This article engages posthuman theory to propose a rethinking of the theory and practice of relational pedagogies within higher education (HE). There has been renewed emphasis within HE discourses on the significance of relationships within learning and teaching as a means to offer a counter-view to an uncaring marketised HE system. This article…

The continued erasure of place and politics from modernity's education systems and disciplinary knowledges perpetuates racialised and ecological injustices and extractive relations. In this paper I affirm the necessity of using evolving methods of critical place inquiry and relocalisation in higher education to redress these erasures. I illustrate…

The increasingly complex socio-technical and economic challenges of our time place considerable pressure on engineering programmes. To ensure that graduates are well-prepared to address these challenges requires curriculum developers to select the appropriate knowledge for the engineering programme. A number of key theorists, notably from the…

Student voice in governance and decision-making has become ubiquitous in higher education, evolving from buzzword to orthodoxy. Student engagement measures have become instruments of quality control, with students expected to take an active role in shaping institutional policy and practice. In this paper, we argue that this ubiquity of demands for…

Suellen Shay's research focused extensively on both the challenges of creating socially-just higher education curricula and the knowledge and practices of the field of educational development. Shay's work highlights the important ways in which curricula define what it means to be educated and the importance of socially-just curricula that provide…

Despite the ongoing 'globalization' of higher education, the curricula of most contemporary universities continue to be based upon epistemological assumptions deeply rooted in the Western philosophical tradition. Critiques of this lingering hegemony are evident in the growing calls for the decolonization of knowledge to make way for indigenous and…

A concerted attempt to offer a temporal lens (the way we make sense of and relate to time changes) underlying decolonizing pedagogy and curriculum (DCP) remains absent. Drawing on student resistance as an entry point, we offer a temporal account of DCP by unearthing the entanglements between past, present, and future underlying DCP enactments. We…

Curricula do not fall onto the page fully formed, but are built around a series of choices made by educators. The curriculum establishes which knowledge is considered valid and which is not; the works of women and people of colour are typically underrepresented within curricula, and the issues affecting these groups are frequently neglected. This…

The purpose of this article is to argue for the deconstruction rather than the decolonisation of the neocolonial curriculum. Globalisation facilitates the democratisation of higher education, which is now accessible to more people than ever before, but globalisation also facilitates the expansion of the ideological dominance of the Global North…

In this paper, I explore whether and how white people can make a meaningful contribution to decolonising university curricula. Drawing on my experiences as a white academic teaching at a South African university, I argue that identity matters when talking about decoloniality and that whites need to think carefully about the effects of their…

This paper uses Bernstein's sociology of knowledge and studies of professional knowledge and expertise to identify how knowledge value is constituted in higher education curricula. It is argued that different knowledge structures and forms of disciplinary community influence how curricula are determined, and lead to distinctive types of knowledge…

This article reports on an analysis undertaken in the field of African philosophies using selected conceptual tools from Maton's Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). In response to calls by South African students for 'decolonising' the Humanities curriculum, the practical purpose of the analysis was to generate theoretically-informed guidelines for…

The paper argues that powerful regional knowledge is necessary and possible and that there are historical precedents supporting these claims. Regional knowledge is being used in a double sense: the first Bernsteinian, the second in relation to knowledge generated outside the academy. Both are important if the debate is not to be confined solely to…

In response to the current demands and trends within education, the disciplines as one of the core long-standing organizing structures within knowledge production and transmission are questioning and shifting what and how they teach. Universities are increasingly offering interdisciplinary subjects and programmes as an alternative to or alongside…

This paper was motivated by student protests at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where the Rhodes Must Fall collective called for the "decolonisation" of the university's curriculum. I deliberately adopt a "decolonial gaze" to re-describe the structural and cultural conditioning of the post-colonial university and the…