UNIVERSITIES AS SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Universities in South Africa present a complex context due to Apartheid legacies and persistent inequalities; hence, transforming universities into more sustainable, decolonial and African-centred communities of higher learning continues to be a key imperative, as highlighted in the White Paper. Although much has been done at the policy level and through research, students generally, and activist students, more particularly, are usually left behind throughout these research and policy development processes. However, their experiences, knowledge, African and Indigenous values and cosmovisions should be at the centre of sustainability initiatives, as a counterpoint to current university structures based on Eurocentric values, competitive logics and policies external to local values held by the communities universities seek to serve. Therefore, the centrality of student activism is not only critical to bring knowledge from below which is rooted on resistances against hegemonic and dehumanising forces, but also as a decolonial strategy that aims to genuinely acknowledge African/Indigenous/locally-rooted knowledges and worldviews to conceptualise what education for sustainable development is and how it is envisaged in this context.

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That is why, in our project we combine decolonial thinking and the capabilities approach to challenge epistemic injustices that limit students’ voices from being acknowledged in conceptualising what a sustainable university community is in a Global South context. We therefore aim to foreground students’ valued ways of living and being through a process of participatory storytelling. 

Using participatory storytelling we are co-creating knowledge on what it means and what it takes to build sustainable communities in the context of one historically white South Africa University (The University of the Free State, UFS). Although the project focuses on one university, the findings will yield data that can inform debates and conversations on educational development and sustainability in the higher education space, through academic and non-academic publications and engagement strategies that will expand the reach of our findings to other students and student activists across the country, and to other stakeholders.

 The research design of this study aligns with our theoretical positionality under a decolonial lens and capabilities approach perspective. We situate the research under a participatory paradigm (Heron & Reason, 1997) to reclaim the need to reshape research positionalities between researchers and participants to foster epistemic freedoms (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, Fricker, 2015). Hence, the project is based on establishing long-term partnerships with leaders and members of different student organisations forming a dynamic, interdisciplinary and diverse research team, where all participants of the project are co-researchers.