2024 UFS Exceptional Academic Achievement for Team Research at UFS Awarded to Higher Education and Human Development Research Group
Overview
Sustained effort over 12 years has gone into building this new and rather remarkable research group in which Prof Melanie Walker’s leadership, hard work, and long-term commitment to the group and to the UFS have been central at all times. Her focus has been on fostering a collective that understands the importance of each person’s own development, achievement, and ownership of their own project, but always with a mutual responsibility, solidarity, and care towards all others in the group. Collective learning is a core feature of how the group operates. We have tried to live by and operationalise ubuntu principles in forming and sustaining the well-being and achievements of our group, where the well-being of the group turns on the well-being of all the team members. We acknowledge, too, the families who stand behind each person in the group. Our students do not come from well-off backgrounds and the majority have been first-generation PhDs, making for a significant and important equity contribution to class, country, and heritage by the group, by Prof Melanie Walker, and by the UFS.
Each person matters and is supported, and their full potentiality nourished in and by the team and by wider networks of exposure to international visitors. All are encouraged (and funded) to attend national and international conferences and present their own research. Achievements are celebrated and valued at public events and via our WhatsApp group: graduations, our HEHD book posters ‘wall of fame’, small-scale ECR funding awards, new publications, personal birthdays, and so forth. As people spend more time in the group, expectations are raised as to what they do and contribute, all building towards a CV and career pathway.
However, it is important to emphasise that all of this is underpinned by the expectation and achievement of the highest quality research, which can be compared with the best universities in the world – this is affirmed year after year by external examiners, by successful funding bids and publications, and by the feedback we get from our steady stream of international visitors. Moreover, having a cohesive theme in common – human development in the space of higher education – enables constructive and creative interaction across the range of our projects, while also being sufficiently broad to allow each person to explore their own particular interest. In short, a ‘broad but vague’ common approach allows us to break new-knowledge ground and produce cutting-edge work. Nor could it happen without the sustained institutional commitment by the UFS – which funds most of our PhDs and half of our postdoctoral fellows, the support of successive deputy vice-chancellors, as well as the vice-chancellor. In addition, core funding from the NRF under Prof Melanie Walker’s SARCHi Chair enables the range of our development activities.
The core team members are Professor Melanie Walker, Associate Professor Mikateko Mathebula, and Associate Professor Faith Mkwanazi. The latter two are PhD graduates of the programme. There is a revolving cohort of full-time doctoral students (up to nine in any one year) who all graduated in just over three years before moving on to postdoctoral positions, or in the case of postdoctoral fellows (up to six in any one year) to university appointments, and the occasional international early-career fellowship attachment (three so far). Current PhDs (2024) are Judith Sikala (F, Zimbabwe); Daizy Nalwamba (F, Zambia), Tsholofelo Motlogeloa (M, South Africa), Crespen Ndlovu (M, Zimbabwe), Suzyika Nyimbili (Zambia), Aluwani Mauda (F, South Africa), Monthusi Magosi (M, Botswana), Gloria Adjei (F, Ghana), Tolulope Mshelia (F, Nigeria). Current postdocs are Fenella Somerville (F, South Africa), Tiffany Banda (F, Malawi), Simon Ngalomba (M, Tanzania), Edward Mboyonga (M, Zambia), Kurauone Masungo (M, Zimbabwe) and Chimwemwe Phiri (M, Malawi). Some of the postdocs and PhDs have been involved in research projects as fieldworkers and researchers (for example, Mathebula started as researcher on a four-year funded project); most recently, Fenella Somerville and Tiffany Banda worked on the Sustainability Universities in South Africa project.
For the first five-year review in 2018 (the second, successful review was in 2022), one international evaluator wrote: ‘The work that has been done since the original grant was awarded is considerable and the outputs both from Prof Walker and from her colleagues and students is impressive … I have seldom seen such a strong application, either from NRF or from any of the other funding bodies for which I provide advice (including ESRC, Australian Research Council, and various Canadian and European funding agencies). The achievements of both Melanie Walker and the group of people with whom she works (staff and students) at the UFS are remarkable’.
The success of this team is due to hard work, dedication, and partnering with others to contribute to knowledge building for a better world. Together we have built a remarkable and sustainable research ecosystem, where individual and collective excellence can flourish.
Significant contributions to our field of expertise, and contributions to South African (and global) scholarship with impact
The research programme of this interdisciplinary group (across education, sociology, philosophy and development studies) 1) theorises, operationalises, and critically analyses higher education policy and practices, framed by concerns about justice, an ecology of knowledges, decolonisation, and solidarity; 2) connects the processes and findings of research with practice to support public reasoning and dialogue; 3) attempts to influence transformative change in higher education in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA); and 4) contributes to critical reflection on global higher education dynamics in ways that foreground human development and justice. The programme has been coherent, with three distinctive but intersecting themes: 1) Transitions and trajectories: access, success, and participation in and beyond higher education; 2) Knowledge, curriculum, pedagogies and in/equalities; 3) The public good. Broadly, the linked key activities under the chair are 1) Southern scholarship/knowledge generation, and 2) capacity building of graduate students and early career researchers.
The research group is remarkable in that it has been built from the bottom up from PhD and early career projects under the leadership of the chair and in pioneering and producing a distinctive national and global research space of human development in higher education spaces. The team now comprises three senior researchers, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, all carrying out cutting-edge research of national importance and continental and global significance, focused on well-being, equalities, and freedoms in and through higher education in South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).
Over 12 years, an inclusive and sustainable research eco-system has been built. Importantly, high-quality social science research is never the work of just one talented researcher; it is an ever-evolving property of the ecosystem in which people collaborate and support each other as a diverse but cohesive team. The team has a clear and shared goal – to contribute to capabalitarian scholarship in and from SSA, with work oriented to producing knowledge on higher education justice and equality in the human development space, to build capacity through training, and to do work with societal relevance and impact. The global quality of work and thinking done at all levels is always central, while creative freedom allows researchers from early career to senior researchers to develop and pursue the research interests that matter to them.
Having pioneered work on higher education in human development as a small team, we ‘punch above our weight’ in terms of global recognition and standing (evident, for example, in Prof Walker being elected as President of the HDCA, and various team members leading thematic groups or serving on the HDCA executive committee over the years). The team has contributed to a substantial body of research knowledge through the 25 PhD theses completed thus far, to numerous books and journals, and through regular participation in conferences nationally (SAERA, HELTASA) and globally (HDCA, BAICE, CIES, UKFIET, SRHE, HECU). Global research and development links have been forged with SSA, Europe (Spain, Italy, Germany), the UK (Lancaster, Bristol, Oxford, UCL, Warwick, Nottingham), and the USA (Minnesota). This has enabled us over 12 years to generate innovative and original ideas in a team that learns from each other.