Introductory Thoughts

Located far from the geopolitical context of the authors in this volume, in the post-apartheid South African context of decades of ‘transforming’ higher education, re-energised by the last few years of young people’s calls to decolonise the university, it was with some surprise that I found myself identifying, at multiple moments, with the sentiments and arguments expressed in this volume. Indeed, I doubt there are many scholars located in any university across the globe at this moment in time who will not recognise and find resonance with the powerful narratives articulated here, notwithstanding their predominant location in a European and a global northern context. This book joins a growing and increasingly urgent conversation about contemporary hegemonic practices in the university in globalised contexts shaped by neoliberal capitalist imperatives. While our different historical and geopolitical contexts clearly present nuanced experiences for us in our different nation-state materialities, we also have much in common given the seamless, ‘liquid’ flow of globalised institutional frameworks and of higher education in current times. For example, at the same time as we in South Africa have been over the last few years facing probably one of the most intense challenges to ‘business as usual’ in the academy, the neoliberal, consumer capitalist grip on our universities was similarly intensifying. As Achille Mbembe (2015a, n.p.), well known critical humanities scholar, puts it: