About the Project

There is currently a growing need to develop new theoretical frameworks which are appropriate for responding to an acknowledgement of, and simultaneously an attempt to progress beyond, systemic contextual problems inherited from past educational policies (Bozalek and Boughey, 2012; Leibowitz, 2012; Soudien, 2012) to attain participatory parity (Fraser, 2009; 2008) and develop critical and emotionally reflexive citizens.

This research project is intended to address these challenges by investigating the potential of a new theoretical framework to address these issues in critical and socially just higher education pedagogies. This theoretical framework will help develop innovative pedagogical practices in higher education that could respond more productively to the identified challenges. 

While there was some reference to the changes that would be needed to transform curricula and institutional culture, there are no clear guidelines in South Africa on how to set about changing monocultural institutional cultures and policies through critical and innovative pedagogical practices. The possibilities of developing critical and socially just pedagogies as a result of increasing prevalence and use of technology is presented in the following section, which examines the current policies and practices regarding higher education in relation to technology enhanced learning.
Posthumanism does not assume an individualised, human self but as Braidotti (2013, p.43) puts it ‘a transversal inter-connection or an ‘assemblage’ of human and non-human actors’.  Hayles (1999. p. 288) in her book ‘How we became posthuman’ where she sees posthumanity replacing the liberal self where  emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject's manifest destiny to dominate and control nature.
This project seeks to fill this gap through the transformative potential of posthumanism and the affective turn for technologically-mediated critical higher education pedagogies in southern contexts.