Sustainability and University in South  Africa  (SUSA)-July 2022- December 2023

Research Team

UFS: Melanie Walker (PI), Lochner Marais (CI), Fenella Somerville & Tiffany Banda - research associates. UP: Talita Calitz (CI), Patience Mukwambo (CI), Post-doc (tbc)

Funding

NRF (grant no 86540)

Aim

To investigate and critically understand: 1) the sustainable (ecologically and socially) (South) African university, 2) and justice-facing, sustainable university futures, 3) from a variety of intersecting stakeholder perspectives.

Background

Universities in South Africa are complex spaces, both reproductive and transformative and fractured by persistent inequalities imported from the broader society and history. We understand the context as one of a long history of colonization and apartheid, a long durée of persistent inequalities including in and through higher education in its reproduction of exclusion and disadvantage. Repairing and remaking futures remains an urgent and complex challenge, especially when we factor in sustainability. We also understand higher education as having the capacity to interrupt inter-generational transmissions of privilege and to export social and ecological justice ideas back into society. We thus understand higher education as being a critical space for advancing sustainability-as-justice. Universities constitute ‘society’s critical learning infrastructure’ (Facer 2020). Universities can develop as concerned and learning communities; they are social institutions produced by society and sustained by society. Changes in universities may or can influence changes in society, including structures of coloniality and knowledge, racism, gender and climate justice values. Universities are also distinctive in that they both produce knowledge and transmit knowledge to students. How they do that, according to which values, opportunities, resources, aspirations and outcomes is of importance in our society. The challenge, then, is how higher education can mobilize and develop transformative, transgressive learning spaces towards sustainability and sustainable futures, and what such sustainable futures should look like for universities in particular. The broad point is the need to be reflexive about universities as a site for imaginative reconstruction which is relational, critical and experimental and which requires us to look at transforming how we live as university communities, in society. Hence transforming universities continues to be a key imperative in advancing Constitutional values of equality, freedom and dignity and human rights, as well as the capability to live in a heathy environment.  

Conceptual framing

We draw on the capabilities approach as a way to interrogate social, institutional and individual capabilities expansion, and agency and opportunities to function, as well as being aligned in values and practices to justice and Constitutional values of freedom, equality and dignity. We wish to find out how diverse stakeholders conceptualise sustainablity and transformative learning spaces. We anticipate that decolonial thinking will be helpful in interrogating epistemic unfreedoms in universities as they are, but also in paying attention to an ecology of cosmovisions beyond the Westcentric to contribute to envisaging and imagining university futures. Our three intersecting conceptual dimensions are thus: planetary consciousness, repair, and transformative learning.

We anticipate bringing together multi-dimensional knowledge: from above (university leadership), from the middle (academic staff), and below (students) in understanding thesustainable university in our context. We are interested and how education and transformative (empowering) and transgressive (going beyond what is known) learning, including transdisplinarity and an ecology of knowledges, are envisaged across  intersecting spaces of classroom, campus and community. In this way we will co-construct a conceptual and practical understanding across two universities: what values and capabilities matter, what enables and what gets in the way according to diverse stakeholders, and then to compare and contrast what emerges at the two university sites.

Methods

• Advisory Group
• Phase One: desk-based study (literatures, websites, relevant projects)
• Phase Two: investigate two universities in depth (interviews and focus groups). Compare and contrast (February –June 2023)
• Participatory story telling projects (lecturers, students, workers) (July)
• Phase three: take our early findings to a broader reference group to include at least three other South African universities and two African universities. The method is one of dialogue, listening and reflexive understanding. 
• Phase four: online colloquium will broaden the discussion nationally and internationally. We will produce case studies and a comparative case report.
  
  Outcomes
  
  
• Story-telling projects
• Seminar and exhibition
• Case study report/s, one for each university plus overview section
• Policy brief
• Conference presentations x 4
• Open access book
• A working definition of ‘sustainability’ for debate