The Borders of Transformation: The Continent and the South African University

This colloquium considers competing and complementary approaches to race and nationality in South African higher education.

A collaboration between the Internationalization and Strategic Partnerships Office, the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab, the NRF-DST SARChI Chair in Mobility and the Politics of Difference and the NRF-DST SARChI Chair in Critical Diversity Studies.

This colloquium considers competing and complementary approaches to race and nationality in South African higher education, at a moment that marks ten years since the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall protests as well as being characterised by the increasing visibility and weaponisation of national and international xenophobia.

It poses this question as a reflection not just on the Fallist movements, but on a three-decade long history of contentious post-Apartheid efforts to align the country’s universities with broader commitments to equity and progressive social change. Current attacks on academic institutions represent them as sites of illicit patronage of apparently unqualified foreigners, while foreign academics themselves navigate bureaucratic mazes and hostile atmospheres.

What can these contradictions tell us about the processes of transformation and change that were meant to be invigorated by #RMF? The colloquium also considers future institutional trajectories in an era of resource scarcity, persistent domestic and global inequality, and rampant populist anti-intellectualism. At its heart, it asks how universities, and the scholars and activists housed within them, can respond to stormy political waters and to potentially competing visions of justice and transformation.

What might it mean to be an African university in South Africa, and what will it take to realise that vision? 

Programme 

Introduction  

• Lorena Nunez Carrasco, Wits  

Transformation after the ‘decolonial turn’ (chaired by Nicky Falkof) 

• Ahmed Veriava, Wits 
• Srila Roy, Wits 
• Salim Vally, UJ 
• Mxolisi Makhubo, UJ 
• Fikile Masikane, UP 

The future of the South/African university (chaired by Loren Landau) 

• William Mpofu, WiCDS  
• Ylva Rodny-Gumede, UJ 
• Samia Chasi, Wits  
• Sarah Mosetsa, HSRC 

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Decolonial Feminisms Seminar Series at Stockholm University

With Srila Roy, Professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Zoomlink: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/65771298622 

Srila Roy is a leading voice in global feminist scholarship. Her research focuses on transnational, decolonial, and feminist theory, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, and politics in South Asia and the Global South. She is the author of Dissonant Intimacies (forthcoming), Remembering Revolution, and Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer  Politics in Neoliberal India (Duke University Press, 2022), and co-editor of Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022).

In this talk, Professor Roy develops an approach to decolonising higher education from a Global South feminist perspective. Situating her ideas within current calls to decolonise, she traces key social fault lines—around race, caste, and nationalism—that have shaped institutional dynamics in higher education in India and South Africa.

For questions and code to Gula villan, please contact: fataneh.farahani@etnologi.su.se.

No registration needed.

Warm welcome!

Fataneh, Paula and Tanushree

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