Student protests in South Africa saw triumph for the hashtag and success for the slogan. What lies beyond this as students push for genuine change in universities?
Grim, single sex workers’ hostels are still common in South Africa’s economic capital Johannesburg.
Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters
Architects and those working on the built environment can learn valuable lessons about their discipline – how it’s taught, and how it’s carried out – from the 2015 student protests.
Most student protests in South Africa during 2015 have been peaceful and organised, but there have been moments of violent confrontation.
REUTERS/Sydney Seshibedi
The students’ movement has stretched South Africans in personal, professional, powerful and provocative ways. Have academics been stretched enough to reflect deeply on the status quo at universities?
A young man wearing an African National Congress shirt joins in student protests in South Africa. Party politics and student politics shouldn’t mix.
Reuters/Sydney Seshibedi
It’s time to change how student representatives are elected at South Africa’s universities. The existing process gives far too much space and power to political parties.
Some South African universities said they felt sufficiently threatened to obtain interdicts against protesting students.
Kim Ludbrook/EPA
Universities were widely criticised for turning to the courts during a series of student protests in South Africa. So why did they do it, and did the interdict process work?
The role of police during the students protests has come in for strong criticism.
Reuters/Sydney Seshibedi
The #feesmustfall movement brought gains for democracy. As relatively free spaces for enquiry, universities have a public duty to fight, not facilitate, a slide into a national security state.
Protesting students from the University of Zimbabwe take to the streets of Harare in 2001.
Howard Burditt/Reuters
In 1988 students from the University of Zimbabwe began demonstrating against government corruption. Their protests grew into a national movement that indelibly changed the country.
21 years into democracy, are South Africa’s university students showing other citizens how best to hold the state accountable?
EPA/Ihsaan Haffejee
University students in South Africa have shown the potential of mass mobilisation to influence policy in advancing justice for their constitutional democratic rights.
It has been an exciting month for Africa, not least for the highly controversial elections in Tanzania, where the annulment of the entire vote in Zanzibar has played an important role in extending the…
Universities are losing sight of their role as places of teaching and learning. Instead, they are becoming hugely stressed business enterprises.
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When funding imperatives dominate universities’ strategies, higher education loses sight of the work it ought to be doing: developing graduates who can make a real difference in the world.
For the first time in a long time, South Africans are hearing stories about those who have been silenced.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
Student protests in South Africa, as well as an unrelated clash between lawyers, have offered a chance for the country to hear voices that are usually marginalised.
Mass meeting of students at the University of Cape Town.
Tony Carr/Flickr
Students have won an important victory. But to understand the complex nature of oppression and how to respond to it will require many struggles over a longer period of time.
Protesting students make their way through South Africa’s capital city, Pretoria.
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Don’t let the name fool you: the #feesmustfall protests at South Africa’s universities are about far more than a single issue. A student who has been deeply involved in the protests explains.
South African student protesters make their feelings clear: education is a right and should be free.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
South African students have won a pyrrhic victory in their battle for free university education. Will students and their institutions ever be able to interact without violent conflict again?
South African students want free university education. In a deeply unequal society, could there be another way?
Kim Ludbrook/EPA
An academic who has marched alongside students during university fee protests in South Africa explains why their demands resonate with her and so many others.
Students protest a planned tuition hike outside the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
Siphiwe Sibeko/REUTERS
Professor of Architecture and SARChI: DST/NRF/SACN Research Chair in Spatial Transformation (Positive Change in the Built Environment), Tshwane University of Technology
Chief Research Specialist in Democracy and Citizenship at the Human Science Research Council and a Research Fellow Centre for African Studies, University of the Free State
Chief Director: Tshwane University of Technology – Institute for Economic Research on Innovation; Node Head: DST/NRF SciSTIP CoE; and Professor Extraordinary: Stellenbosch University – Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology., Tshwane University of Technology