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…

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…

As contexts in schools and higher education become increasingly more diverse, engagement with human differences and different knowledges becomes essential. Institutions need to change their practices to respond to the different needs of learners, as well as valuing their knowledges and prospective teachers need to better equipped for these…

University campuses are spaces not only for self-reflection and critique but also where asymmetrical power relations create experiences of exclusion and marginalisation for many students. Within the complexity of such spaces, transformative opportunities are opened up for student agency and agentic actions. This qualitative article uses a…

This study set out to explore how Black immigrant academics (BIAs) reconstruct their identities within academe. Utilising the research methodology of narrative inquiry, this article explores how BIAs came to see themselves across those communities, which were of primary importance to them in the reformation of their identities. Through the…

Data suggest that having a positive, internalized racial identity is related to healthy outcomes. Although some scholars have highlighted the role of education in providing a context to develop such an identity, there is a dearth of research in this area. This study analyzed racial life narrative interviews with 15 Black South Africans to explore…

An earlier paper focused on how born-free learners constitute, negotiate and represent their identities after almost two and half decades of democracy in South Africa. Utilising the theoretical framework of subjective realities of educational change, in this article I set out to explore what implications teachers' beliefs hold for born-free…

This article attends to rural school leadership in two South African schools through the lens of the concepts of relational leadership and emotional labour. The inquiry draws on five years of guided conversations and observations that speak to leadership experiences of hope and anticipation as well as despair and disillusionment. I worked with one…

Since the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, increasing numbers of black students have been enrolling at historically whites-only universities. This situation has been paralleled by a resurgence of racialising discourses that represent black students as lacking in competencies, lowering academic standards and undeserving of their places at…

Multiculturalism currently aims for the political accommodation of difference instead of the subversion of the resulting privileges of difference. In the South African context such a distinction is especially important since the economic and symbolic subjugation of the majority of Black South Africans continues despite political transformation,…

Despite its chequered history in relation to human rights issues, South Africa has been playing host to peoples displaced and dispossessed by geographies of anger and war, poverty, economic meltdown and other human rights atrocities. Perceiving South Africa as a sanctuary, there has been a steady wave of immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees…

Drawing on narrative data from a multiple case study, I recount the life stories of two resilient Black South African university students to theorize about the processes that encouraged these students, familiar with penury and parental illiteracy, to resile. I aimed to uncover lessons for school psychologists about resilience, and their role in…

The paper examines the case of a female doctoral candidate who studied over a period of eight years at a South African university and the challenges she encountered. It reports on a qualitative study that followed a narrative approach and employed a method known as the "listening guide." Findings revealed that the voluntary participant…

Personal narratives can be powerful venues for understanding human experiences. In this paper, we tell the story of Lutanyani, a Black South African multilingual teacher and author of supplemental reading materials in a marginalized South African language. Through various word images, we convey the role of language, in particular written language,…

This article focuses on the larger project of identifying oppressive structures (during apartheid more specifically in this instance) and how educational policy/textbooks (post-apartheid) produce transformative knowledge for decolonization. It presents Black South African teacher perceptions and desires of what/how educational policy, history…