Academic pipelines of precarity
Employing a decolonial ontological perspective for unpacking black tutors' experiences at a historically white university
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.20853/40-5-8515Keywords:
black tutor identities, historically whie universities, coloniality of Being, academic pipeline, decolonisation, precarityAbstract
After thirty years of South African democracy, black tutors’ experiences within the academic pipeline at historically white universities (HWUs) suggest a loss of belonging and a silencing of their authentic sense of “Being” in the world. Given tutors’ location as staff and students, they inhabit the in-between spaces of academia and are ideally situated to provide an appraisal of the decolonial project underway at HWUs. This article pays particular attention to how various forms of othering usher in deficit discourses of blackness, securely framed within an ambit of coloniality, that seeks to hamper deep transformation efforts. This qualitative study adopts a constructivist ontological perspective and employs Maldonado-Torres’ (2007) “coloniality of Being” framework alongside decolonial African scholarship and argues for confronting enduring colonial matrices within the academic pipeline. This article draws on data from a Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) funded tutor project aimed at reconceptualising tutor development. Findings suggest that black tutors at HWUs exist in a liminal state of precarity, where their ontologies represent colonised beings. Recommendations are made that universities take seriously the call to decolonise if they wish to address the leaky academic pipeline.
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