Capabilities negotiations in the Pan-African and post-pandemic university: Perspectives from student activists

In this presentation, we reflect on the process and outcomes of identifying and negotiating capabilities that are valued by diverse student activist groups in relation to their ideal university project; a Pan-African and decolonial university. Having worked with 13 activist students at one South African university since November 2021, through a Participatory Action Research project to explore what a ‘sustainable university community’ might look like for them, the paper reflects on preliminary findings. We start by discussing negotiations between the student activists’ worldviews, often aligned, and the challenging university milieu in which these worldviews are inspired, conceptualised and often, structurally suppressed. We then present what they understand and perceive as the central unfreedoms maintained and perpetuated by their university, such as challenges around institutional funding and management and more generally factors that play out at the structural, ethical, and individual levels. Finally, we describe their identified internal capabilities as capabilities that these students have reason to value generally; then relate these with their combined capabilities, as the combination of internal capabilities with the social and political context where these students are situated. These combined capabilities include those such as ‘Learning, education and knowledge capabilities’; ‘Activism, Advocacy and Leadership Capabilities’ and ‘Employability and work capabilities. We conclude by presenting the Ubuntu-Supporting Institutional Capability list to highlight institutional capabilities that need to be enhanced and promoted by the institution to move towards a Pan-African, decolonial university in the future. If promoted and adopted, such a list could be instrumental in repositioning resources, practices, and systems in ways that align with a more just post-pandemic university.

About Carmen Martinez Vargas

Carmen Martinez-Vargas is currently based at the SARCHI Chair’s Higher Education and Human Development Research Programme at the University of the Free State, South Africa, as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. Since 2018, she has been the Coordinator of the Participatory Methods thematic group at the HDCA.