Using Harvey's (2012) "Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography" and Sharp's (2009) Geographies of Postcolonialism as theoretical approaches and Gordon's (2008) "Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City" as historical context, a graduate-level critical geography of urban higher education class…

This paper explores factors affecting the choice of investment in specific human capital in the presence of significant inter-group and spatial inequalities. I use four years of admissions application data at an elite university in South Africa in conjunction with quarterly labor force data to trace the link between aptitude-adjusted expected…

Calls for the decolonisation of higher education in South Africa have been punctuated by comments on black pain. This is not surprising if it is acknowledged that violence inordinately marks so much of South African life. What is rarely discussed though is the idea that pain has also come to be fetishised. Pain, for example, is valued as a…

Background: The need for transforming South African education can ultimately be traced to a form of Western subjectivity which dominated Europe since the classical age (1600-1750). The notions of 'discipline' and 'subjectivity' suggest distinct associations with repressive regimes like apartheid, and the present article will argue that the…

Background: This qualitative study examined apartheid-era South Africa, from 1948 to 1994, which established social and administrative policies that deliberately curtailed the education of Indigenous and other South Africans as a means of oppressing non-European ethnic groups. Analysis: In lieu of face-to-face interviews, the experience of…

The segregation enforced during apartheid has not only ensured widely disparate South African university landscapes, but also framed constructions of activism in historical discourses of racial disenfranchisement and marginalisation. As a result, activism is implicitly and explicitly associated with disadvantaged universities; with black students;…

Studies have shown how social media, including Facebook and Twitter, are reshaping communication, news, and information. It is therefore important to explore the role social media plays in student protests and campaigns in order to determine to what extent social media allows participation and audience inclusion during #FeesMustFall and other…

Informed by critical race theory (CRT), we examine how African-American and white college students, at a predominantly white, structurally diverse, Southern US university, understand their cross-racial experiences. Black-white interactions are understood within the context of the so-called 'post-racial' environment, against the backdrop of…

This article is based on our two narratives through which we explore how Freirean thought had an impact on our respective praxis as academic activists in apartheid South Africa. We reflect specifically on the influence the work of Freire had on informing and advancing our respective struggles against apartheid education. This article therefore…

The front pages of the nation's newspapers and nightly television news segments continue to share stories about United States Black colleges and universities that struggle to survive or have been forced to close, despite their remarkable legacy. With a downward spiral-taking place for several of these institutions, there is inarguably a need for a…

Research into racism and college sports largely explores how universities profit off the undercompensated labor of predominately Black men in Division I football and basketball. This research frames college sports as an institution that dehumanizes, marginalizes, and exploits athletes of color (Beamon, 2014; Eitzen, 2016; Hawkins, 2010; Sack &…

This conceptual article explores the use of threshold concepts to help pre-service teachers develop antiracist dispositions. Threshold concepts are "troublesome knowledge" within a discipline that serve as gateways to expanded modes of thinking about subject matter. Grappling with threshold concepts places learners in a liminal space as…

The core objective of this article is to evaluate the progress made in linguistic development over the past three decades, with a specific focus on the role of language and its philosophical underpinnings in reshaping and decolonising South African higher education landscape. Linguistic imperialism as a conceptual framework alongside the Framework…

After nearly 25 years of democracy, lives of young South Africans are still profoundly shaped by the legacies of apartheid. This paper considers how these differences are produced, maintained and disrupted through an exploration of changing narratives developed by a small group of South African pre-service teachers, with a particular focus on the…

Over the past decades, the language management discourse in South Africa has focused on the development and intellectualization of the functional status of indigenous African languages in high-status domains. African languages are marginalized despite the existence of various empowering and restorative legislative provisions and policies of the…