"Emergencies" and techno-rationality: The tasks of decentred critical university studies (original) (raw)
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The university in techno-rational times: Critical universities studies, South Africa
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2023
This concept note was produced for a symposium held under the banner of Critical University Studies – South Africa (CUS-SA) at the University of Johannesburg in August 2022. The opening plenary session was addressed by Profs. Premesh Lalu, Sarah Mosoetsa and Sarah Nuttall. A summary of a paper prepared for this symposium by Michael Peters on the university in techno-rational times was presented as part of the panel. The rest of the symposium featured critical discussion in response to this concept note and presentations of potential chapter contributions for a book on the theme. The concept note is followed below by six responses by South African higher education scholars in response to Michael Peters’ and the CUS-SA concept note.
DECOLONISING THE SOUTH AFRICAN UNIVERSITY: A SOCIAL REALIST STUDY
Thesis, 2020
This research is a case study that investigates the demand for decolonisation at the University of Cape Town (UCT). UCT is an institution that was reserved for white South Africans under the Apartheid system, until the formal abolition of Apartheid in 1994. Between 2015 and 2017 the university faced disruptive and violent student protests which halted the academic programme on several occasions. The demands of black students were centered on the legacy of economic and cultural exclusion which they still felt at UCT, 20 years after Apartheid. These charges of exclusion eventually became bundled within the general demand for the total decolonisation of UCT. The aim of this research was to understand the charge that UCT remained colonial, for the purpose of helping the institution chart an emancipatory course of action. The research therefore sought to investigate the exact nature of coloniality at UCT, as well as offer some practical suggestions for it to overcome the problem. In contrast to many research projects in this field, this investigation was conducted from the paradigm of critical realism, meaning that an objective and holistic problem analysis was attempted, with the hope of it leading to a more coherent and unifying change strategy. The research was designed as a single organisational case study, with data for the research coming mainly from open source documentary data. To augment the documentary data, a series of interviews with members of the university community was also conducted. Documentary data included official university publications, video and audio material, minutes of meetings and other material which related to the protests and to the call for decolonisation. The interviews comprised seven unstructured interviews; two with senior executives, one with a recently retired professor and four with students. The qualitative data analysis drew on recognised methods of documentary analysis, including textual analysis and critical discourse analysis. Using the lens of social realism, the central focus of the analysis was reaching an understanding of the dynamics between Structure and Agency, where Structure refers to the historically established cultural and material structure and Agency the actions of the people in response to it. The first of two key findings that were made was that the legacy of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past persists on campus, in the form of the cognitive and emotional pressure that it places on black students, thereby adversely affecting the exercise of Agency. Whereas social and economic deprivation can be quantified, and structurally addressed, the research found that the emotional and cognitive effects on Agency remain more complex and worthy of greater attention. Theorising such complexity as Student Secureness, the research goes on to identify practical approaches to ameliorate the effects of this form of coloniality. The second important outcome of the study was confirming that coloniality continued to be felt in the cultural and intellectual plane - which manifested in the form of Eurocentrism in the curriculum, the domain of research as well as in the classroom and campus milieu. Going beyond this however, and in applying a social realism lens, the study infers a further and novel causal structure termed Intellectual and Cultural Solipsism (ICS). ICS is theorised as a more complex and broader explanation of coloniality, which transcends race and nationality. It is theorised as a condition in which the agents, being colonially conditioned, are unable to make sense of knowledge that emanates from epistemic pathways outside of their ingrained sensemaking faculties, thereby resulting in a constricted reflexivity and the formulation of an unproductive agentic stance and leading eventually to organisational stasis and socio-cultural schism. In addressing the problem of ICS, the thesis argues for the conceptualisation of an expanded institutional identity that can generate broad commitment and institutional cohesion. A transcendent, globally relevant African identity is proposed, built on the common legacy of colonialism and the goal of an emancipated Africa, to which the entire university community can commit to, and to which the entire academic project can be directed.
Apartheid’s University: Notes on the Renewal of the Enlightenment’
2007
Abstract This paper sets to work on strategies for forging new and critical humanities at the institutional site of the university that appears to be trapped in the legacies of apartheid. The paper suggests that the university's responses to apartheid might hold the key for the realignment of its critical commitments in the post-apartheid present.
Journal of culture and values in education, 2023
This conceptual article explores the profound impact of technorationalism on educational law in Southern African universities. It also examines the influence of techno-rationalism on equity, social justice and academic freedom within higher education in the digital era. The article critically analyses the reshaping of educational law in Southern Africa by considering technological advancements, economic forces, affective factors and socio-cultural dynamics. It aims to investigate whether the implementation of technorationalist discourses hinders social justice aspirations in universities. Additionally, the article explores how pervasive neoliberalism and market-driven logic are at universities, questioning whether these practices overshadow the institution's core objectives and commitment to social justice. The article envisions possibilities for reconceptualising the university in the era of techno-rationalism through the critical pedagogy theory. This theory is relevant to this work because it promotes an emancipatory theoretical framework that challenges learning environments, especially higher education institutions, where people might be politically, socially and economically disempowered. It also calls for a holistic approach to knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy that recognises the university's embeddedness in a broader ecological and socio-cultural context. Through this exploration, the article contributes to the scholarly discourse on the decolonisation of universities and seeks to inspire new lines of enquiry addressing inequality and the pursuit of social justice in Southern African higher education institutions.
Decolonising The University In South Africa : A Precondition for Liberation
2012
The essay itself means to treat the way in which the general suppression and marginalisation of the African perspective in South African Education is an affirmation of an age-old philosophic racism and a confirmation of the pre-dominance of the white-supremacist power structure in South Africa. Our method will be to briefly treat the general history of racism with specific reference to the contact between Europeans and Africans, more specifically indigenous South Africans some time after the expeditions of conquest and settlement of the European invaders. We will then focus on this racism in the domain of education, focusing particularly on higher education and using the discipline of philosophy as a case study both because it is the area of training of the present author as well as because philosophy pervades all other disciplines and so our focus should have a specific as well as a general appeal. After arguing that very little has changed in the culture and practice of universities in South Africa since 1994, we will finally show how this condition of our universities, presents a serious obstacle to both Historical Justice and true liberation for the indigenous African people of the country.
#MustFall–The Event: Rights, student activism and the transformation of South African universities
University on the Border: Crisis of authority and precarity, 2021
In this chapter, we read the 2015-2016 #MustFall movement as an “event” in Badiou’s sense of the word. Employing Badiou’s (2005, 2013) interpretive scheme, we suggest that the #MustFall movement fractured the appearance of regularity of the South African higher education landscape to such an extent that it can be considered the kind of ‘event’ that Badiou defines as “something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable. [It] is, in a certain way, merely a proposition. It proposes something to us” (Badiou, 2013:9-10). Reflecting on a long-term research project on ‘transformative student citizenship’ that started in 2011, we argue that the #MustFall movement’s contemporary emergence and forms of political action that disrupted the functioning of the social order can be perceived as a demand for ‘retreating’ rights. We suggest that the ‘event’ breaks with established power’s control over what should or should not be considered possible. While established power institutes and sustains this distinction through the use of state apparatus and capital, the ‘event’ extracts the possible from the impossible: “the ‘event’, for its part, will transform what has been declared impossible into a possibility” (Badiou, 2013:11). Though much work needs to be done within the realm of what is pragmatically possible, the case for a free, ‘decolonised’ higher education system has most certainly been snatched from the realm of the impossible. We tentatively explore what possibilities are proposed by #MustFall–The Event. For this chapter, #MustFall–The Event will designate the protests prior, during and after the 2015-2016 student ‘uprising’. This ‘uprising’ nearly brought the country to a standstill and temporarily disrupted the appearance of social stability. Mainly peaceful, productive and unsettling, the protests were also accompanied by violence, damage to property, intimidation and bullying across a wide spectrum, and political opportunism and proprietary inclinations of all sorts. Our analysis here does not make any judgements in these regards, nor will it attempt to provide an explanatory historical interpretation. These matters are well-traversed in a large number of opinion pieces as well as substantial studies such as Free Fall: Why South African Universities are in a Race against Time (Ray, 2016) and Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa (Booysen, 2016). Instead, we make a modest attempt at formulating the possibilities that have been opened up by #MustFall–The Event. To do so, we briefly provide a context for positioning student politics and protests within broader societal processes. We then proceed to read the #MustFall movements as a Badioun ‘event’, followed by an exploration of #MustFall–The Event as an instance for ‘retreating’ rights. In conclusion, we contemplate the implications of our analysis for the discourse on social justice.
The need to transform higher education in South Africa is indisputable. This article explores how the recent #mustfall protests, as an Event, could inform transformation. An Event follows three phases: reframing (shattering the frame through which we understand reality), the fall (the loss of a primordial unity which is a retroactive illusion) and enlightenment (subjectivity itself as an eventuality). In conclusion, I pose that a shift towards who comes into presence in higher education and not (a pre-determined) what comes into presence, could provide possible footpaths to decolonialisation and transformation. Through processes of subjectification, the subject(s) of higher education could reframe historic ontological othering and actively take part in the process(es) of becoming and being human in higher education in (post)colonial South Africa.