Student Activism Against the Neocolonial, Neoliberal University

Exploring a Sociology of Absences, Emergences, and Hidden Fires

Abstract

The struggle for cognitive justice is an integral part of decolonising education: it seeks to destabilise the grip that Western thought has over the world and pay more attention to other forms of knowledge that have been deliberately marginalised as part of the colonisation agenda. Aotearoa New Zealand is certainly no stranger to debates and struggles regarding the decolonisation of education. The highly revered work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith and the recent collection by Jessica Hutchings and Jenny Lee-Morgan, are just two examples of scholarship that have made significant contributions to scholar-activism in this area. To extend these debates further and link them to a parallel set of critiques about the neoliberal university, I employ the tools developed by the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who encourages us to engage in both a ‘sociology of absences’ and a ‘sociology of emergences’. The discussion hinges on an example of the recent student protests in South Africa, dubbed by some as the ‘fallist movement’. The student uprisings highlight the mutually constitutive nature of neoliberalism and racism and underscore the need to frame the global struggle against the neocolonial, neoliberal university as an intersectional one. Given that learning from one another’s struggles is a critical aspect of social movement praxis, the use of this example aims to encourage a ‘north-south’ dialogue between scholar-activists in Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa.