Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational…

Linguistic heterogeneity and fluidity--prominently captured in the notion of 'translanguaging'-- are starting to be seen as normative and natural. In turn, homogeneity and fixity, instantiated for example in standard languages, are becoming the 'odd-ones-out.' I challenge the dichotomy between linguistic fluidity (languaging) and fixity (named…

The authors of this paper adopted a transformative framework in this article to examine how the legacy of apartheid continues to manifest within higher education in South Africa. In particular, the authors analyzed (a) how mainstream mentoring knowledge of 'black' and 'marginalized' people have influenced mentoring in post-apartheid South Africa;…

This article is based on research into the phenomenon referred to as the "colonization of the mind." It commences with a discussion of four different backgrounds and concomitant experiences regarding this persistent form of colonization: two with reference to the authors of this article, and two with reference to distinguishable…

The South African government continues to work tirelessly to reverse the effects of apartheid by addressing social inequalities and transforming the higher education sector by dismantling structural, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal discrimination. The use of the lowercase "w" for white or whiteness in this article is the…

Generational experiences create unique contextualised meanings for society. This is the case with millennials in South Africa, many of whom use social media to organise their lives and engage with issues pertinent to them, such as South Africa being a rainbow nation. Some of these millennials are history teachers who, when at work, have to teach…

Since the 1960s and before the dramatic announcement of the release of Nelson Mandela on 2 February 1990 (signalling the end of apartheid and the crossing of the proverbial Rubicon (Stone, 2014, p. 3)), the international community assisted the African National Congress (ANC) in its struggle against apartheid and put crucial pressure on the state…

This paper draws on the compelling example of a political movement in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s to explore both how epistemic justice conditions of possibility and of failure play out in practice. It provides a springboard to understand how and why failures of epistemic justice matter tremendously for democratic and inclusive lives and…

This article explores how whiteness is enacted and negotiated from the perspective of a conductor in a Playback Theatre performance (PT). The article addresses how PT provides a stage for exercising opportunities for "doing white differently" in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that "Doing white differently" takes place…

With the ascent of the National Party to power in South Africa in 1948, education reflected apartheid thinking and practices and implemented the ideology of separate development in educational institutions. Pronouncements of the African child's inferiority were reflected in government policy and legislation. The origins of this thinking and…

Multilingualism as a consequence of transnational mobility and migration is prominent in studies of language socialization and family multilingualism in the Global North. While mobility within and between the various regions in South Africa sustains multilingualism and aligns with the global dynamic of mobility, Indigenous multilingualism is…

Within the last two decades, the South African government drafted impressive policies to fully include and accommodate students with visual impairments within higher education. However, in interviews with 23 students with visual impairments at two South African universities, we found that legislation has yet to fully permeate the embodied…

South Africa's first national democratic elections in 1994 marked a turning point in the history of the country. Since democracy much of the focus of African National Congress (ANC)-led government has been on redress and transformation across all spheres of society, including higher education. This paper examines one important aspect inherent in…

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…

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;…