Transformation in Higher Education 2025 Special Issue: We invite you to submit

AOSIS calls on all authors to participate in the Transformation in Higher Education journal 2025 special issue that will be published in the open-access scholarly journal. Submit your latest research for consideration, contribute to the open-access content available to everyone, and share your expertise with a wider audience.

Timeline:

Abstracts (maximum 300 words)

• Submissions open: 15 July 2024
• Submissions deadline: 30 August 2024

The outcome of successful abstracts and invitations to submit full articles

• Announced: September 2024

For those invited to submit a full article

• Full article submission: 14 January 2025
• Review process: 14 January 2025 – 01 March 2025
• Estimated publication date: June 2025

Transformation: A Humanizing Praxis

Understanding transformation as both process and practice can assist in finding new ways of imagining the academy, shifting us away from discourse as an end-in-itself, toward liberatory forms of knowledge sharing and ways of being in the world. Staff and students, who interact with the administrative, often bureaucratic face of the institution can be powerful interlocutors in distilling academic/worker-student demands and in facilitating meaningful change, sometimes in novel ways. Yet the academy, or the ‘Westernized university’, was neither initially conceptualised for all thinkers and knowers, nor built for the prosperity of all human beings (Grosfoguel, 2013; Kessi, Marks & Ramugondo, 2021). At any given time, even at an institution that has declared its intention to transform, there are distinct actors and spaces where different forms of progress and pushback are most prominent (Kessi, Marks & Ramugondo, 2021). For an institution that remains oppressive, even if it may otherwise project a transformative façade, professional role transgression, as a form of occupational consciousness, maybe one way by which professionals enact agency (Sonday, Ramugondo & Kathard, 2019).

In this special issue, we invite authors from public universities in South Africa to engage transformation with a provocative idea around the idea of the human, to inspire a dynamic exchange and robust contestation of ideas for a special issue for the Transformation in Higher Education Journal. The focus for the special issue is ‘Transformation: A Humanizing Praxis’. We acknowledge from the onset that although the term ‘transformation’ is used regularly and widely, it is illustrative of its contested nature that there exists no consensus on what it means. To generate scholarship on/for/of transformation in higher education and society, we depart from a short-hand vision of ‘transformation’ as constituting a humanizing praxis’. This special issue invites both academics and university administrative staff to engage with the following provocation which provides a conceptual backbone:

“Being human is not a given but a political potentiality which manifests on an oppression-liberation continuum of enacted harmful negations and salutogenic affirmations of our humanity” (Kronenberg, 2018).

Appreciating that the question of ‘being human’ underlies the theme of this special issue, we provide some background as to why and how the provocation came about. The provocation was dialectically arrived at as a synthesis in a doctoral study (Kronenberg, 2018) that was urged by the deeply troubling diagnosis of post 1994 South African society’s historically entrenched dehumanized/ing condition (Kronenberg, 2018). Appropriate concepts to imagine and generate potentially humanizing and healing responses to violent-divided-wounded human relations were found to be lacking in both professional and public discourses. This study therefore conceived of and applied an original conceptual depiction of ‘being human’ as ‘enacting humanity affirmations’. The main question asked was: ‘how are affirmations of our humanity enacted in everyday post 1994 apartheid South Africa?’

Two sets of generative questions are provided to the special issue contributors, to serve as pointers for relatability/resonance and reflection on action (‘scripted professional roles’) within their spheres of influence, for example, the lecture room; but also, beyond formal learning spaces, and into staff recruitment processes, promotion practices, staff development, academic conferences, student residences, sports, the cafeteria, etc.

The first set of questions is informed by a critical contemporary interpretation of Aristotle’s intellectual virtue phronesis (adapted from Flyvbjerg, 2004): (1) Where is my university as a key institution in processes of building and sustaining healthy/healing societies going with transformation? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this transformation desirable? (4) What, if anything, should academic/worker-student formations/movements do about it?

The second set of (practical theology) questions is articulated by Richard Osmer: (1) What is going on? (Descriptive-empirical task) (2) Why is this going on? (Interpretative task) (3) What ought to be going on? (Normative task) (4) How might academic/worker-student formations/movements respond? (Pragmatic task).

In addition to the provocation around ‘Being human is not a given’ as articulated above, these set of questions are intended to assist contributors to identify practices, processes or actions that may either advance or impede transformation, possibly in their own sphere of influence, and then interrogate these.

We invite authors to submit abstracts, a maximum of 300 words, to the Guest Editors.

Authors of successfully selected abstracts will be contacted by Guest Editors to submit their full article.

Objective:

Along with the provocation, the contributors are invited to engage either set of questions (Contemporary interpretation of Aristotle’s intellectual virtue phronesis OR practical theology questions), considering their own setting in higher education and from different methodological positions. Other provocations and sets of questions beyond what we offer here are also welcome, to frame contributions on how we may imagine transformation as a humanizing praxis.

Authors may wish to frame the scope of their contributions along any of the three levels in their institution:

• Macro Level: The Institution (Vision and Mission, Institutional Leadership, Institutional Culture/s)
• Meso Level: The Curriculum (Teaching and Learning), Student Support Services, The Student Representative Council, Student Associations/Societies etc)
• Micro Level: The Student, The Academic, The Professional Administrative/Services Staff]

Recommended topics:

1. Contemporary interpretation of Aristotle’s intellectual virtue phronesis
2. Practical theology questions

Manuscript information:

Manuscript contributions may consist of the following:

• Manuscript submissions should be in English.
• Original Research articles must fully comply with the Transformation in Higher Education guidelines for manuscripts (maximum 6000 words, 60 or fewer references with limited self-referencing; no more than 7 table/Figures).

Interested authors must consult the journal’s guidelines for manuscript submissions at thejournal.org.za.

Submission procedure:

To submit your article to the Transformation In Higher Education, go to thejournal.org.za. When you submit the article, select the ‘Transformation: A Humanizing Praxis’ as the article type after logging in with your personal user credentials. For more details on the submission procedure, go to thejournal.org.za. All submissions will undergo anonymous review to guarantee high scientific quality and relevance to the subject. The final decision regarding acceptance/revision/rejection will be based on the reviews received from the reviewers and at the sole discretion of the Editor-in-Chief.

Of course, we will be happy to provide you with any assistance during the submission and application process. Kindly enquire at submissions@thejournal.org.za.

All abstracts (maximum 300 words) and inquiries should be directed to the attention of:

• Prof. Elelwani Ramugondo (University of Cape Town) – elelwani.ramugondo@uct.ac.za
• Mr Quinton Apollis (University of Cape Town) – quinton.apollis@uct.ac.za
• Dr Frank Kronenberg (University of Cape Town) – frank.kronenberg@uct.ac.za

We would be honoured to receive your positive reply and look forward to receiving your article.