Search

This article draws on our continuous artistic engagement with Tonga youth in Zimbabwe over the last four years and offers a critical analysis of their transformation. We use the intersecting concepts of political and cultural capabilities to argue how arts-based participation in civic spaces has enabled them to shift the power balances, fostering them as epistemic agents and change-makers. Their journey across three arts and heritage workshops showcases that the longitudinal collaborations and social networks developed and built on one another, creating a thick interrelational embodied process of initiating political advocacy and re-creating different and multiple reinterpretations of their cultural heritage. The paper demonstrates the possibilities of envisaging and realising alternative livelihoods amidst the struggles exacerbated by horizontal and vertical inequalities, precarity, political apathy and poverty and highlights the importance of identifying relevant, context-sensitive, and engaging approaches for transformative development and legacy.

This paper focuses on the experiences of out-of-school girls in Zimbabwe. It draws on a research strand of SAGE (Supporting Adolescent Girls’ Education), a UKAid programme funded through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (FCDO) Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) initiative. Using a digital storytelling approach the research highlights critical events that have changed girls’ lives and impacted on how they see their futures. The paper explores insights made possible by this alternative methodology. Crucially, it challenges the often-static representation of ‘marginalised’ and ‘out-of-school’ girls in Sub-Saharan Africa by illustrating the unpredictability of individual circumstances and girls’ perceptions of these, within broader contexts of persistent vulnerability factors. Drawing on the capability approach the paper also offers new insights into the perceived value and purpose of school for out-of-school girls. The findings have implications for conceptualising more creative, contextually appropriate policies and practices for young people who miss out on formal school.

There is a gap in research on access to universities in South Africa. The research that exists focuses on quantitative methodologies, although some qualitative studies are now emerging. These resea...

This paper provides an account of migrant youths’ experiences of access to education through a social initiative-driven school and highlights how these youths developed pathways of aspirations to work for the good of the community. In doing so, the paper also provides a lens to the issues of migration in Southern Africa and a context in which to understand how collective action (agency) for education can deeply transform marginalised migrants’ aspirations and offer spaces of equality and agency for change. Drawing on data collected over a span of three years, the paper aims to illustrate how Albert Street School (Authority obtained to use original school name), established as a part of grass-root collective action, supports and impacts on migrants’ capabilities and how these capabilities lead to aspirations for public good. The narrative methodology used to understand migrant youths’ lives and experiences illustrates that collective capabilities have the potential to address different forms of disadvantage and distribute diverse and incommensurable good to local communities.

‘Unfolding narratives’ is a provocative, moving and memorable attempt to express the dynamic and competing ways in which the concept of Ubuntu is understood, politicised and lived by in Southern Af...

This article provides a Global South perspective on marginalised migrant youth and higher educational aspirations, with a specific focus on South Africa. We use data from a case study in Johannesbu...

This chapter draws on findings from an AHRC-GCRF-funded project that used the capability approach to explore graffiti as an arts-based method and its contribution to epistemic justice. Graffiti on board was used as a participatory method that created opportunities for collaboration among youth from across social categories including ethnicity, age, and social class. In this chapter, we demonstrate how graffiti on board, a method not widely used in Zimbabwe and broadly, fosters epistemic justice and encourages social cohesion by providing space for Tonga youth to tell stories about the lives they value. The collaborative and participatory nature of the method provided an opportunity for the youths’ experiences and knowledge to be visible in a context where their voices have for long been silenced and opportunities for higher education and employment limited. The nonexistence of opportunities for voice and higher education has resulted in generational and cyclical exclusion. The project involved 12 youth from Binga, a rural district south of Zimbabwe, a representative from a local youth non-governmental organisation (NGO), and another representative from the district museum. The project started with a five-day workshop mapping out and artistically illustrating the challenges experienced by Binga youth, followed by multi-city exhibitions as well as stakeholder workshops in the largest cities (Bulawayo, Gweru, and Harare). The capability approach allowed not only for the identification of valued opportunities among the youth but also a nuanced understanding of how arts-based methods can be used to address epistemic injustices among marginalised communities. The findings show that collective action and platforms for self-expression for marginalised rural youths create new opportunities to work towards a common good. Further to this, youth become creators of knowledge rather than passive consumers of selective narratives that often exclude them.

The paper explores the possibilities for promoting epistemic justice in a South African university setting through a participatory action-based photovoice research project in which university researchers worked alongside undergraduate students with no prior experience of doing research. The student voices are employed to understand how learning as capability development and agency expansion can advance epistemic justice in a university setting of hierarchical relationships that make participatory action research challenging. The paper considers how, in this project, spaces of epistemic democracy intersected with the expansion of multidimensional functionings, resulting in more epistemic justice for the student-researchers. The paper considers the possibilities for change through a participatory project toward promoting epistemic justice at the individual level. It also explores some criticisms of the limits of such individual development in the face of structural challenges.

The migrant stories presented in this chapter provide an overall picture of the daily experiences of disadvantaged youth and how these experiences influence their daily lives and choices. Johannesburg as a destination of choice reinforces the idea of the city being the horn of Africa because of its economic activities and demonstrates why the city is the most populous in the country. For policy-makers, the chapter ought to be an illustration of why development programmes in this city should take into account current and future migrants, as this is clearly a destination of choice. Using the migrant stories, Mkwananzi further provides an understanding of the environment in which HE aspirations may be formed among migrant youth living in a context of disadvantage.

Mkwananzi draws on theoretical and empirical reflections to illustrate how the discussions throughout the book may contribute to higher education, migration and development policy. Also helpful is the reminder that addressing the subject of marginalised migrants cannot be seen as a task to be carried out by a single state only, but requires regional effort, including by the migrant-sending countries. The emphasis is on the potential contribution of the engagement of multiple actors in constructing a society favourable for local, regional and international development. Furthermore, Mkwananzi explores the role of international migration in reducing and/or intensifying poverty and what role education may possibly play within this nexus to improve the well-being of individuals.

Focusing on the capabilities and barriers to higher educational aspirations formation, the author brings to the fore key challenges experienced by youth in contexts of disadvantage. An orientation to pre-migration illustrates the impact of economic and political structural on schooling experiences and how they influence educational aspirations and agency. The author’s use of Amartya Sen’s (1999) five instrumental freedoms (political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees and protective security) demonstrates the conditions that either support or hinder capabilities formation among migrant youth. This helps to understand the current external capability context of these youth and the author discusses how fostering the conditions for these instrumental freedoms is key for development interventions directed at marginalised migrant youth.

The chapter demonstrates the interaction of capabilities and conversion factors and details how these two concepts relate to, and interact with, aspirations. The chapter also discusses the aspirations gap as well as the aspirations window and how it plays out for different individuals, thereby creating an awareness of what a complex analysis of aspirations and disadvantage can look like. Using intersectional analysis, Mkwananzi highlights the gendered aspect in aspirations formation, which marks the disparate values and aspirations between young men and women. Finally, the illustration of the role of agency in the interaction of capabilities and conversion factors provides an illustration of the complexity of aspirations formations in an environment with multiple factors.

The chapter reconciles overlapping themes by classifying them as capabilities and functionings. The short- and long-term aspirations based on the capabilities and functionings valued by migrant youth provide an understanding of choice and agency in disadvantaged settings. Based on these, Mkwananzi also discusses the value placed on education by classifying this into intrinsic and instrumental values. The different degrees of value placed on education by migrant men and women draw attention to gendered influences in higher educational aspirations formation.

This chapter provides a detailed discussion on the contribution of the capability approach (CA) in researching education, youth and migration. In doing so, Mkwananzi displays the comprehensive nature of the framework in looking at complex and multidimensional phenomena such as migration, cutting across and beyond social, political, cultural and economic contexts. In addition to acknowledging the complex nature of migration, Mkwananzi illustrates that migration is an integral part of human development. Interconnections between CA and migration show how the two relate to each other and are clearly articulated. Discussed in detail is also the importance of education in human development, as it forms people’s existing capacities into developed capabilities and expands human freedoms.

Mkwananzi underlines the importance of a study on higher education for youth in a disadvantaged context of migration, particularly what this means for both human and sustainable development. The complexity of classifying migrants not only highlights the changing nature of the migration landscape, but also how migration has become all-encompassing of political economic, social and cultural spheres. In the same vein, Mkwananzi reinforces the importance of migration within the Global South and how this is equally important as migration from the Global South to the Global North. The adoption of the human development informed capabilities approach as an analytical framework provides a clear picture on why such a study cannot be separated from development discourses.

Mkwananzi provides an original contribution by conceptualising the formation of higher educational aspirations among migrant youths in disadvantaged contexts. The fourfold conceptualisations of resigned, powerful, persistent and frustrated illustrate what happens at the intersection of diverse contextual environments and different levels of agency. The chapter illustrates that, although material support is important for the youth, it is inadequate on its own and may fail to prepare them fully for their future. It is therefore essential to understand the diverse conversion factors that influence the formation of migrants’ educational aspirations and what this may mean for their plans in relation to human development. Through this comprehensive analysis of the sometimes overlooked lived realities of disadvantaged groups, Mkwananzi provides a starting point for engaging with various structures under which these aspirations are formed.

Statistics show that student enrolment in higher education institutions in South Africa has dramatically increased over the past years, a clear indication that higher education (HE) is addressing issues of equitable access in the wake of an exclusionary apartheid past. Despite these positive trends, there are still marginalised groups in society about whom we know little, and who risk being overlooked both in access statistics and at the level of actual lives. The article therefore outlines the aspirations and challenges for vulnerable young people in accessing higher education, based on a case study conducted at Orange Farm informal settlement in South Africa. A qualitative approach, using Sen, 2009 , Sen, 1999a and Nussbaum's (2011) capabilities approach (CA) was adopted as the conceptual frame for the light it casts on real lives, opportunities and plural achievements, with empirical data collected through face-to-face interviews with purposively selected young people living in an Orange Farm orphanage.

Youth, Gender and the Capabilities Approach to Development draws on a variety of case studies (from South Africa, Tanzania, Russia, India, Columbia, Spain, Morocco and Turkey) to bring contemporary...