This paper grapples with methodological issues related to ongoing debates on positionality and reflexivity by drawing on the author's experience of conducting research in a culturally familiar field. The paper is based on in-depth qualitative research that examined the lived realities of unemployed young people residing in the township of Daveyton…

This article looks at how institutional peer leadership roles in higher education reproduce social class inequalities. Through an ethnographic case study of Southern African Development Community (SADC) international students studying at Rhodes University in South Africa, I demonstrate how students from privileged class backgrounds possess the…

Democratization of the South African education system was significantly advanced by the South African Schools Act (SASA) promulgated in 1996. SASA gave parents the power to direct the course and substance of their children's education in important ways. The circumstances of its origination, however, left in place crucial features of the country's…

Drawing insight and inspiration from our comrade Aziz Choudry, in this paper, we explore the role of political education and knowledge making in social movement struggles to contest the state and capital around access to water and other public services. Drawing on a decade of organising work in the city of Cape Town and at wider scales, we…

Elite universities are often believed to represent education's gold standard and to produce highly educated luminaries who rightfully take their places leading all the institutions that matter in societies across the world. We begin by explaining how this is so. Then we discuss what we call monster methodologies, suggesting why and how we employed…

This article reflects on the successes and failures of student protests in transforming higher education in South Africa through a Marxist lens. The slow pace of change by the government in addressing structural and systemic inequalities has led to disgruntlement within the student body. In their quest to hasten the process, students engaged in…

In many countries, the contours of skills formation systems are traced back to early struggles over control of apprenticeship. This paper uses a curriculum lens to examine two distinctive policy moments in the history of formal apprenticeships in South Africa and to trace the legacy imprint of direct and indirect race-based exclusion as well as…

Background: Cultural dissonance and exclusion in schools persevere because of a lack of response to diversity. In South Africa, coloniality manifests itself in teaching and learning practices through promoting and privileging selective cultural norms in schools, often to the detriment of poor black children. Aim: Despite the availability of…

This article focuses on the navigation and negotiation of a Zulu student on a diverse university campus in South Africa. Students in higher education institutions bring their life stories, shaped by lived experiences, culture, history, and language, to the campus, while the interconnection between race, language, culture, and gender creates new…

Gender equity among South African principals remains a compelling issue for research. While post-apartheid governmental policies address gender equality, women continue to experience discrimination in the field. A theory of intersectionality was used to examine three Indian South African women's leadership experiences. The focus was to investigate…

Not only does teaching about gender and sexuality diversity lead to some very interesting and often emotionally evocative, pedagogical exchanges; it can also create challenging issues for teachers and students alike. This article focuses on what happens when a module that addresses compulsory heterosexuality and schooling is broached in an…

In South Africa, differential performance in school mathematics with respect to social class remains an enduring concern as reflected in national and international large-scale assessments. The article examines the implications of evaluation for orientations to mathematics in a school populated by learners from upper-middle-class or elite…

Following the end of apartheid in 1994, the ANC government placed education at the centre of its plans to build a nonracial and more equitable society. Yet, by the 2010s a wave of student protests voiced demands for decolonised and affordable education. By following families and schools in Durban for nearly a decade, Mark Hunter sheds new light on…

This article offers an account of the development of student leaders' agency within the institutional culture of their residences at Stellenbosch University (SU). Residences at formerly white universities such as SU are struggling to align their welcoming practices and cultures to the requirements for immersion of the diverse students who now live…

In this article I discuss the vision of education for liberation during the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa. The article focuses specifically on "People's Education" and "Workers' Education". Instead of an instrumental role for education reduced solely to the labour market requirements of business, economic growth and…