Being, Doing, and Feeling in Neocolonial Educational Settings: South African Activist Students' Aspirations Toward Alternative Educational Futures

• In Event: Youth and Student Voices From the Margins: Advocacy, Access, and Aspirations in the Education System

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss a one-year participatory project with activist students in South Africa about their experiences of neo-colonial practices and logic in the university space. Basing the analysis on a mixed bottom-up collaborative framework, I argue that there are three key dimensions to explore neo-colonial oppressions in an intersectional way, which allows the narratives of embodied educational experiences to be recognized when they are not hegemonic. The findings suggest that their Ubuntu ways of being, doing and feeling towards others and the university provide more complex and counter-hegemonic visions of their educational future without tightening into one single identity but rather from a composite account of who they want to be and not who they are.

Author

• Carmen Martinez Vargas, Lancaster University