Psychosocial Pathways Towards Reinventing the South African University(ORIGINAL PDF)

This book presents an innovative narrative methodology, utilising the myth of the Minotaur to examine the state of the university at the heart of the hierarchical labyrinth in “post”-apartheid South Africa. Throughout the work the author wrestles with and self-reflexively highlights her own positionality as a white, middle-class South African woman to examine how this affects the production of this research in ways which serve to preserve the colonial knowledge system. With the rise of the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall student movement in South Africa, demanding for the fall of institutionalised racial hierarchies, the author uses the cover image of narrative formations in the spirit of exploration to think with and through undulating networked forms that could possibly forge new psychosocial pathways towards decolonising and reinventing South African universities. This work offers a unique conceptual and methodological resource for students and scholars of psychosocial and narrative theory, as well as those who are concerned about the politics of higher education, both in South Africa and in other contexts around the world.

Sabrina Liccardo is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pretoria. Her primary interest is in developing visual arts-based, community-engaged and experimental qualitative (narrative) methodologies that explore the material, discursive and symbolic practices of psychosocial reproduction and transformation in higher education institutions in South Africa.