Uni-Repair Project, 2025

The expanding disproportionate burdens of climate change and ecological disruptions have been known to scientists, politicians, pundits and policy makers for decades.  These issues have been discussed, debated and written about globally, yet with marginal efforts to usher in sufficient shifts to halt further crises. Now, more and more communities are facing the realities … as global trends in earth’s warming and concomitant climate change and ecological degradations are fuelled further, alongside societal devastations and political fallouts. But these will remain unequally distributed and inequitably experienced. Confronting such realties requires the most urgent actions of our times.  (Farhana Sultana, 2024, Confronting Climate Coloniality, p.2)

Research team

Melanie Walker, UFS (PI), Sandra Boni, UPV (CI), Fenella Somerville, UFS (CI)

Funding

NRF Grant 86540 under the SARCHi Chair in Higher Education and Human Development

The project

Climate change is the defining crisis of our time, and it is happening even more quickly than we feared. But we are far from powerless in the face of this global threat. Climate change is a threat multiplier, especially for the poor and most vulnerable sections of those who live in South African society. It can exacerbate existing vulnerabilities such as poverty, hunger, and poor health and hamper progress towards a dignified way of living. Without action, the climate breakdown in South Africa will cause the extinction of countless species, destroy some of the country’s most precious ecosystems, and devastate human livelihoods. Universities should not stand aside from this urgent challenge.

This project flows from the SUSA project of 2023.  This project was interested in how can/does higher education mobilise and develop transformative learning spaces towards sustainability and sustainable futures in classroom, campus, and community spaces? What do/should such sustainable futures look like for universities in particular? We interviewed people at two university sites to understand and compare how diverse university stakeholders understand sustainability and transformative education across classroom, campus, and community spaces. In the project, we understood ‘sustainability’ as open to debate rather than settled. We brought together multidimensional knowledge: from above (university leadership), from the middle (academic staff), and from below (students and workers) to understand the sustainable university in our context, what enables and what gets in the way of sustainable futures. We also conducted a participatory experiment at one university on the theme of sustainable university communities. 

Uni-Repair now builds on the university case studies to explore cases of best practice at one university in spaces of classroom, campus and community.

As in the SUSA project, we will again foreground the concept of repair (Sriprakash et al. 2020)[1] in conversation with planetary habitability (Mbembe 2023)[2], paying attention to the repair that we need to address and mend in spaces of transformative learning processes and outcomes at the university. Thus, Mbembe (2023, 1) calls for ‘the acceleration of a new planetary consciousness that recognises the interdependent relationships that human beings have with the environment, combats racism, and draws on the archives of the world, including African systems of thought.’

We understand repair to involve addressing past injustices that persist in the present and without attention will be carried forward into the future. We will investigate experiences of climate crisis in examples of teaching, co-curriculum, and community engagement at the UFS to understand how knowledge, relationships, and underlying logics within campus, community, and classrooms can contribute to opportunities to achieve valuable and sustainable lives, with dignity, for and by people and other living beings. We will consider which capabilities (our opportunities to be and to choose ways of living) emerge as valuable for repair and planetary consciousness knowledge, actions, and values. An indigenous ethic of ubuntu will be explored for what it brings to understanding a reparative planetary habitability. Finally, the project will analyse evidence of change in the data in order to contribute to the basis for an action framework and strategies for engaging university stakeholders.

We will reflect with academic staff and students as co-researchers on ‘reparative socio-ecological practices’ in which eco-repair has been taken up. We will use an arts-based approach, mixing interviews, text, and visual images to construct participatory stories about what they did/are doing, what other participants did/are doing towards reparative climate futures, and what the university and higher education community could be doing. We will explore evidence of transformative shifts in values and perspectives. In short, we ask: what does socio-ecological repair look like in practice and what can these cases teach us about the possibility of higher education change for both individuals and institutions? The idea is for our case studies to inform real-world change and advocacy based on why repair matters, how climate repair is done, and how repair ought to be done to advance a socio-eco reparative future for universities and society. I

Research Questions

1. What can we learn about the opportunities and obstacles for repair, reparative futures, and the reparative impact of universities on ‘the living world’ through exemplars of community engagement, co-curricular activities (campus), and teaching (classroom)?
2. What types of transformative learning processes are evident and possible to enhance planetary consciousness and reparative planetary habitability?
3. How can we learn from and integrate an indigenous ontology and ethic with and for ‘decolonial’ repair and decolonising climate coloniality?
4. What are the normative implications for changes needed in universities and the HE system if they are to fulfil their potential role for ‘deep’ rather than ‘shallow’ socio-ecological repair?

Methods

1. Analysis of university and programme websites and relevant document analysis (e.g. University World News, UNESCO, etc.).
2. Three (or more) ‘repair’ participatory case studies at the UFS: (i) classroom –undergraduate teaching and learning example, (ii) campus – co-curricular example, (iii) community engagement example – to find out what planetary habitability, repair, and reparative learning look like in practice, using participatory storytelling methods. Research[3] suggests that five (ideal) conditions are important for higher education participatory methods: equitable partnership, co-production of knowledge, immersion, agency and transformative institutions as practices, and an enabling environment. We will also keep in mind Martinez-Vargas’ (2022)[4] approach with five elements: 1) injustice as the initial issue, 2) a platform to expand people’s capabilities to be and to do, 3) enabling less heard or unheard voices as knowledge creators, 3) internal (diversity of people) and external (diversity of knowledges) epistemic diversity, and 5) uncertain horizon, that is, processes of democratic dialogue and decision. We will keep these ideas in mind in planning and implanting the three participatory storytelling projects.
3. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with key informants directly or indirectly involved in the case studies selected: how they understand planetary habitability, what they think needs to be repaired and why, what they are doing, what universities are doing to address socio-ecological challenges; the contribution of indigenous knowledge and an indigenous ethic, and how, from their experiences, higher education change happens or gets stuck.
4. Global advisory group to act as a sounding board across two moments of the research.
5. Dialogue and engagement at the UFS and dissemination of knowledge through public dialogue and an exhibition, webinars, conferences, and papers.