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…

A presumed indicator of change, in terms of the South African higher education sector's racialised past, are the quantitative measures of numerical 'diversity' within the academic staff composition at historically white institutions. To better inform policy, academic development curricula and institutional culture, this study focuses on…

In today's world of multimedia communication, the use of multiple modes of discourse is prevalent in various fields. The international academic community has taken an interest in studying multimodality from different perspectives. This paper uses CiteSpace 6.1.R6 to visually analyze literature on multimodal discourse studies (MDS) in the Web of…

This article examines some of the discussions and debates in the literature about workers' control and self-management, which have assumed an importance in the context of the search for an alternative to the prevailing global socioeconomic, political and cultural system and its persistent crises. The article reviews and analyses a range of…

After centuries of "Eurocentric" linguistic ideology, the South African government has formulated African language development and multilingualism as one priority in the education system. While only English, and decreasingly Afrikaans, are the only "established" languages of instruction at tertiary level, most universities in…

Supporting a sustainable world in a situation of war is the background to this study. Additionally, interdisciplinarity forms a part of the dialogical ecosystem of searching for suitable solutions in a complex reality. For such purposes, in this contribution, the co-authors reflect on an actual instance of war. The first author provides a…

Using a culturally relevant conceptual framework, we examined student outcomes from engagement in student activism for students (N = 1,238) at a South African university. Findings show participation in student activism differed by students of different genders, population groups, and academic disciplines. Students involved in activism reported…

This study explores how libraries mediated interactions between black readers and texts in twentieth century South Africa. By situating libraries as vital infrastructures of reading, I critically examine how librarians tried to build the habit of reading within black communities. Beginning in the 1930s with the Carnegie Corporation of New York's…

Since 1994, South African journalism education has undergone waves of introspection about curricula and methods of teaching as educators respond to the challenging realities of the post-apartheid environment. The most recent challenge to journalism educators is the student protests which started at the end of 2015, questioning the high costs of…

Seamus Heaney (like Stimpson and Parker in this issue) speaks of: "A historic dialectic [which] exists between the beautiful and the bestial". In this speech, delivered on 13 December 2012, Njabulo Ndebele reflects on the stories South Africa tells itself about past atrocity, as a way of achieving "the future we have desired".…

Educational policies and practices are influenced by cultural, political, and economic factors, and this is also true of specialized educational approaches such as gifted education. Factors such as a country's cultural tendency toward egalitarianism or meritocracy, whether the political system is centralized or decentralized, and the degree to…

Taking as its point of departure Ahier's location of the problem of citizenship in the context of the changes that globalisation and neo-liberalism have brought about in higher education, this article focuses on the conceptual preconditions that need to underpin the idea of "teaching" citizenship through the university curriculum. The…

Graduate unemployment is especially problematic in a country where much emphasis is placed on furthering academic studies for economic and personal rewards. This article investigates the relationship between career choice and unemployment length among graduates from a South African university. Data were collected by means of a survey questionnaire…

There is a paucity of South African literature that uses feminist critical approaches as a conceptual tool to examine intersections of social justice and citizenship. This article aims to address this gap by examining the potential of critical feminist approaches to transform conceptions of citizenship in higher education. It outlines how…

The paper focuses on the issue of children's political participation and considers the idea of political participation understood as a human right. Contingently it considers the question of children as agents or potential political actors, as well as the assumed limitations of their role. The paper begins by offering an outline of how children's…