Conference Agenda

In the national universities of South Africa, various events during the past years indicate that students suffer tremendously under different kinds of oppression. It is widely acknowledged that students from poor, rural geographical areas find the university space as alienating and not speaking to their life worlds. In this qualitative paper, I respond to Fataar’s (2019) idea of the “misrecognised” university student in the South African context. Fataar’s (2019) focus of student agency in the context of Africa is on the students’ movement, space, scale and the body in trying to account for how students transact their educational lives. I attempt to add on the historical, structural, affective and post-human complexity of students in the context of South African universities.

The university sphere is rapidly changing and adapting to the demands and challenges of the current era. At present, while we are gradually moving out of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, students and academics at universities must respond to these rapid changing environments. Fataar & Norodien-Fataar (2021) concurred with the work of Cope and Kalantzis (2017), which provides a productive schema for developing a digital learning ecology in universities. This learning ecosystem refers to a “complex interaction of human, textual, discursive, and spatial dynamics … which take on a coherent, systemic form” (Fataar and Norodien-Fataar, 2021: 162). Academics must rethink pedagogical approaches to accommodate changes in learning spaces and relations, and in how they will engage with learning mediation and assessment practices (Fataar and Norodien-Fataar, 2021) to stimulate knowledge acquisition and critical engagement with the knowledge possessed by students. The concern of this paper is on students who are gaining access to universities after imperatives of democratization in the country.

In post-apartheid South Africa, youth in Black communities were often described in terms of their marginalization and labels of being disadvantaged. Previous research, such as the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 2003), has shown consensus in that student´ socio-economic family background significantly influences academic success. On the contrary, recent post‑structuralist theorists engage in the complex interplay of structure and agency (Kapp et al., 2014) in determining students’ academic success. In this regard, Thomson (2009) claimed that the lives of individuals are both constrained and agentic. In this sense, the concept of agency is comprehended as an individual’s capacity to make conscious choices and to act and improvise in response to particular situations (Holland et al., 1998). Individuals will act and interact within their context to gain the needed resources in their attempts at self-formation.

My focus on students coming from historically disadvantaged communities aims to contribute to ongoing debates about social justice for humans/students in the university sector. I argue that if institutional practices recognize, embrace and align with students´ agency, resilience and adaption, an institutional platform could possibly engage students in their intellectual becoming. In this paper, I am guided by two questions: 1) How can students from historically disadvantaged communities use their critical horizontal knowledges to connect with disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge of the university to enhance critical specialized consciousness in the becoming of ethical humans? and: 2) How can an African theorization of student agency form the basis to consciously reframe the core institutional function of the university? In responding to these questions, I locate my arguments in African-student agency, using literature by African scholars to gain an understanding of the African concept of student agency.

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge in calls to decolonize the university. For a long time, criticism against the university’s epistemic hegemony (cf. Mignolo, 2011) had remained mostly confined to scholarly circles of, for instance, feminist, post/decolonial or social and cultural studies scholars (cf. de Sousa Santos et al., 2008; bell hooks in Media Education Foundation, 2002). Under the influence of the increasing multipolarity and diversity of our contemporary societies and of international decolonization activism, such concerns have now become much more mainstream.

As a result, and in response to criticisms of the epistemological canon that the assumed universality of Western knowledge production has reinforced and the sustained inequalities this produces, universities, scholars and activists across the globe have formulated different proposals to decolonize the university. Depending on the context, these proposals range from: addressing the crisis of representation (Begum & Saini, 2019), diversifying the curriculum, widening participation, changing staff recruitment policies (Abu Moghli & Kadiwal, 2021; Pimblott, 2020), removing physical traces from the university campus (Newsinger, 2016), and so on.

One particular option that has been proposed is to stimulate a pluri-versal understanding of the world (Mignolo, 2011) within the university (Gallien, C., & جاليان, ك, 2020). This option of pluri-versity (Martinez-Vargas, 2020) goes beyond stimulating a more diverse composition of staff, students and curriculum within the university. Rather it proposes an altogether different, pluriversal understanding of the world; an understanding, sensing, and knowing of the world as a world in “which many worlds can co-exist” (Mignolo 2011). Seeking to preserve the heterogeneity of the world and the plurality of worldviews, the option of the pluri-versity seeks to spark “imaginaries beyond the naturalized grammar of modernity”(Andreotti et al, 2015, 22). As such this option goes “beyond reform” (Andreotti et al, 2015, 22) of the university as a modern institute of education and knowledge production.

Many reflections have already been formulated about why a pluri-versal understanding is needed (Boidin et al, 2012) and what it could practically consist of in universities in countries that were formerly colonized (e.g. Stein et al, 2021; Le Grange, 2020). Little has however been written on how spaces of pluri-versality could practically be generated in or at the border of a European university (Gallien, C., & جاليان, ك, 2020). Moreover, several questions regarding the pluriversal spaces, such as ‘how can bridges be built between different worldviews?’ or ‘how do power relations play out in the pluriverse?’( Gallien, C., & جاليان, ك, 2020 ) remain unanswered.

In 2022 we undertook ‘The Conversations’. This public experiment was a practical attempt to create the conditions to make possible a ‘pluri-versity’ (cf. Van Ruyskensvelde & Berghmans, 2022). In this paper we wil present an analysis of this experiment. This analysis will also serve as a stepping stone towards a wider reflection on some of the hitherto undertheorized issues with regards to the creation of pluriversal spaces in Western higher education.

The notion of diversity, which has originally been designated a role of a ‘quality product’ for markets, institutions and even whole nations to lay evidence of their tolerance, has been criticized for implicating some forms of discrimination while offsetting others (Ahmed 2012). In our project, developed two years ago at the Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany, we challenge the classical channels of knowledge production and distribution by inviting external actors to diversify university curricula. In a larger sense, Vielfalt bildet project points to new tendencies that aim at de-polarising the historical and recent notions of diversity.

We start by arguing that diversity as an inherently paradoxical discourse needs to be introduced and discussed from different perspectives, especially standpoints disenfranchised by inequalities confronted with dominant (hegemonic) positions (e.g. the educators and activists who lived through non-normative experiences. In its theoretical part, this paper draws on a discussion about the negativity and positivity in the diversity discourses in the last twenty years. We agree with Sara Ahmed (2012) that positive readings of diversity are as much conducive to good practices as fostering liberal conviviality although we claim that they do not, typically, give in to liberal trends. The problematic notion of integration - used interchangeably with diversity - has in some cases led to less diversity as a result (Badiou 2009). Drawing on recent readings of Balibar’s and Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, and Class (Bojadžijev and Klingnan 2018) and on the practical solutions for more heterogeneous curriculum within German Educational Sciences (Walgenbach 2014; Kasatchenko & Zitzelsberger 2020), we stress the necessity to rethink epistemological ties between learning in a white, Western academia and teaching in a multi-cultural society.

Moving on to praxis, we introduce the work of our project in the third year of its existence, linking the experience with a conception of diversity that opts for a two-way education through a reflexive process and professional praxis. The ViBi Project (2020-2024) is funded by a state organization Living democracy (Demokratie leben). The work of ViBi is based on organizing events (discussions, lectures, workshops, etc.), in which civil society actors, such as activists and leaders of local minority groups, speakers and teachers, exchange their experiences and knowledge with educational science students. The activities of Vielfalt bildet (Diversity educates) project aim at opening the walls of the university towards the external public by including organizations and charities founded by minority groups into the teaching curricula and events proposed to students. The premise is that shaping academic knowledge must be diversified to help young professionals in the field of educational science understand the myriad ways in which human mind shape and is shaped by in multicultural contexts.