Extended Studies Unit

Post-apartheid universities are challenged by the opportunities and responsibilities associated with the power they have to influence how people understand and perform their humanity. How I experience and make sense of teaching is partly to do with how the university, the discipline and the departments I work in, facilitate and frame teaching and learning – similarly, how students, particularly first year students, come to know themselves has to do with these frames too. I argue that how we work with these frames is affected by how we think about vulnerability. I am interested in conversations which disrupt and transform enduring legacies of oppression and authority. For this end, this article works with some ideas and practices of social justice education. Through a self-study of my teaching, and using a theoretical lens adapted from the work of Judith Butler, I developed two themes that emerged from this engagement:  the connection between the ontology and epistemology of teaching and learning in self-study as praxis; and vulnerability, and the violence and possibilities of non-convergence. I conclude the paper with examples that engage these themes.

I was invited to write this reflection as a contribution to how we think about postgraduate supervision courses. Having recently completed one of these, I critiqued the course for its unproblematised western canon. The article explains my critique, as well as my journey to find a new canon.

Foundation provision for South African university students has been a national programme to redress the inequalities of apartheid. This paper considers the articulation gap that emerges between the foundation year, and the rest of the degree, especially in formerly white institutions, and how to align both to a common purpose of public good. It looks at the concerns around race, gender and class inequalities, raised by, for instance, students during the 2015, 2016 student protests in South Africa. It argues that if there is not a powerful political project of race, gender and class transformation that runs concurrently with foundation provision in the institution, it can lead to frustration, alienation and failure. Three theories are used as a lens to consider foundation programmes in this context: Critical Race Feminism, Black Consciousness, and African feminism. Critical race feminism is not a new theory – for example bell hooks’ work on feminism and liberatory pedagogy, and Krenshaw’s work on intersectionality, date back several decades, but remain relevant. Black consciousness, popularised by Steve Biko in the 1960’s and 70’s, continues to inspire a thoughtful consideration of race in South African society. African feminism argues for noticing the silenced voices and finding the communities that animate their knowledge seeking. This paper argues that some of the complications in the success of the foundation studies, and in transformation of universities, can be better understood by a careful interrogation of race and class dynamics on campuses that continue to struggle to transform. It reminds us of the university’s purpose as a pubic good, and asks us to locate the poor, black student in the centre of our deliberations.

This article introduces a research project that works with former Extended Studies Programme students to make knowledge that emerges through online, multimodal collaborations. Knowledge-making is not politically neutral, and the project and article are responding in part to the calls of the 2015/2016 South African student protesters to decolonise and transform university curricula. The project draws on African feminist ideas, emphasising the intersectional oppressions of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, which continue to influence theoretical choices in the knowledge hierarchies of South African and African universities. The “race”, class and gender inequalities that drive success or failure at university and in society become some of the topics addressed in the project, where former students as co-researchers collaborate to devise the topics, responses, and kinds of dissemination. Ntseane’s overlapping principles of a collective worldview, spirituality, a shared orientation ...

Teaching, as a social justice project, seeks to undo and re-imagine oppressive pedagogies in order to transform teachers, their students, and the knowledge with which they work. In this article, I argue that self-study can contribute to social justice in a number of ways by, for instance, making the sometimes limiting norms that frame teaching and learning visible; inviting my own vulnerability through peer and student reflections and feedback, and noticing the important relationship between ontology and epistemology in teaching and learning. One means to avoid the narrow way in which self-study might apply to only one person's practice is to use theory to legitimise it and make it more broadly applicable. In this study, I use Judith Butler's ideas relating to vulnerability in order to explain the way in which my teaching and learning is framed and to show how normative frameworks that define teaching can be expanded to be more inclusive. I use excerpts of peer and student f...

If I could, I would introduce Sylvia Tamale with singing and dancingan aptly Afro-Feminist way to honour an author whose reputation as a thinker, scholar, and activist is renowned. She stands on the shoulders of her ancestors and dedicates her book to Wanafunzi wa Afrika (the students of Africa), for whom this is a rare and valuable gift. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism is an epic testament to Tamale's courageous political and intellectual rigour, it imagines a world with reconfigured social institutions that restore dignity to African people. Although much of her formal training and work has been in law, Tamale's activism and scholarship have crossed many disciplinary boundaries, notably in the fields of gender and sexuality, jurisprudence, and politics, all with an African feminist framing. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism brings together all of these interests in a textual and empirical analysis of colonialism's effects and their potential undoing. Decolonial studies is a growing field, with scholars from the Global South building on the work of Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and others who helped to shape the post-colonial discourse in the 20th century. The twenty-first century has seen Walter Mignolo, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Ramon Grosfogel, Arturo Escobar, and many others guiding the conversation with a focus on 'decoloniality', which Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues 'is not a singular theoretical school of thought, but a family of diverse positions that share a view of coloniality as the fundamental problem in the modern age' (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, 15; emphasis added). The field is not without its contestations. In a recent editorial, Siseko Kumalo and Leonard Praeg make a scathing accusation that mediocre scholars can and have co-opted the 'discourse and praxis' (Kumalo and Praeg 2019) of decoloniality to re-inscribe the marginality of Black/Indigenous people by a failure to engage with empirical and substantive evidence and voices. This charge struck a chord. A frustration for me has been the paucity of African women's voices in the carefully curated global conversation, for instance in edited volumes with multiple authors. Like panel discussions on webinar, these showcases of scholarship are opportunities to put politics into practice, right? Two recent volumes I bought to supplement the African feminism I have been reading reveal more than the topics anticipated in the contents page. The first, Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (2018) edited by Bernd Reiter, has 15 chapters, only 5 of them by womenthere is one African author, a man. Notwithstanding the excellent contributions to the ideas of decoloniality with its focus on plurality in the politics and hierarchy of knowledge, it is as though African women have nothing to say here. The second purchase was Knowledges Born of the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South (2020), edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses. Of the 13 chapters, 4 are written by women, one of them the Mozambican coeditor, and one chapter is written by an African man. Surely, in a field that unpicks the legacies of imperial, patriarchal, anthropocentric colonialism and how it positions African women in the social and knowledge hierarchies, more African women could be invited to speak for themselves? This book review was originally

This article introduces a research project that works with former Extended Studies Programme students to make knowledge that emerges through online, multimodal collaborations. Knowledge-making is not politically neutral, and the project and article are responding in part to the calls of the 2015/2016 South African student protesters to decolonise and transform university curricula. The project draws on African feminist ideas, emphasising the intersectional oppressions of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, which continue to influence theoretical choices in the knowledge hierarchies of South African and African universities. The "race", class and gender inequalities that drive success or failure at university and in society become some of the topics addressed in the project, where former students as co-researchers collaborate to devise the topics, responses, and kinds of dissemination. Ntseane's overlapping principles of a collective worldview, spirituality, a shared orientation to knowledge, and communal knowledge-making are motifs that influence how the project is imagined and run. My positionality as lead researcher and former lecturer of the co-researchers is navigated using African feminist guidance, which also informs the ethical principles of the project.

Foundation provision for South African university students has been a national strategy to redress the inequalities of apartheid and the effects of this on university access and success. This paper considers the articulation gap that emerges between the foundation year, and the rest of the degree, especially in formerly white institutions, and how to align both to a common purpose of public good. It looks at the concerns around race and class inequalities, raised by, for instance, students during the 2015, 2016 student protests in South Africa. It argues that if there is not a powerful political project of race, gender and class transformation that runs concurrently with foundation provision in the institution, it can lead to frustration, alienation and failure. Three theories are used as a lens to consider foundation programmes in this context: Critical Race Feminism, Black Consciousness, and African feminism. Critical race feminism is not a new theory-for example bell hooks' work on feminism and liberatory pedagogy, and Krenshaw's work on intersectionality, date back several decades, but remain relevant. Black consciousness, popularised by Steve Biko in the 1960's and 70's, continues to inspire a thoughtful consideration of race in South African society. African feminism argues for noticing the silenced voices and finding the communities that animate their knowledge seeking. This paper argues that some of the complications in the success of the foundation studies, and in transformation of universities, can be better understood by a careful interrogation of race and class dynamics on campuses that continue to struggle to transform. It reminds us of the university's purpose as a public good, and asks us to locate the poor, black student in the centre of our deliberations.

Knowledge-making in South African universities is set up and framed in particular ways, with a Euro-centric bias. We argue that many of the contributions that African first year entering students could make to this process of knowledge-making are dis-abled, leading to alienation. In this article, we argue for a different perspective and approach to teaching and learning in the humanities. Former Extended Studies students from a South African university have worked collaboratively in a knowledge-making project, and using data generated from this, suggest different kinds of environments and strategies for more inclusive teaching and learning. Using an African feminist theoretical and methodological lens, we consider alternative ways of knowing, and recognition that supports powerful senses of belonging and agency, using examples from student experiences of an Extended Studies humanities programme. We contrast this with how humanities programmes are experienced by some first-year stude...