ‘decolonisation’
of South African universities. In particular, we focus on
theories of recognition and how these are being played out in the
current South African HE context. Our aim is not to critique
student politics, but to understand the position and heed the cry
of the subaltern student. We deliberate on what an adequate
response, framed within a model of pedagogic rights, might be
from those who teach in and manage universities. We note some
impediments to implementing this response and conclude by
asserting the importance of working with a politics of recognition
and representation as well as redistribution.
This article explores the forms of popular politics that rose out of massive student protests in South Africa at the end of 2015. By delving deeper into the way higher education has been structured in post-apartheid South Africa, the author explains the ways in which race and class privilege have been reified in South African universities. The spatial location of the university within South Africa and the place of the university within the African continent is not reflected in institutional culture of higher education but is deeply embedded in the student protests. By exploring the collective decision making structures of students the author explores students growing lack of faith in higher education institutions to effect any transformational change.
The student protests of 2015 precipitated a renewed interest in the decolonisation of the university in South Africa, and by association the decolonisation of the university curriculum. The decolonisation of the curriculum is an important conversation, and long overdue, given that the Western model of academic organisation on which the South African university is based, remains largely unchallenged. In this article I add to the conversation by discussing what decolonisation entails, why the need for decolonisation, the importance of rethinking how curriculum is conceived, and outlining some possible ways of decolonising the university curriculum. The purpose is not to provide a set of answers but to open up ways of (re)thinking the university curriculum.
Rape: A South African Nightmare unpacks South Africa's various relationships to rape, connections between rape culture and the shock/disbelief syndrome that characterises public responses to rape. It investigates the female fear factory, boy rape and violent masculinities, the rape of Black lesbians, baby rape, as well as the high profile rape trials of Jacob Zuma, Bob Hewitt, Makhaya Ntini, Baby Tshepang and Anene Booysen.
While the phenomenon of student protest in South Africa is not new, what characterizes the current wave is the successful use of social media to communicate and galvanize students to participate in protests across the country. Recent studies on the use of social media have noted that this form of communication greatly enhances the strength of student movements. However, some scholars have argued that the resulting leadership vacuum, undermines the achievement of their demands and makes it more difficult for the government and higher education authorities to effectively respond to such action. Through the lens of the learning community theory, this article reviews the current literature on social media and student activism in order to establish the effectiveness of its use and the shortcomings thereof. It argues that higher education institutions and the government need to become more conversant with the implications of digital infrastructure. It further suggests that these institutions should create an environment that supports and encourages effective use of social media through provision of the necessary infrastructure. The article provides a deeper understanding of the role that social media can play to galvanize students to advance their causes.
The deepening crisis in African universities has had grave consequences for stu- dents who are faced with a dramatic deterioration in their living and study condi- tions and bleak prospects for future employment. The authoritarian management style and political control prevailing in most of these universities form formidable obstacles for students wishing to voice their grievances and organize in defence of their interests. However, African students seem not to be resigned to their fate and instead have displayed a growing activism that is reflected in various forms of protest, including strike actions. This study focuses on two recent violent strikes in the English-speaking University of Buea (UB) in Anglophone Cameroon. Like most other student protests in Africa during the ongoing process of economic and political liberalization, the UB students went on strike in an attempt to improve their unsatisfactory living and study conditions and to create democratic space within and outside the university. What was peculiar to the UB strikes was that they were inspired by deep feelings among the Anglophone student community of being more oppressed and marginalized than their Francophone counterparts, owing to their Anglophone identity, by the Francophone-dominated post-colonial state.
Perhaps more than any other tense, expressions of futurity are intricately linked with modality: the future is inherently uncertain. This article explores the outcomes of future markers grammaticalised from ‘come’ and ‘go’ in isiNdebele and several other South African Nguni Bantu languages, and shows that their semantic and pragmatic functions can mark contrasts in time, space, and modality, and can be used both subjectively (communicating speaker stance) and intersubjectively (communicating information about the relationship between speakers). Multiple factors influence the choice and interpretation of isiNdebele future markers in different contexts. These factors can all reasonably be traced to developments from ‘come’ and ‘go’, but the semantic and pragmatic force of these markers differs significantly, depending on context. Because different contrasts are emphasised in different contexts, there is significant functional overlap of ‘come’ and ‘go’ futures, despite their different origins and cognitive frames. Cross-linguistic distinctions are observed in the systems of future marking across South African Nguni languages, suggesting that even in a group of closely related languages that are often in heavy contact with one another, significant semantic and pragmatic differences can be maintained.
In this chapter, employing a Senian notion of virtues of democracy, Zayd Waghid argues that decolonial education ought to aim at achieving a conscious individual and social shedding off of an often-unexamined neo-colonial mentality that characterises even decoloniality endeavours. Zayd Waghid argues that a Senian account of democracy, when embedded in education for decoloniality, expects of students to identify and challenge power hierarchies between students and the university and, more importantly, oppressive power hierarchies among students themselves that restrict them from exercising their basic political and liberal rights. Such neo-colonial tendencies among students mostly manifest through coercion to adopt essentialist decolonialisation positions that require an almost entire dismissal of one perspective of knowledge, replacing it with another largely ethnocentric one. Ideal education for decolonisation, as Zayd Waghid contends, ought to be about students acting through a sense of recognition of and respect for the rights of the culturally diverse student community and the wider society where members have diverse values. As such, the author posits that education for decoloniality should be about students conscientising and sharing perspectives with diverse others in a context characterised by mutual respect, harmony and accountability in order to achieve social transformation. Decolonisation demands of social justice, Zayd Waghid purports, must not be conceived in narrow forms of decoloniality, grounded in forms of solidarity such as cultural and racial identities that are immune to internal and external assessment. Such decoloniality is ironically neo-colonialist. Zayd Waghid’s position is that education for decoloniality must incessantly conscientise students to identify and challenge a lack of transparency and accountability of dominant student groups vigilantly, irrespective of the nature of the basis of solidarity for such groups. Such students will have an awareness of the internal and external unfreedoms of their society that inhibit the full capabilities for human flourishing of all members of society. In the absence of self-reflexivity and practical reason, one could be narrow and essentialist in one’s demands, ultimately not only disabling the capabilities of cultural and racial others to flourish, but such narrowness also disables one from flourishing in other spheres of ones’ life, such as economic, whose prospects are adversely affected by the demands of the narrowness.
This book advances a re-imagined view of caring in higher education. The author proposes an argument of rhythmic caring, whereby teachers hold back or release their judgments in such a way that students’ judgments are influenced accordingly. In doing so, the author argues that rhythmic caring encourages students to become more willing and confident in articulating their understandings, judgments and opinions, rather than being prematurely judged and prevented from re-articulating themselves. Thus, rhythmic caring can engender a different understanding of higher education: one that is connected to the cultivation of values such as autonomy, justice, empathy, mutual respect and Ubuntu (human dignity and interdependence). This book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of caring within education, as well as Ubuntu caring through the African context.
Until recently, higher education in the UK has largely failed to recognise gender-based violence (GBV) on campus, but following the UK government task force set up in 2015, universities are becoming more aware of the issue. And recent cases in the media about the sexualised abuse of power in institutions such as universities, Parliament and Hollywood highlight the prevalence and damaging impact of GBV. In this book, academics and practitioners provide the first in-depth overview of research and practice in GBV in universities. They set out the international context of ideologies, politics and institutional structures that underlie responses to GBV in elsewhere in Europe, in the US, and in Australia, and consider the implications of implementing related policy and practice. Presenting examples of innovative British approaches to engagement with the issue, the book also considers UK, EU and UN legislation to give an international perspective, making it of direct use to discussions of ‘what works’ in preventing GBV.
Drawing on the findings of a qualitative study, this article explores efforts to engage men in preventing gender-based violence in South Africa. The discussion focuses on the perspectives of people who are doing this work, their rationale for engaging men and the various challenges and tensions they encounter. This article concludes that while efforts to engage men are essential, they must be grounded in an intersectional feminist analysis of gendered power relations. The findings reflect broader debates within the gender and development literature around “bringing men in” and may thus be relevant beyond this particular case.
This article provides a broad overview of the necessity for and challenges of decolonising universities in South Africa. It situates the student protests for the decolonisation of knowledge within the debates on the African Higher Education landscape, the ideology of Pan-Africanism, and calls for an African Renaissance. The article highlights the context in which the Fallist Movement emerged in South Africa and the demands it articulated. This article questions whether or not the decolonisation of knowledge, and the broader university system, can truly materialise, given the inherent nature and functioning of these institutions and the current practices of decolonising universities. The article argues that to date the decolonisation of universities has largely been ad-hoc, performative, and technical, rather than the sustainable and substantive transformative processes that should be at the heart of any decolonisation project. Furthermore, the article asserts that the universities that we are trying to decolonise are rigged spaces as they have been fashioned in the image of western universities and align with their norms, values, and epistemologies. To break this foundational epistemological and cultural bedrock requires a complete overhaul of the structure, ideology, and functioning of the universities. Without major shifts in the power relations, orientation and forms of knowledge production at these universities, there can be no decolonisation.
The decolonisation of higher education in South Africa is closely linked to questions of knowledge production. The epistemic violence of the colonial encounter has put into question the possibilities and modes of doing research in marginalised communities. In this article, I argue that praxis in community social psychology can lead to more relevant and just research methods, especially when rooted in liberation thinking. In the South African and African context, this requires an engagement with the particularities of Blackness and the Black experience. Drawing on examples of participatory action research projects with young Africans using Photovoice methods, and the establishment of the Black Academic Caucus at the University of Cape Town, the article shows the links between praxis and epistemic justice as exercised within the cultural practices of the university, and between researchers and participants from marginalised communities.
Does a more educated population spur regime-challenging mass protest? It is commonly argued that educated individuals are more likely to collectively challenge governments through protests and that this may explain why education is associated with democratization. While many studies have investigated education’s effect on conventional political participation (voting, petitioning, etc.), it is not known whether education levels affect contentious mass protest. This article argues that education increases the frequency of mass protest, by alleviating collective-action problems and motivating mass opposition, particularly in autocracies. These links are investigated at the subnational level in Africa, by mapping over 600,000 survey respondents to spatialized protest-event data. We present evidence that areas with more educated populations have higher levels of protest activity, and we find mixed evidence consistent with both opportunity- and grievance-related mechanisms driving this relationship. We proceed to identify the causal effect of education by using the location of colonial-era Christian missions to instrument for local education levels.
In this brief and powerful book, Diana Fuss takes on the debate of pure essence versus social construct, engaging with the work of Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston Baker, and with the politics of gay identity.
This article explores the possibility that the recent #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student protests at South African universities may be partially underpinned by grief over a dying essentialist assemblage in the wake of the 2012 Marikana massacre – which saw the assemblage severed from the State Apparatus in a way that spelled its doom. Particular focus falls on how the related protests mirror the grief stages identified by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and the article concludes by reflecting on possible post-structural curricular interventions that may help to stabilize university operations in the country.
The Arab Spring exemplifies to many a kind of globalisation from below. It cuts across borders and challenges liberal and technocratic élites. But how far does its global resonance really go? Are publics still largely corralled within national political spaces? Are waves of revolt confined by civilisational breakwaters? Or is the cosmopolitan space that many leftists envision taking shape? Based on a three-country survey of university students, this article probes these assumptions. It finds far-reaching solidarity with the aspirations of the Arab Spring, driven by the rise of a cross-border global society. But on probing the bases of such solidarity, it also finds that the cosmopolitan cohort emerging in the Global South does not fit a simple liberal or leftist mould. The Arab Spring resonates on multiple frequencies at the same time. This complex cosmopolitanism has implications for layers of common ground as global political opportunity structures emerge.
The black abolitionist and freed slave, Sojourner Truth, spoke out at the Akron convention in 1851, and named her own toughness in a famous peroration against the notion of woman’s disqualifying frailty. She rested her case on her refrain ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ It’s my hope to persuade readers that a new Sojourner Truth might well — except for the catastrophic loss of grace in the wording — issue another plea: ‘Ain’t I a fluctuating identity?’ For both a concentration on and a refusal of the identity of ’women’ are essential to feminism. This its history makes plain.
It is an honour and indeed a privilege to be the guest editor of this special issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy. I consider this introduction to the issue to be motivated by one principal reason: the need to contextualise the articles that appear in this issue. I believe that such contextualisation will, among other things, highlight the difficult task or problematic that we, whether as academics, students, researchers, policymakers, administrators, educationists, and other stakeholders, encounter as soon as we begin to talk about Africanising the philosophy curriculum in universities in Africa. While some of the articles provide some recommendations about how to go about the Africanisation project, and what to include in an Africanised philosophy curriculum, other articles ask questions with regard to whether such obligations exist, and, if they do, who has them and how extensive they are. And still others point us to either some challenges in respect of the Africanisation project or worry about whether some of the traditional approaches and proposals to Africanisation that are generally bandied around are not wrongheaded, namely whether these approaches and proposals are not pointing or leading us the wrong way, or whether we are not mistaken in the way that we are going about this business of Africanisation.
In looking forward to the important issues of this coming decade, we need only turn to the events of the past year for a sense of what is at stake for theatre, performance, and performance pedagogy. Last year, student activists protested racism on college and university campuses across the United States. At Yale, students protested the hostile racial climate on campus following several incidents, including a professor's dismissal of concerns about racist Halloween costumes, numerous swastika graffiti, and the explicit exclusion of black women from fraternity events. At the University of Missouri, the student group Concerned Student 1950—named for the year the first black students were admitted to the university—called for the resignation of university president, Tim Wolfe, citing the administration's inaction in the face of numerous racist incidents on campus. At Ithaca College, Claremont McKenna University, the University of Kansas, and many other colleges and universities across the United States, students held rallies, performed die-ins, and signed petitions in support of students at the University of Missouri and Yale and to call attention to inequality on their own campuses. Set against the backdrop of Ferguson and an increased awareness of institutionalized violence against black and brown bodies, these events remind us that colleges and universities have always been sites where racial discrimination and inequality have been both perpetuated and protested.
In this chapter we focus on two examples of the use of educational technology involving the second and third authors. These projects used action research and discourse analysis respectively to examine the pedagogic encounters of students and teachers involved with educational technology. In the main, both projects were geared towards cultivating democratic education within educational technology practices.