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The greatest achievement of any education system lies in its ability to harness and develop human capabilities indiscriminately. This paper aims to show that the development of capabilities is crucial in bolstering individual well-being while at the same time propelling human beings to function adequately at various levels in society. I argue that, for a symmetrical development of capabilities to be attained for all, institutionalised unfreedoms that are perpetuated through entrenched classism, racism and sexism need to be addressed. The claims in this paper respond to the dilemma of continued marginalisation of women in South African higher education by arguing that a capability approach (CA) to human development should be considered as a possible framework through which gender and gendering can be investigated and evaluated. The paper has adopted a critical exploration methodology in discussing theories of social justice and a capability approach to human development. The paper concludes that education is an essential component of human development that should be enjoyed by all regardless of their creed, gender, race or social class.

The public university in the global South continues to be trapped in an existential slumber, struggling to self-define/self-diagnose its purposes, rationales, goals and agenda(s). Despite the emergence of the #FeesMustfall, #RhodesMustFall, and more recently the #Asinamali student protests, South African higher education continues to adopt neoliberal and colonial conceptions of institutional reforms, seen through the emergence and enactment of performance management instruments, demographic understandings of transformation, incoherent/illogical policy prescriptions, and the use of technology as pedagogic replacement. In this article, I attempt to do two things. Firstly, I critique the South African higher education policy and legislative framework as largely inadequate and neoliberal in nature and designed to reinforce market-orientated logics and discourses. Secondly, and in thinking beyond the neoliberal university, I propose what an inclusive curriculum could look like through a decolonial lens. I end the article with some parting thoughts on the future of the neoliberal university in South Africa, and the potential implications for what I see as the emergence of decolonial and transformative curricula.

Internationally there has been some interest in how critical pedagogies might be enabled in higher education to support transformative social agendas. Few writers, however, have theorised the ethico-political aspects of this effort from a feminist new materialist perspective. By focusing on the analysis of an inter-institutional collaborative course which was constructed across three disciplines and two differently positioned universities in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper examines the design of the course retrospectively from a feminist new materialist theoretical framing. In so doing, it moves beyond more traditional understandings of critical pedagogy to consider the design and student engagement with the course from the perspective of what we call "response-able pedagogies." Response-able pedagogies are not simply examples of the type of learning that can take place when power relations, materiality and entanglement are acknowledged; they also constitute ethicopolitical practices that incorporate a relational ontology into teaching and learning activities. We propose that ethico-political practices such as attentiveness, responsibility, curiosity, and rendering each other capable, constitute response-able pedagogies. The paper focuses on the transdisciplinary and interinstitutional course to consider how these ethico-political practices which constitute a response-able pedagogy might (be put to) work and how the students were both enabled and constrained by this design in terms of their responses to such ethico-political practices.

This paper uses Nancy Fraser's concept of participatory parity to reflect on data gathered by and from third year students in a final year research module in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in 2015. During the course students developed a research proposal, collected and shared data with other students, and then used this data to write a final (externally examinable) research report. Employing a participatory photovoice methodology, the students' research focused on ways in which social and group identities had shaped their experiences of feeling empowered and disempowered on campus. Each student took two photos representing experiences of feeling empowered and two of feeling disempowered on campus and wrote narratives of about 300 words explaining and describing the experience foregrounded by each image. Students shared these narratives and accompanying images with each other, their teachers and the wider university community through a public exhibition in the library. In the paper we draw on Fraser's concepts of maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation to highlight constraints to equal participation identified by students.

In a recent article in this journal, Vorster and Quinn offered a set of recommendations on how academic staff developers can advise university lecturers on decolonising their curricula and methods. Their main advice was to integrate more African cultural elements into their teaching. However, Vorster and Quinn's advice is rather general. In this paper, I wish to complement their advice by giving some specific recommendations on how the decolonisation of education can happen in the field of philosophy. [This article offers a commentary on Jo-Anne Vorster and Lynn Quinn's "The 'Decolonial Turn': What Does It Mean for Academic Staff Development?" (EJ1149746).]

This paper builds on a conceptual analysis of institutional culture in higher education. A theoretical framework was proposed to analyse institutional documents of two higher education institutions in the Western Cape, for the period 2002 to 2012 (Jacobs 2012). The elements of this theoretical framework are "shared values and beliefs", "language", "symbols" and "knowledge production". Even though the larger study focused on two higher education institutions, the focus in this paper is only on Stellenbosch University (SU). The aim of the paper is to explore how the constitutive elements of the proposed theoretical framework are constructed in the Institutional Intent and Strategy 2013-2018 document of SU. The findings of the larger 2012 study suggested a missing link between transformation and institutional culture. Although SU is striving towards an inclusive campus or institutional culture, the contention is that transformation extends far deeper. The current analysis reveals that the challenges SU is facing are two-fold. Firstly, the university has to make sure that the proposed "core processes" represent significant actions to address the challenges related to transforming the university's institutional culture. Secondly, SU should guard against the use of concepts such as "redesign" to imply transformation.

Hargreaves (2002) suggested that vigorous social movements have the potential to improve the quality of (and increase the equity in) public education. This paper explores the role of Equal Education, an education social movement in South Africa led by university students and secondary school learners, in the process of educational change. Drawing on interviews with the organisation's founding members, organisers and secondary school learners, the paper examines how the organisation/social movement embodies what Oakes and Rogers (2007) describe as "learning power" and in the process contribute to improvement in public education.

The wellbeing of sexual and gender minorities (SGM) is undermined by widespread homophobia that extends to health systems, and is exacerbated by medical curricula under-representing the health needs of this key population group. In 2012, under the auspices of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, a student-inspired curriculum intervention led to the introduction of interactive participatory workshops centred on the health needs of SGM. This paper describes the experiences of two of the workshop facilitators who embraced the risk of introducing an unchartered topic in a student-centred manner, which frequently led to unpredictable events that were challenging. Here, the authors reflect on their own vulnerabilities, which are considered alongside the value of moving through risk to transform present curricular practices and student attitudes, especially in a country like South Africa where prejudice against SGM patients by healthcare providers is well-documented.

In the light of #FeesMustFall, decolonisation has come to the fore in the South African higher education landscape. Decolonisation proposes the overthrow of entrenched European power relations in higher education and the study of fairy tales within a pre-service teaching degree in a university English curriculum provides an ideal opportunity for lecturers to challenge this dominance. All too often, cultural fairy tales are analysed and studied within the European trajectory of the structuralist/formalist classification tradition, often rendering the tale to an oversimplified outline which has been reduced to archetypes, motifs and memes which are universalised across cultures and texts. Epistemic awareness of Afrikology has been suggested as a way of facilitating the inclusion of Afrocentric thinking in the English curriculum and giving pre-service teachers a voice in their own learning. The purpose of this paper is to track the creation of context-relevant cultural capital in the writing of fairy tales. An analysis of the results shows that deep critical engagement with the cultural metaphors presented in fairy tales leads to the development of Afrocentric cultural capital that is highly contextualised and rooted in the language and customs of the cultural identity of the writers who transcoded the fairy tales.

Students' call for decolonising the curriculum has triggered deep reflection about what we teach and how we teach it, but equally, about the role of pedagogic spaces in recognising students as agents in their learning. This paper is situated within the field of academic literacies, where students' engagement with texts is seen as being context-specific, and involving assertions of agency to various degrees. The added dimension here is the embedding of digital literacies, defined as a set of customised online practices, into a writing-intensive, first year, foundational course at a South African university, to favour the acquisition of academic literacies. The analysis of different spaces becomes crucial in grasping how innovative forms teaching and learning may take place. In his trialectics of space, Lefebvre distinguishes between perceived, conceived and lived spaces. Butler would refer to lived spaces as "performative" ones, "congealing" into form through iterative use. Online learning spaces may well turn into performative spaces as students inhabit them, interact with online resources and explore their spatial boundaries. I perform a discourse analysis of students' textual practices on the online and physical spaces, to explore how students reproduce or subvert genre categories through processes of "re-genring." Furthermore, I share the extent to which such pedagogic spaces become performative, the power dynamics that emerge, and their effects on our traditional conception of teaching and learning in higher education.

Recognising the authoritative de/legitimising power of education systems, this paper contributes to studies concerned with the ways in which new entrants to higher education experience the positioning of their inherited identities as they negotiate their transition to campus life. The findings emerged during a broader psychosocial study of the transitions of seven first-generation students at a technical university in South Africa. The nature of their self-positioning was explored through an analysis of the positioning statements they articulated during photo-elicitation interviews. The university was positioned as a powerful institution, with conditions for both opportunity and alienation. Participants strongly identified with the professional community of practice in Art and Design. However, in relation to the urban campus context, the majority of participants positioned aspects of their home communities as deficit. A case is made for creating conducive conditions that enable self-reflection on students' transitional experiences and develop collective critical consciousness.

The problem of the South African university, and society in the same breath, is not so much that of governance or politics but ideology. The deepening realisation of the farcicality and impossibility of strategies, attendant ideologies and "master signifiers" of transformation (such as diversity, multiculturalism and rainbow nation) of the South African society and (whatever remains of) its institutions has never been more acute than now, when the insistence at meaningful change and the unanimous rejection, mostly by blacks, of the university (at least in its current form) have gained traction. This paper draws on Žižek's Lacanian theory of ideology to provide a counter-narrative and reading of official transformation consensus and ideologies like diversity, by highlighting their ethical liminalities. The underside of diversity's official claims to equality and justice are unmasked, and the terror and ironies of this liberal ideology are exposed, especially its refusal to recognise that whiteness (as a system) and justice can never coexist or inhabit the same space. Transformation discourse, of our kind, fashioned under diversity's register can never escape being appropriated by liberal ideology and practice, as yet another means to reaffirm its priorities.

The ways in which Africanisation and decolonisation in the South African academy have been framed and carried out have been called into question over the past several years, most notably in relation to modes of silencing and epistemic negation, which have been explicitly challenged through the student actions. In a similar vein, Canada's commitments to decolonising its university spaces and pedagogies have been the subject of extensive critique, informed by (still unmet) claims to land, space, knowledge, and identity. Despite extensive critique, policies and practices in both South African and Canadian academic spaces remain largely unchanged, yet continue to stand as evidence that decolonisation is underway. In our paper, we begin to carefully articulate an understanding of decolonisation in the academy as one which continues to carry out historical relations of colonialism and race. Following the work of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012), we begin the process of "de-mythologising" decolonisation, by first exposing and tracing how decolonising claims both reinforce and recite the racial and colonial terms under which Indigeneity and Blackness are "integrated" in the academy. From our respective contexts, we trace how white, western ownership of space and knowledge in the academy is reaffirmed through processes of invitation, commodification, and erasure of Indigenous/Black bodies and identities. However, we also suggest that the invitation and presence of Indigenous and Black bodies and identities in both academic contexts are "necessary" to the reproduction and survival of decolonising claims, which allows us to begin to interrogate how, why, and under what terms bodies and identities come to be "included" in the academy. We conclude by proposing that the efficacy of decoloniality lies in paradigmatic and epistemic shifts which begin to unearth and then unsettle white supremacy in both contexts, in order to proceed with aims of reconciliation and reclamation.

Microaggression is defined as subtle and often unconscious or automatic actions or statements made towards a discriminated group. It causes distress, anxiety and isolation. Microaggression can often lead to demoralisation and a feeling that one is in a constant psychological warfare. It is also ubiquitous in nature. This paper is a reflection on my experiences of microaggression as a black female academic gathered from working in six universities across five countries and two continents. I use autoethnography underscored by critical race theory thinking. The reflection has a multicultural face and is done in light of the extant literature on gendered, racial and non-native microaggression in the academic world. I find close similarities in my experiences with others. I conclude that microaggressions are ubiquitous and are inevitable in a multicultural setting. Victims need to acknowledge microaggressions and be assertive in order to mitigate the associated negative effects. Further, counterspaces provide a very useful platform for challenging the inaccuracy of victims' lived experiences and serve as a source of validation.

One of the biggest debates in South Africa is the use and usefulness of apartheid categories when analysing society and societal behaviour. This paper examines the process of learning and unlearning that took place when a political reporting lecturer and an academic staff developer sought to explain racially biased voting in South Africa and its historical origins to students. The autoethnographic method of reflecting on teaching practice is used to explore the tensions and dilemmas that arose when introducing a specific pedagogic intervention-- the Privilege Walk--to help students understand privilege as systemic, intersectional and historically rooted. We also discuss our own further development of the walk to allow students to create a new grid based on alternative values and that would affirm difference. Framed by Fraser's participatory parity, critical pedagogy and Massumi's affect theory, we trace our journey in engaging and disrupting identity politics by developing a decolonising pedagogical approach that emphasises post-apartheid identity as fluid and becoming and capitalises on affective and embodied learning in South African classrooms.

The article examines students' engagement in university classrooms in South Africa. Of interest is the extent to which students experience some measure of parity of participation in these engagements. Such "participatory parity" broadly refers to students being able to act on a more or less equal footing with their peers and lecturers. Though much has been written about student engagement and its educational value, such engagement is not typically examined through Fraser's parity lens. Such parity matters because students are able to experience themselves as valued participants in the social world of the university. However, as what is being discussed is the university classroom, parity of participation in itself is not the only outcome, it is also gaining access to disciplinary knowledge through such participation, or what is referred to here as epistemological access. In order to examine the nexus between participatory parity and epistemological access a methodology for examining participation drawn from activity theory is mobilised. The paper then concludes with reflecting on the usefulness of using this theory and also the usefulness of promoting participatory parity in classroom engagement.

Positing existence in terms of difference and becoming as substantive, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are interested in ways of thinking and being that lie outside of institutionalised knowledge and the semiotic chains and regimes of power that sustain it. Although this line of thinking is not applied to pedagogy itself in a sustained manner in their work, their consideration of milieu and cartography, as related to subjectivity, can make an invaluable contribution to pedagogical praxis. In this paper, I diffractively read Deleuze and Guattari's thoughts on subjectivity through the writings and practices of Fernand Deligny. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Deligny was known for rejecting standardised forms of knowledge, instruction, and living, placing instead an emphasis on modes of being that lie outside the preexisting norms of the Symbolic Order and the dominance of language. It is, in part, from Deligny's practices that Deleuze and Guattari derived their method of cartography which can map subjectivity as "wander lines" and gestures within a social milieu. Together with territory, rhythm and the refrain ("ritournelle"), I think here about wander lines, gestures and milieu as part of a philosophical approach for effectuating socially just pedagogies in higher education, particularly in the context of the recent Fallist movement in South Africa.

Twenty years into democracy, South Africa is still struggling to improve the quality of its education system. The identification of schools that can work closely with universities to mentor student teachers has been suggested as one way in which teacher education can contribute to an improved education system. The article outlines research that was conducted to establish the conditions for the establishment of Professional Practice schools, seen as schools that, regardless of resource level, would offer excellent support to student teachers on Teaching Practice. Drawing on activity theory as well as Fraser's (2008) three dimensional theory of justice, the paper explores the challenges and possibilities of such school-university partnerships as a form of social justice in South Africa. Vision, agency, shared expertise, material conditions and institutional capacity are argued to be key factors of a system-wide approach to enhancing teacher education in the country.

The current emphasis on social responsibility and community collaboration within higher education has led to an increased drive to include service learning in the curriculum. With its emphasis on mutually beneficial collaborations, service learning can be meaningful for both students and the community, but is challenging to manage successfully. From a design education perspective, it is interesting to note that contemporary design practice emphasises a similar approach known as a human-centered design, where users are considered and included throughout the design process. In considering both service learning and human-centered design as foundations for design pedagogy, various philosophical and methodological similarities are evident. The paper explores the relationship between a service learning community engagement approach and a human-centered design approach in contemporary communication design education. To this end, each approach is considered individually after which a joint frame of reference is presented. Butin's service learning typology, namely the four Rs--respect, reciprocity, relevance and reflection--serves as a point of departure for the joint frame of reference. Lastly, the potential value and relevance of a combined understanding of service learning and human-centered design is considered.

At least one of the goals of the transformation of universities in South Africa is to develop civic-minded graduates who leave university to become agents of positive social change in broader society. More specifically, universities in South Africa aim to develop graduates who are critical, capable and balanced--graduates who are aware of their social responsibilities in post-apartheid South Africa. In this paper we, first, consider why South African universities should want to promote the development of socially-responsive civic-minded agents. Second, we analyse three plausible suggestions for the transformation of universities into sites that could increase a university's ability to foster civic-minded graduates on its campus: transformation of the university structures and demographics; the implementation of transformative teaching and learning practices; and the implementation of community engagement programmes. While all three of these suggestions are found to be plausible, we argue that in order for universities to become sites for transformation par excellence--sites which foster the development of civic mindedness--universities must embrace an epistemic shift in institutional culture. Finally, we examine some plausible causes that could be preventing this from taking place in our context.

The ways in which Africanisation and decolonisation in the South African academy have been framed and carried out have been called into question over the past several years, most notably in relation to modes of silencing and epistemic negation, which have been explicitly challenged through the student actions. In a similar vein, Canada's commitments to decolonising its university spaces and pedagogies have been the subject of extensive critique, informed by (still unmet) claims to land, space, knowledge, and identity. Despite extensive critique, policies and practices in both South African and Canadian academic spaces remain largely unchanged, yet continue to stand as evidence that decolonisation is underway. In our paper, we begin to carefully articulate an understanding of decolonisation in the academy as one which continues to carry out historical relations of colonialism and race. Following the work of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012), we begin the process of "de-mythologising" decolonisation, by first exposing and tracing how decolonising claims both reinforce and recite the racial and colonial terms under which Indigeneity and Blackness are "integrated" in the academy. From our respective contexts, we trace how white, western ownership of space and knowledge in the academy is reaffirmed through processes of invitation, commodification, and erasure of Indigenous/Black bodies and identities. However, we also suggest that the invitation and presence of Indigenous and Black bodies and identities in both academic contexts are necessary to the reproduction and survival of decolonising claims, which allows us to begin to interrogate how, why, and under what terms bodies and identities come to be "included" in the academy. We conclude by proposing that the efficacy of decoloniality lies in paradigmatic and epistemic shifts which begin to unearth and then unsettle white supremacy in both contexts, in order to proceed with aims of reconciliation and reclamation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally there has been some interest in how critical pedagogies might be enabled in higher education to support transformative social agendas. Few writers, however, have theorised the ethico-political aspects of this effort from a feminist new materialist perspective. By focusing on the analysis of an inter-institutional collaborative course which was constructed across three disciplines and two differently positioned universities in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper examines the design of the course retrospectively from a feminist new materialist theoretical framing. In so doing, it moves beyond more traditional understandings of critical pedagogy to consider the design and student engagement with the course from the perspective of what we call "response-able pedagogies." Response-able pedagogies are not simply examples of the type of learning that can take place when power relations, materiality and entanglement are acknowledged; they also constitute ethicopolitical practices that incorporate a relational ontology into teaching and learning activities. We propose that ethico-political practices such as attentiveness, responsibility, curiosity, and rendering each other capable, constitute reponse-able pedagogies. The paper focuses on the transdisciplinary and interinstitutional course to consider how these ethico-political practices which constitute a response-able pedagogy might (be put to) work and how the students were both enabled and constrained by this design in terms of their responses to such ethico-political practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term ‘epistemological access’ has been increasingly used in scholarly publications on higher education learning in South Africa and elsewhere recently. This paper reviews the context and lineaments of the term in the work of philosopher Wally Morrow and its take-up by other scholars, and sets out to elaborate the conceptual underpinnings of the notion, outlining three possible answers to the question, ‘what is epistemological access affording access to?’ and proposing a fourth as a fruitful way to deploy the term in future scholarly work on higher education learning which seeks to stipulate what graduates should learn, know and be able to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognising the authoritative de/legitimising power of education systems, this paper contributes to studies concerned with the ways in which new entrants to higher education experience the positioning of their inherited identities as they negotiate their transition to campus life. The findings emerged during a broader psychosocial study of the transitions of seven first-generation students at a technical university in South Africa. The nature of their self-positioning was explored through an analysis of the positioning statements they articulated during photo-elicitation interviews. The university was positioned as a powerful institution, with conditions for both opportunity and alienation. Participants strongly identified with the professional community of practice in Art and Design. However, in relation to the urban campus context, the majority of participants positioned aspects of their home communities as deficit. A case is made for creating conducive conditions that enable self-reflection on students' transitional experiences and develop collective critical consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of the South African university, and society in the same breath, is not so much that of governance or politics but ideology. The deepening realisation of the farcicality and impossibility of strategies, attendant ideologies and "master signifiers" of transformation (such as diversity, multiculturalism and rainbow nation) of the South African society and (whatever remains of) its institutions has never been more acute than now, when the insistence at meaningful change and the unanimous rejection, mostly by blacks, of the university (at least in its current form) have gained traction. This paper draws on Žižek's Lacanian theory of ideology to provide a counter-narrative and reading of official transformation consensus and ideologies like diversity, by highlighting their ethical liminalities. The underside of diversity's official claims to equality and justice are unmasked, and the terror and ironies of this liberal ideology are exposed, especially its refusal to recognise that whiteness (as a system) and justice can never coexist or inhabit the same space. Transformation discourse, of our kind, fashioned under diversity's register can never escape being appropriated by liberal ideology and practice, as yet another means to reaffirm its priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how students' resources can be drawn on in curriculum design in tertiary education to develop a pedagogy of diversity. It asks what kinds of resources are privileged through existing academic practices, and how certain traditionally unused resources can be included in teaching, learning and meaning-making. With reference to a case study in engineering in South Africa, an argument is made for a 'reciprocal curriculum', an exchange of cultural practices and not just bridges to established norms. In this conception of curriculum, students' practices and resources can be utilised, whilst the discourses and knowledge of the discipline can also be made accessible. The parameters of 'science' and scientific discourse are explored by analysing students' texts from a multimodal social semiotic perspective. The paper ends by proposing that students' resources be harnessed through using metalanguages to describe and reflect on their own practices as well as on academic practices, and the need to create less regulated spaces in the curriculum in order to enable this reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we focus on the narratives of black women early career academics (ECAs) who are confronting and negotiating the “publish or perish” discourse in their professional lives in the university. Through a qualitative interpretivist case study, we purposively recruited and interviewed 10 education academics in one research-intensive university in South Africa. We relied on Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework to think through and to theorise the complex positionality of black women academics in a South African university. The findings reveal that black women ECAs often have challenges when it comes to research and publication, with some of the participants rejecting the publish or perish mantra, questioning the usefulness of publishing, and to what extent their own research will make a societal impact. The findings also reveal the deeply embedded patriarchal and gendered nature of the publish or perish discourse in how it disregards the role of wife/motherly/societal care work that women academics often perform. We end the article with broader reflections on the emergence of the publish and perish discourse in the South African higher education system and its implications for the attraction, retention, and wellbeing of black women ECAs in the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the successes and failures of student protests in transforming higher education in South Africa through a Marxist lens. The slow pace of change by the government in addressing structural and systemic inequalities has led to disgruntlement within the student body. In their quest to hasten the process, students engaged in protests across the country, inspired by the #RhodesMustFall movement. This article outlines the problematic areas that have led to the unrest and reflects on the #FeesMustFall movement: the lessons learnt and its impact on contemporary higher education. The reflection further unpacks what it means to be a student in South Africa and how the learning process shapes and is shaped by the student movements within universities. The study reviewed existing literature on the #FeesMustFall movement to better understand the influence of student protests on government policy and to evaluate whether any protest-based changes have occurred in higher education in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public university in the global South continues to be trapped in an existential slumber, struggling to self-define/self-diagnose its purposes, rationales, goals and agenda(s). Despite the emergence of the #FeesMustfall, #RhodesMustFall, and more recently the #Asinamali student protests, South African higher education continues to adopt neoliberal and colonial conceptions of institutional reforms, seen through the emergence and enactment of performance management instruments, demographic understandings of transformation, incoherent/illogical policy prescriptions, and the use of technology as pedagogic replacement. In this article, I attempt to do two things. Firstly, I critique the South African higher education policy and legislative framework as largely inadequate and neoliberal in nature and designed to reinforce market-orientated logics and discourses. Secondly, and in thinking beyond the neoliberal university, I propose what an inclusive curriculum could look like through a decolonial lens. I end the article with some parting thoughts on the future of the neoliberal university in South Africa, and the potential implications for what I see as the emergence of decolonial and transformative curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment policy reform has led to the adoption of a "participatory" framework of assessment in South African higher education. Using a Foucauldian theoretical lens, this article explores the relation between participatory assessment practices in higher education and social control. Empirical evidence is drawn from assessment practices observed in certain lectures in a South African university and interviews with lecturers. Data is analysed through a Foucauldian lens that forges a connection between disciplinary power, control and regulation. The article then describes the technologies of disciplinary power that play out within the participatory assessment practices and demonstrates what these technologies of power do to assessors and students when they become involved in them. The article argues that participatory assessment in some respects epitomises progressive educational themes, yet, when studied with an eye towards power, it reveals deep contradictions and paradoxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the South African higher education context, which is fraught with inequities and where many feel uncomfortable, the focus on socially just pedagogies and the positioning of teachers in relation to this is not just timeous and relevant, but crucial. In this article we share what we believe a posthumanist view has to offer researchers and educationists. The article revisits data from a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research project, in which 23 audio-recorded interviews were conducted with academics from a variety of faculties and units for academic development. We discuss two discourses which emerged from our reading of the data: the first concerns lecturers and students having fixed racial identities that influence how learning does or does not take place and the second concerns students learning in a developmental and teleological manner. We discuss ideas culled from the literature on posthumanist ontologies that helped us to respond to these discourses, and which we believe, could be shared with academics and researchers who wish to advance a socially just pedagogy in higher education. We reflect briefly by way of conclusion on what, as researchers, our responses and responsibility towards the data and the complexities of our time could or should be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wave of student-led protests that have taken place across the South African higher education landscape over the last two years provides us, as teacher educators, with the opportune time to reflect on how our pedagogical practices relate to larger societal transformative imperatives. We engage with the relationship between pedagogical practices and social transformation by attending to questions concerning identity, intersubjectivity, and group relations. We argue that conventional pedagogical practices that work towards social justice are entangled with and regulated by identity politics, and that such a position equates these pedagogical practices with a politics of negation and ressentiment. By drawing on Deleuze's interpretation of the concept of fabulation and Deleuze and Guattari's argument that desire is a positive social force that enables experimentation to occur, we re-imagine the idea of a pedagogy as a politics of affirmation. Such politics, we argue, makes possible the constitution of new social collectivities that are able to escape the gravitational pull of identity politics and ressentiment. We posit that, in the midst of student protests, this is an important first step in generating the conditions to experiment with the creation of a different, more socially just future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the political, social, cultural and economic context of South Africa, higher education spaces provide fertile ground for social research. This case study explored "othered" identities in the Department of Visual Arts of Stellenbosch University. Interviews with students and lecturers revealed interesting and controversial aspects in terms of their experiences in the Department of Visual Arts. Theoretical perspectives such as "othering", symbolic racism, the racialised body and visual art theory were used to interpret these experiences. It was found that "othering" because of indirect racism and language or economic circumstances affects students' creative expression. Causes of "othering" experiences should be investigated in order to promote necessary transformation within the visual arts and within higher education institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The researchers construct the identity of participants by analysing online and offline identity performances in a virtual forum of a higher education institution in South Africa. The study identifies several interactional and cyclic elements that inform the articulation of discursive identity. Being directed by Iris Marion Young's theory of communicative action, the interactional character of the different elements of identity formation are valued to be enhancing or debilitating moral discourse. As the research concludes that embodied identities facilitate moral discourse, design elements for the online forum are proposed to enhance a critical understanding of own (un)emancipatory positions and the appreciation of others. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Emotions are central to social justice work in education but receive scant research attention in South Africa. Our study explores the role of emotions in teachers’ approaches to teaching about sexual and gender diversity in schools in the Free State. Using in-depth interviews, we found that teachers experienced discomfort with the topic, had inherited bitter knowledge about non-normative sexual and gender identities, and experienced strong negative affect when discussing the topic. In many ways, participants unconsciously and unreflexively perpetuated heterosexism and homophobia in their classroom teaching and school settings. We conclude that the growing emphasis in educational policy in South Africa on the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) learners requires a greater awareness among educators of the role of emotions in enabling or hindering this form of social justice work in education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]