Instrumental yet invisible: regional students and university transformation in South Africa

• In Event: Educational policy as a research object: the ethnographic possibilities, challenges and limits of studying power

Proposal

The emergence of post-apartheid South Africa as the most popular study destination in a region with the highest outbound mobility ratio worldwide (Chien & Kot, 2012) sparked my interest in understanding the regional migration experiences in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). In 2015, upwards of 70% of South Africa’s foreign student population, amounting to 52,878 students, came from SADC countries (VitalStats, 2015). This paper comes out of a larger institutional ethnography of efforts to expand, equalize, and internationalize higher education at one of South Africa’s top-ranked formerly white public universities (hereafter WCU) that has undergone intensive institutional expansion, transformation, and internationalization since 1994. Data consisted of more than 100 hours of audio-recorded interviews with 26 top and mid-level administrators, 15 faculty and staff members, 30 non-national students, and 19 black and white South African students; participant observations in on-campus and off-campus events and meetings; and review of institutional documents. Data was analyzed by concept mapping, which involved sifting through research texts and documenting emerging patterns and interpretations in a series of visual, relational concepts (Butler-Kisber 2010). The paper explores the social function of policy discourses and discursive activities in mediating power and control over narratives pertaining to the role and mission of public universities in South Africa: who they belong to, who they should serve, and what knowledge they should value and generate. I draw on Spratt’s (2017) characterization of discourses as both socially constructed and socially constitutive. While discourses emerge from the social action of groups of people, individuals and groups also mold the social world, perceptions and behaviors in ways that propagate some positions as more rational than others. Findings show that WCU goes to great lengths to brand itself with respect to national racial justice and international recognition logics, but not others such as regional solidarity and national social cohesion. Consequently, WCU has explicit Transformation and Internationalization policies and corresponding institutional resources such as physical offices, staff, and budgets assigned thereto, yet other discourses (e.g. Regionalization) have no such institutional support.
I argue that the presence of SADC students on campus makes WCU appear more racially integrated, internationalized, and responsive to regional calls for geopolitical redress and development cooperation. Despite being utilized to orchestrate a response to, and mediate conflicting national racial justice and international recognition logics, in reality the inbound regional students are not fully accounted for in institutional discourses, policies and structures for either Transformation or Internationalization. This is because the non-national African students do not constitute the historically marginalized black South Africans targeted by and benefitting from the South Africa government’s post-apartheid equity policies; nor are they the typical self-funding international customer that many destination countries rely on for much-needed source of income – they are in fact subsidized by the host country. The paper highlights the power relations that justify and propagate nationalistic notions of racial justice, and techno-rational claims of Euro/American higher education internationalization templates in ways that instrumentalize regional students while constraining possibilities for cross-national and cross-racial solidarities.

Author

• Upenyu Silas Majee, University of Wisconsin-Madison