‘Why mouth all the pieties?’: Black and women academic’s revelations about discourses of ‘transformation’ at an historically white South African institution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With inequality persistent across geopolitical contexts, ‘transformation’ continues to be expediently cited in the rhetoric of higher education institutions. Illuminating alike issues worldwide, the paper critically examines race, quality and oppression among the black and women academics who have been the recipients of post-apartheid development programmes at an historically white institution in South Africa. It presents their responses to the espoused discourses of transformation as portrayed in the Integrated Transformation Plans of South African universities, which extend from reparation; compliance; relevance; evolution; psychological; contexts; social; review; to mission. Utilising a report-and-respond approach, participants responded to the definitions of each notion outlined in a questionnaire, followed by non-deterministic small group discussions of the researchers’ interpretations of their responses. These recipients’ lived experiences provided deep insights, from within, into the significance of misalignment between transformation discourses and practice for transforming the institutional culture of the dominant in-group. Emerging ahead of the implementation of a self-regulatory transformation tool for higher education institutions across that national context, these findings point to the importance of external mechanisms for holding institutions to account for what they espouse, and for their responsiveness to higher education research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".