Page 27 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2018

A commitment to socially-just education
Universities across the world need simultaneously to navigate transformation and increased participation in a resource- constrained landscape. In South Africa, these intersecting challenges are intensified by increasing numbers of first- generation students from poor and working- class families.
Dr Talita Calitz’s book, Enhancing the
Freedom to Flourish in Higher Education
(Routledge, 2018) explores the complexities
of increased participation, while shifting attention to student capabilities, resilience and agency. Based on her doctoral and a postdoctoral research undertaken at the University of the Free State, the focus of her book is on the experiences of students and ways in which university staff and management structures can enable resilience, activate capabilities, and seek collaboration with students, despite academic and resource constraints.
Using South Africa as a case study, the book tracks the experiences of first-generation undergraduate students whose narratives illuminate the structural inequalities affecting their participation in higher education. Calitz outlines the political, economic and academic factors that lead to diminished participation while also foregrounding the many resources that students use to
A theory and pedagogy of memory
The troubling euphemising of death and dying becomes an ambiguous project during times of great physical and psychological upheaval.
During the First World War, the war poets attempted to gloss over death by summoning the dead in beautiful word-bouquets of lyrical language and Romantic nature-inspired figures of speech and imagery. Except for the bitter trench poets, the war poets set about creating communal primordial images or archetypes of becoming: these were the forever-young-beyond-the-grave soldiers embraced by verdant nature.
Poetic Bodies and Corpses of War: South African Great War Poetry (Unisa Press) by Dr Gerhard Genis in the Department of Humanities Education is a bold attempt to bring the fields of South African Great War poetry and indigenous oral poetry or izibongo into
negotiate some of the obstacles. Her analysis shows that student experiences can offer insight into the complex reasons why some students flourish at university while others are marginalised socially and academically.
Proposing a model of equal participation embedded in the experiences of students, the book offers practical suggestions on how to enhance opportunities for students’ well-being and freedom to flourish. While grounded in individual student narratives, her analysis brings critical social theory to the problem of unequal participation, showing the invisible and implicit forms of inequality that speaks to broader global debates around justice, widening participation and equality in higher education.
closer dialogue. He makes the argument that izibongo are conduits of inter-generational and trans-generational trauma which is revealed through figurative and imaginative word-traces. What these poetic traditions have in common is the major theme of coming to terms with loss, suggesting a common South African consciousness marked by the wounds of conflict.
His work opens up conceptual paths to the study of trauma and literature through an epigenetic lens. Genis explores the close link between language and trauma through epi-poetics, which is a theory and pedagogy of memory. Epi-poetics refers to the implicit collective literary unconscious of a people which is mirrored in poetic language traces that represent culturally embodied marks. These metaphorical and metonymic word-traces find expression both in Great War poetry and in the tradition of izibongo.
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