Re-Searching Ourselves: A Call to "Settled/r" Scholars in the Un/Settled South African Academy

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Abolition Pedagogies: Toward Radical Resistance in Schooling Spaces

Abstract

As students, academics and journalists have shown us, the 2015-2016 “Must Fall” protests at South African universities have provided optimal opportunities, serving as “laboratories” or “playgrounds” for many to study and report on activist-related phenomena within the higher education space. As a challenge to all of us “researchers” in, of, and outside the academy, this ongoing study questions the “researcher-researched” relationship, identifying if and how academics/scholars are defining, understanding, and “responding” to calls for justice, inclusion, equity, “transformation,” and “decolonization” through protests within (and beyond) the trope of victimhood. Adapting a conceptual dialogical framework of critical, anti-colonial theories, this study—via interviews, participant observation, and critical discourse analysis—explores researchers’ and protestors’ appeals and resistances to “victimize” rather than “humanize.”

Author

• Sahar D. Sattarzadeh, University of the Free State