This article advances the notion of a "scholarship of hope" in order to signpost one route into a generative approach to academic work. Such an approach has to proceed on the basis of a defamiliarising type of inquiry meant to challenge dominant understandings of our social world. I suggest that a defamiliarising scholarship of hope…

Over the last three decades universities across the world have increasingly come under pressure to address inequalities. In South Africa inequalities emanate to a great extent from the country's apartheid past. It is against this background that the Vice-chancellor of Stellenbosch University commits the institution to "education for social…

This article reports, from the insider's perspective, on a research project comprising fifteen academics in the Faculty of Education Sciences at the North-West University and fifteen senior officials from one of the four Education Districts in the North West Province. This project has as its research theme, hence aim; "the creation of…

This article depicts the state of Humanities in post-apartheid South Africa by examining HEMIS enrolment and graduation data from 1999 to 2007. It demonstrates that although the decline in student enrolment and graduation in Humanities has not been severe; read in the context of substantial growth of all other disciplines, Humanities is in a…

Apartheid-designed higher education institutions continue to have a major influence on students and higher educators in South Africa. There is a need for innovative approaches for engaging with difference in higher education. One means of doing this could be through innovative pedagogical approaches. The Community, Self and Identity project…