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This chapter is concerned with academic citizenry in higher education, and the conditions created within institutions for transformative leadership. This is central to the fitness-for-purpose of higher education institutions to drive the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.Drawing from a mixed-method study, the chapter explores the patterns which emerged from literature, questionnaire responses, and semi-structured interviews about the problematics at play within six institutions in the post-colonial contexts of India and South Africa. The two upper middle-income contexts have strong constitutional commitments to democracy and social justice at the macro-level, with bold policy interventions undertaken at meso-level to address the legacies of exclusion and oppression in student enrollment and staff composition in HE. However, recent fraught dynamics and unrest within the sector in each country have brought renewed attention to the politics of participation and a breakdown in trust of governance and management.In this study, the standpoint of key stakeholders was prioritized, including those in assigned leadership positions and academic staff. Particular attention was paid to gender and intersectional inequalities impacting academic staff, and what they revealed about the persistence of policy-implementation gaps and their relation to principle-implementation gaps. Concerns are raised about impoverished comprehensions of, and conditions for, sustainable ethical leadership which emerged across both contexts.

The university is a highly politicized and fractious realm for students and academics. Amidst trade-offs between the processes of massification, democratization, commodification, and globalization, the question of transformation for sustainability has become crucial to the social good(s) of higher education. This paper considers academic citizenry within Indian public higher education — a context where the increase in the enrollment of first-generation students and female students, due to affirmative action policies, has not substantially translated into altering the composition of academic staff. Informed by a mixed-method study conducted in 2019 with the participation of academics and those in leadership positions at four higher education institutions, we found that the enactment of such policies was operationalized for the production of the “New Middle Class” by universities. Of concern is that neither the representation nor the participation of academics who are women, “lower” castes, or minorities meets the mark of just, inclusive institutions. Despite the rhetoric of inclusiveness and development, the implementation of related policies clothe subalterns with the veneer of the intellectual class, permitting access on condition that sociocultural identities are concealed, and the hegemonic status quo maintained. Terms such as “quality” and “equality” function as tools for social control rather than serving social justice, where assertions of caste identity and resistance are simultaneously repudiated and misrecognized.

One of the 12 critical areas for change highlighted in the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) is the education of girls and women, in particular the participation of women in Science, Technology, E...

Reflexivity has been foregrounded as an important practice in scholarship regarding the scrutiny of ethical research and knowledge production. What is at risk, however, is reflexivity becoming counter-productive and consumed within the hegemony of Western practice, ultimately making little contribution towards disrupting power asymmetries. In this paper, we ask, at what point can critical self-reflexivity become productive, rather than self-indulgent and paralysing? Reflecting on the assumptions that underpin our scholarship, we ask, how can we utilise emotions of paralysis, discomfort and contradiction towards positive social change? Drawing on our experiences, we highlight the messy nature of reflexivity and argue that these emotions are important and entail a constant re-examination of the assumptions embedded in our pedagogy, scholarship and motives for engaging with the world. In so doing, we show how challenging the ways we know the world through reflexivity and critical thought are vital in the process of decolonising knowledge.

If science (natural, social, and humanities) is to be a truly global knowledge system, scientific endeavours have to move beyond dualistic binaries of Indigenous versus Western, towards a dynamic dialogic approach that centralizes intersubjectivity, relationship, and contextualisation. Despite its historic engagement with the reproduction of Western norms and reinforcement of Western dominance, contemporary anthropology is a social science field that is specialized in dealing with a multitude of knowledge systems, and suitable to facilitate cross-cultural dialogues as well as highly critical reflections on its own knowledge constructions. Drawing on insights and practices from this discipline, we describe the inter-related strategies of 1) radical multivocality and 2) adamant reflexivity, and how they may be useful in facilitating decolonisation within higher education. We reject the replacement of one knowledge system with another and refuse subjugation of one form of knowledge to another frame of reference. Instead, we envisage science as a co-creative dialogue among a multitude of knowledges that enables a new generation of academics to use Indigenous and Western knowledges and methods in a reflexive and critical dialogic synergy, thus fostering academia as a space, where new narratives arise, meta-narratives are challenged and different narratives are related to each other.

Scholars writing on agency argue that normally, individuals who experience social structures as comfortable will tend to want to reproduce them while those who experience these structures as oppres...

Social relations, institutional arrangements and cultures bequeathed by South Africa’s system of apartheid continue be felt in the present despite the country’s formal transition to democracy 25 ye...

The call for the ‘transformation’ of higher education in South Africa is one instance of a wider effort, since the country’s first democratic election in 1994, to surmount an apartheid and colonial...

African foreigners in South Africa have frequently been the targets of violent and discriminatory practices, which occur in the enabling context of negative discourses concerning African foreigners that circulate in various spheres of public life. This study is interested in one particular field of interaction between African foreigners and the South African state, namely the public health sector. Discriminatory and, sometimes, violent practices towards African foreigners on the part of South African citizens are widely documented. Less discussed are the ways in which these practices of violence and discrimination are in fact state practices. We show this with reference to the treatment of African foreigners in the public health sector. We refer to this prejudicial treatment as health-care Xenophobia which is made possible by a wider set of discourses related to citizenship and the rights accruing to citizens which suggest the ‘non-rights’ of the non-citizen.