School of Higher Education Studies
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Browsing School of Higher Education Studies by Author "Buys, Barend Rudolf"
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Item Open Access A phenomenological reading of the racial knowledge and identities of student leaders engaged in reconciliation(University of the Free State, 2017-08) Buys, Barend Rudolf; Jansen, J. D.; Niemann, S. M.𝑬𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒉 This study wants to make sense of the lived experiences of student leaders engaged in racial reconciliation at a South African university campus by exploring their struggles with racial knowledge and identity over time. Four students, two male and two female, two black and two white, participated in the study. They were senior student leaders that played a public role in racial reconciliation on campus following a traumatic incident of racial discrimination at Reitz, a men’s residence on campus. The study faced a dearth in current literature on the combined themes of student leadership, racial knowledge and identity, and reconciliation. However, a broad literature review on student engagement, student leadership and student diversity revealed critical themes and gaps relevant to this study in the research on diversity and change in higher education. A framework of concepts was developed to read the narrative data of the study. These included the notions of conscientisation (Freire), racial ignorance (Mills), in-betweenness (Bhabha), transitionality (Winnicott), scapegoating (Girard), nearness (Jansen), embrace (Volf) and bridge-building (Boske). The study uses a phenomenological approach to describe and interpret the life histories of the participating student leaders. I drafted the four racial biographies of the four student leaders in conjunction with the students, which were then analysed for patterns of experiences that reveal shifts in racial knowledge and identity in and across lives. On the one hand, the students reproduced the racial ignorance and the hierarchies of racial distance that marked their lifeworlds. However, on the other hand, the students behaved in alternative ways to the norm of their environments. They built friendship across racial divides and challenged cultural codes and norms. The different and competing realities of racial distance and togetherness reveal a continued struggle between knowledge defined by ignorance and knowledge defined by the transitional context of post-apartheid South Africa. Similarly, their alternative experiences of race in a changing society reveal an alternative racial identity that emerge over time in their lives, an identity of in-betweenness. A synthesis of the emerging themes revealed successive moments of struggle with racial ignorance and alternative knowledge in their lives prior to and on campus, and prior to, during and after Reitz. The students learned to reproduce racial ignorance at school and at home prior to arriving on campus. On campus they faced radical racial distances prior to and immediately after Reitz. But, the trauma of the incident also disrupted the established racial hierarchies of their environment. Thereafter the post-Reitz interventions raised their consciousness about race and racial hierarchies so that ignorance dissipated. At the same time, the transitional nature of their racially integrating schools and local communities compelled new knowledge and identities different to established black and white identities. However, at school and on campus prior to Reitz, the students faced reprisals for their attempts at racial in-betweenness and breaking with racial codes and norms. Reprisals discouraged and cast doubt on new knowledge and identity. They internalised this rejection of their alternative knowledge, but rediscovered its value when the post-Reitz interventions for change embraced in-betweenness and alternative knowledge and identities. Their conscientisation disrupted racial ignorance and brought their in-betweenness and transitional knowledge to the surface. As ignorance dissipated, their new knowledge and in-betweenness were actualised as racial bridge-building. The study defines the students’ struggle with ignorance and transitional knowledge as the struggle of an epistemology of transitionality to emerge in the face of the dominant epistemology of ignorance that marks the post-conflict environment of post-apartheid South Africa. It defines their growing in-betweenness as an emerging ontology of transitionality and uses the notion of bridge-building to define the methodology and praxis of their leadership for racial reconciliation and change. The study contributes to current scholarship on leadership for change in higher education by describing in detail how student leaders experienced change personally and as part of change interventions on a divided university campus. The study provides new ways to make sense of how student leaders who counter-culturally lead reconciliation on campus become leaders for change and the social, cultural and political influences that mediate their transition. The study also contributes potential theoretical readings of transitionality, bridge-building and reprisal as important concepts to theorise leadership for change in higher education. The study recommends further research to test the transferability of the findings of this research.