Editorial Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The decision to put together this collection began as an initiative to engage with presenters and participants of the UNISA Decolonial Summer School of 2019 beyond the content that was presented.UNISA, referring to the University of South Africa, was established in 1873 and is South Africa's foremost distance learning university.UNISA is situated in Pretoria in the province of Gauteng, which is one of South Africa's three capital cities where the executive branch of government is located, with over 400,000 registered students, including its international student population that come from 130 countries around the world.UNISA's Decolonial Summer School commenced in 2013 for the first time, under the direction of the School of Humanities, and has thus far run every year except for 2021, due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.This collection is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors.Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, colonisercolonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection.Not only are we confronted with the overwhelming critique of colonial pedagogies, we are also confronted with an ongoing critique of teaching and learning practices within the university system that almost all of the contributors draw attention to.Some authors utilise the terms, Black and White when referring to racialised identity, with capitalisation, and some do notthose who write Afrika in its newly adopted form within the South African academy, and those who do not.The collection made provision for these choices, with the full knowledge of how named identities and their writtenness differ from one region to the next.Drawing attention to the local -South Africaand the various locations within the world -Bhutan, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Germany, India, Ire-land, Jamaica, Oman, Senegal, the United States of America, the United Kingdomare not just places where contributors were born or have lived and worked but places where our agency remains active, where we engage with the world, where we challenge the many ways in which colonisation continues to inform how we write, speak, think, imagine, and produce knowledge.In this collection, we took a broad approach to the study of decolonisation.The collection is composed of varied engagements with decolonisation and decoloniality and is intentionally inclusive of community-based contributionsthose outside of the academy, as well as from within it.Students, alumni, activists, and former students play an important role in this collection not only because they are shaping the work that is being carried out in activist communities in South Africa and around the world but because many are student-cum-activists and are, as such, actively involved in communities where dispossession of Indigenous land, forced removals, and forced migration continue to inform the afterlife of apartheid and colonisation.Strict protocols with the blind-review process were observed throughout, including the work of the editor, which was handled by the editorin-chief.The process is taken very seriously in the South African context and one that secures that a journal maintains its national and international standards of excellence and repute.Because of the length of time that this process took, we decided to open the call to contributors and participants of the UNISA 2020 Summer School (referring to the University of South Africa and hereafter referred to as the school), as some of the 2019 discussions found continuity there too.All forms of collective work require a commitment to see that the process is adhered to in the best possible way.Here, for this collection, the process took longer than expected as the pandemic forced us into isolation without colleagues to rely on for face-to-face dialogue and discussion, administrative and technical support, which we often take for granted and only realise when those services are not available to us, especially when computers and printers crash, malfunction, and we are left helpless, incapable of furthering the work we stored on computers upon which we rely.For students
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".