Abstract
In South Africa, students who are poor, black and come from rural communities with poorly resourced schools are vulnerable to being victims of epistemic injustice. This is because they are usually seen as under-appreciated knowers who have low (English) language proficiency and deficits in academic literacy. In an attempt to provide a nuanced characterisation of youth from rural areas, this paper reflects on one student’s life-history interviews and his photo- story that form part of data collected since 2017 for Miratho – a project on achieved higher education learning outcomes for low-income university students. The paper uses a capabilities approach as an interpretive framework for the qualitative data and theorises that students’ linguistic capital and narrative capital are epistemic materials that can be mobilised into the ‘capability for epistemic contribution’ as conceptualised by Miranda Fricker. The paper thus makes a case for higher education researchers and educators to recognise poor black youth from rural communities as both givers and takers of knowledge or ‘epistemic contributors’. It argues that doing so constitutes an ethical response to the structural inequalities that limit equitable university access and participation for youth in this demographic.
Highlights
In South Africa, poverty has a spatial dimension; it remains concentrated in rural areas that were previously segregated along ethnic lines during apartheid and set aside for black people (Walker and Mathebula, 2019; Sulla and Zikhali, 2018)
In using the image of a Recognising poor black youth from rural communities in South Africa as epistemic contributors 77 child who appears alone in the middle of the street at night, Rimisa makes a symbolic reference to the disorientation he experienced when he first entered university, demonstrating the ability to reflect and make inferences to other examples of being lost and confused in the telling of his story
In this paper, I have argued that higher education researchers and educators ought to acknowledge the capitals students bring with them to university in order to facilitate the mobilisation of such capitals and foster epistemic contributions
Summary
In South Africa, poverty has a spatial dimension; it remains concentrated in rural areas that were previously segregated along ethnic lines during apartheid and set aside for black people (Walker and Mathebula, 2019; Sulla and Zikhali, 2018). Students who are knowledgeable about poverty based on their personal experience might be recognised as credible knowers because of this, but may still suffer epistemic injustice due to not having access to particular kinds of informational and interpretive materials - before they enter university - to render their understanding intelligible to themselves or others.
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