"Emergencies" and techno-rationality: The tasks of decentred critical university studies (original) (raw)

This speculative paper explores the relationship between the notions of emergency and university from two angles. First, the university is seen as being in a state of emergency. Second, the university is a state of emergency. Both these readings, we argue, are deployed to uncritically advance the dominance of techno-rationality within higher education in South Africa and elsewhere, which places the social justice possibilities of the university at a distance from itself. A key task of decentred critical university studies (DCUS) is to provide, amongst others, a disclosing critique of these processes as a basis on which alternative praxes can be imagined. The paper conceptualises the contours of a possible DCUS approach, drawing on the notions of emancipation, emergence, conviviality, and incompleteness in relation to the Africanisation, decolonisation, and Southern knowledges nexus-further differentiating it from critical university studies in the Anglo-American context.