In the past decade, universities the world over have been the site of occupations and encampments. The backdrop of global conflicts and mass oppression due to systemic failure to address the growing inequality gap mobilized the student movements, #RhodesMustFall and the University of Colour from mid-2010 onwards. The recent encampments resulting from the ongoing Gaza genocide and ecocide compounded by images of concurrent genocides and ecocides in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan call for justice against settler-colonialism and its afterlives. These colonial wounds have made hysteria a public mental health concern caused by the devaluation of life with livestreaming genocide and ecocide, highlighting the ways in which civil liberties are being eroded in white liberal democracies like with the banning of Palestine Action in the UK.
These developments have led to the global majority of allochthones becoming increasingly involved in the political sphere, visible both in former student activist such as Chris de Ploeg who joined political party De Vonk and in the election of French-Palestinian jurist and politician Rima Hassan as a member of the European Parliament. Allochthones are not simply window-dressing in the political spectrum but rather agents of change who understand the everyday realities of othering because as Tendayi Achiume argues, decolonisation through migration. In other words, we are here because you were there.
In a continent still insisting on terms such as ‘majority minority’ emerging from superdiversity studies, implying that the white majority is becoming a minority and that allochthones are replacing majority rule highlights the incongruency within the system. Furthermore, it alludes to the anxieties faced by whites within white liberal democracies with waves of anti-immigration sentiment like referring to migrants and refugees as ‘gelukzoekers’ [translation: fortune seekers, Ed.]. These sentiments distort the challenges of finding belonging in your host nation. Thus, these white autochthonous anxieties prevent social cohesion within the host country because harmful perceptions are barriers in accessing the system.
With the formation of the European Union, regionalism was meant to increase economic cooperation and to strengthen the bloc. However, decreasing birth rates and migration from within Europe has caused a negative growth rate, demographically and economically. In this sense, new trajectories of migration are needed from the global south, implying that Europe’s white population is shrinking. These demographic anxieties are frequently mobilised by right-wing actors, who recast economic and demographic trends as racialised threats. Think of Trump’s unfounded notion of white genocide in South Africa causing an influx of white refugees to the US. This unfolding future gives rise to people forming red protest lines against the rising presence of neo-Nazi movements and authoritarian regimes. This pushback offers us an opportunity to reimagine a world based on social justice with glocal institutional governance that is based on ubuntu (mutual recognition: I am because you are/interdependence) with a respect for all life on Earth. This reimagining is also founded on self-reflexiveness and accountability because to break away from the colonial system, we need to have shared values that can secure the future from within the present.
Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire understood that the education system could offer that space for reimagining social justice. Preceding Freire was decolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon who claimed that the last should be put first, referring to restorative justice by ensuring that marginalized and indigenous people are not left behind in our shared world. Both Freire and Fanon therefore advocated for the importance of including marginalized voices as a course correct. With this, scholarship today has a new challenge requiring a reimagining as it adapts to an ever-evolving global order. Moreover, we are witnessing the demise of Western imperialist thinking. Following that, the ever-present issue of migration which is intensified by the climate crisis will accentuate matters of race and intersectional race politics.
This offers us an opportunity to reimagine the university as an incubator for these values by focusing on respect for differences, complemented by the use of technology as we connect our lived experiences via social media. In such a world, it is important to have spaces that build solidarity and resistance. More importantly, these spaces offer an opportunity for a different discourse. As American academic Saidiya Hartman states: Black life persists amidst social death. In this light, the classroom can offer a remedy by including marginalised and indigenous voices through sharing lived experiences of the everyday through allowing for personal narratives to emerge as a praxis that extends beyond the classroom. This storytelling approach encourages reparative work extending into the community, contributing towards policy work and change. Thus, the classroom offers a resistance to the normalisation of daily injustices.
By connecting the works of Freire and Fanon, we see how colonial systems treated natives as second-class citizens, producing trauma through systemic othering and a lack of recognition – trauma that has become a metaphor for all traumas. The ability to recognize the other even in disagreement, connects us to our humanity. Therefore, storytelling is offered as part of the development of a classroom praxis, encouraging learning through sharing, nurturing recognition and safety, and centering creativity through artistic expression. Furthermore, through storytelling we maintain our dignity whilst recognizing the dignity of the other, enabling a deeply embodied relationality fostering stronger bonds of love and care. This ubuntu interdependent healing space between the classroom and community becomes a collective experience whilst pushing back against the neoliberal client-based university. To this extent, students are teaching us how to rethink the university as a public good by realizing our coexistence and making education more inclusive through storytelling and shared reflection.
r/evolution cosmology
r/evolution
revolution
evolution
r/elation
relation
elation
r/evolve
revolve
evolve
dancing virtually
in my mind
synchronised swimming
on a page
words play
lifeworlds
the sun the earth
sun
earth
the earth r/evolves
around the sun
r/evolution
is accepting
understanding
r/elation
to growth
in togetherness
earth = uhuru
sun/earth = ubuntu
we all
r/evolve
around the sun