Decolonisation as a Spatial Question: The Student Accommodation Crisis and Higher Education Transformation

Abstract

ABSTRACTDebates on epistemological decolonisation have focused on curriculum issues. There has not been sufficient analysis of how questions of decolonisation are shaped by other factors, such as the very spatial location of universities. This article argues that the colonial nature of the university in South Africa is directly linked spatially to the historic land question of dispossession in South Africa. Historically, South African universities came to be fixed as physical and cultural elements of towns and cities based on the broader trajectory of settler-colonialism and apartheid urban development, segregation and the Group Areas logic of the apartheid state. We therefore argue that in order to grapple with transforming the tertiary sector as a whole, we must conceptualise universities not only as spaces of learning but also as spatial entities in themselves that are directly related to the demography and economies of towns and cities. This paper critically explores the spatial locatedness of the university through the crisis of student accommodation encountered by working-class students in the system. We propose that inasmuch as the university is an “epistemic entity” entangled within colonial and imperial circuits of knowledge-making and power, it is also a “spatial entity” located in social geographies of inequality that were produced through racialised spatial relations of colonisation and apartheid.