Crises, Contestations, Contemplations and Futures in Higher Education

The theme of this special edition once again derives from the Annual Teaching and Learning Conference hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2017.For ten years (2007 - 2016), the conference has engaged a cauldron of issues that emerged in Higher Education, South Africa. During that decade, the academy charted a path of what it deemed to be relevant concerns around curriculum transformation and innovation, African perspectives and paradigms, reconstruction, internationalisation, policy analyses, research and teaching excellence, and professional development, all of which were suggestive of deep engagement with issues that mattered to higher education. The student uprisings (#RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall) disturbed the reverie that had lulled the academy’s senses to student concerns and aspirations. In fact, higher education students made explicit the ways in which the academy was complicit in the reproduction of inequalities and the marginalisation of local values and contexts. The outcome of academia’s lethargy to action and its propensity to ‘talk’ rather than ‘act’ to enable relevant and appropriate transformation, has had devastating consequences, culmina-ting in violent uprisings in South Africa. Simultaneously, though, it has also created new opportunities and improved access to higher education for those marginalised by race and class