Post-apartheid University Research Articles

Collaboration and partnerships between South African higher education institutions and stakeholders: case study of a post-apartheid University

In this paper we attempt to locate collaboration and partnerships between higher education institutions and their stakeholders. These include the state, students, teaching and administrative staff, the community and corporate entities. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the contribution of stakeholders to the developmental trajectory and sustenance of higher education institutions using the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa as the case study. The paper analyses existing scholarship to understand the importance of stakeholders and their impact on higher education institutions. The study first examines the stakeholders’ concept in the post-apartheid period, the concept of stakeholder in relation to HEIs, UWC and collaborations and partnership with stakeholders from a theoretical perspective, and the stakeholder collaborations and partnership from UWC perspective. The study adopted a qualitative approach utilising existing data from literature and interviews with participants. Conceptual analysis was used to analyse the data. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with key participants. In total, 10 participants participated in the interviews.

Placing Students at the Centre of the Decolonizing Education Imperative: Engaging the (Mis)Recognition Struggles of Students at the Postapartheid University

Misrecognition of South African university students is at the heart of this article. Misrecognition refers in this article to the exclusionary institutional discourses and practices of this country’s universities, which continue to prevent the majority of their (Black) students’ from achieving a successful education. It is a conceptual account of the ways in which these misrecognized students develop a complex educational life in their quest for a university education. The article argues that at the heart of students’ university experiences is an essential misrecognition of who they are, and how they access and encounter their university studies. I suggest that gaining greater purchase on their (mis)recognition struggles may place the university in a position to establish an engaging recognition platform to facilitate their educational success. Divided into four sections, the article starts with a rationale for bringing the institutional misrecognition of students into view. This is followed by a theoretical consideration of the notion of recognition, which opens space for what I call the recognitive agency of the education subject, who remains largely unknown to the university. The third section provides an account of the nature and extent of Black students’ survivalist educational navigations and practices in their family, community, school, and university contexts. The final and concluding section of the article presents a normative argument for developing an education platform for facilitating a productive encounter aimed at animating students’ educational becoming. This, I argue, should proceed on the basis of a decolonizing knowledge approach, involving curriculum recognition, which would accord students the conceptual tools for developing the epistemic virtues necessary for complex decolonized living.

University–community engagement as place-making? A case of the University of Fort Hare and Alice

ABSTRACTIn the South African context, the post-apartheid university is deemed a critical contributor towards the national development agenda and community engagement is a significant principle through which universities would bring about social and economic transformation. This is reflective of a growing global movement of networks of universities iterating the civic and social role of higher education and its responsibility to its place. Drawing on notions of place-making, this study briefly recalls the histories of the University of Fort Hare and the town of Alice and evidences the more contemporary engagement policy, design and praxis of both, to surmise the significance the university gives to its place. The findings reveal a disconnect between the University of Fort Hare and the town of Alice and conclude that whilst the University of Fort Hare remains the economic power in Alice, it has no intrinsic commitment towards either the town or place-making.

Higher education policy change and the hysteresis effect: Bourdieusian analysis of transformation at the site of a post-apartheid university

In this article we focus on constraints to post-apartheid transformation in the higher education sector of South Africa via a case study of an attempt to introduce a new curriculum for the Bachelor of Education. Thirty-one semi-structured interviews were the main data-gathering method. We use Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, habitus and hysteresis to explain why transformation proved difficult in this case. We analyse the higher education field that gave rise to this curriculum with a brief historical overview of the position of Afrikaners as the dominated part of the dominant white group in the early years of the twentieth century. Their lack of cultural, economic and intellectual capital gave rise to a position-taking that placed Afrikaans language universities in general and Faculties of Education in particular into the heteronomous part of the higher education field. At first the curriculum, and their intellectual habitus, was in synch. However, it started to drift apart because of a number of economic and political changes that made their position at the heteronomous part of the higher education field increasingly untenable. Because of their insulation from the wider higher education field, academics in the Faculty of Education were at first only vaguely aware of the implications of these changes. However, when a dean was appointed in 2000 with a mandate to transform the curriculum for the BEd, they experienced hysteresis, and they were no longer feeling at home in the field. This explains why the new curriculum was consequently substantially subverted.

Symbolic Representations of the Post-apartheid University

Symbolic Representations of the Post-apartheid University

Language policy, symbolic power and the democratic responsibility of the post-apartheid university

(2003). Language policy, symbolic power and the democratic responsibility of the post-apartheid university. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 179-190.