Editorial

Abstract

There are growing moves in higher education to reconceptualise scholarship in contemporary contexts. Located in a wide body of critical work including feminist new materialism, posthumanism, decolonial and indigenous thinking, efforts to reimagine and reconfigure pedagogical and research practices in higher education are proliferating. Scholars are increasingly challenging the dominant colonial, patriarchal, eurowestern logics which neoliberal, corporatised academia has intensified.The #Rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall student decolonial protests from 2015 and the more recent COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated already existing inequalities in South African higher education, have amplified the urgency for transformation in the sector. Emphasis is increasingly directed towards more radical decolonial efforts to rethink the underlying logics and normative practices of local and globalised neoliberal higher education. This has raised important questions regarding knowledge production in and beyond the South African context, particularly in relation to the use and value of eurowestern theorists in local research, pedagogies and curricula. On the other hand, there are currently also many productive moves that employ alternative forms of academic scholarship -located in diverse thinking and approaches including feminist decolonial and indigenous approaches, queer theory, feminist new materialisms, critical posthumanism, as well as human geography, non-representationalist theory and the work of Deleuze and Guattari, amongst others. Using the latter theorists in particular, there has been a focus on cartography, schizoanalysis, corporeal theorising, rhizomatic learning, and nomadic thought in socially just pedagogical praxis.These junctures and innovative genealogies and methodologies are directed towards more precise engagements with transformation toward accessible, Africanised and decolonised curricula, and research agendas and practices. Justice scholarship, which includes research and pedagogical practices, is increasingly engaging novel, creative, experimental ways of doing and making knowledge differently, that have catalysed the use of postqualitative, embodied, affective, and mobile methodologies. Such research and pedagogical practices trouble the taken-for-granted neoliberal capitalist and anthropocentric notion of individualised subjectivity.They also highlight the need for accountability and responsibility for others and the planetary condition (Braidotti, 2019).