Over the past two decades, the racial profile of academic staff in South Africa’s higher education institutions (HEIs) has undergone notable change, driven in part by national and global pressures for diversity, equity and inclusion. This article extends previous work by examining the racial composition of academic staff across all South African HEIs from 2005 to 2020, with a focus on trends in representation by race, gender, rank and institutional type. Using data from the Department of Higher Education and Training, we find that black African academics now represent the largest racial group in academia for the first time in the history of the country, with particularly rapid gains since 2015. However, representation remains uneven at senior academic ranks and within historically white institutions. Later, we explore whether national demographic representativity should be considered a benchmark of transformation and argue that while representativity is an important marker of equity and redress, it is not synonymous with transformation. We caution against a metrics-only approach and advocate for a broader transformation agenda that includes pedagogical reform, institutional restructuring and financial sustainability. Contribution: This article contributes to the ongoing debate about the meaning of transformation in post-apartheid South African higher education and highlights the need for clarity in both vision and policy.
Accounting graduates often hold leadership positions early in their careers, but are insufficiently prepared for them. Transforming the curriculum is necessary to address this, but effective change requires buy-in from multiple stakeholders. A key stakeholder group is the educators themselves. The purpose of this study is to investigate accounting educators’ perceptions of the need to incorporate responsible leadership (RL) competency development into the accounting curriculum and how to do so. The study was conducted within a South African higher education setting. Interviews were conducted with 12 experienced South African accounting educators from 10 different employer institutions involved in senior accounting courses. Thematic analysis was employed to analyse the data. The study found unanimous support for developing RL competencies to at least a foundational level in accounting students. Furthermore, the appropriateness of an existing RL competency development model for accounting education was affirmed, and refinements to the model to effectively execute the curriculum’s role in this process were identified. These refinements include cultivating a common understanding of a chartered accountant as a responsible leader; weaving the golden thread of RL throughout all years of study; and accounting educators to reconceptualise their role as primarily educators of future responsible leaders, and to secure support and personal development to execute this role effectively. Contribution: The study’s contributions include practical suggestions aligned with the three model refinements, as well as evidence that affirms existing guidance on RL education for accounting students, which may be beneficial to accounting educators and academic institutions.
This study examines the experiences of international students (IS) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), interrogating the intersections of internationalisation, transformation and decolonisation within South African higher education. While internationalisation is often framed as evidence of institutional diversity, the research showed that it reproduced epistemic exclusions rooted in colonial hierarchies of knowledge. Drawing on a qualitative, narrative-based and critically interpretive approach, grounded in decolonial and postcolonial epistemologies, the study foregrounds the lived experiences of IS, particularly those from Africa, as epistemic agents navigating cognitive dissonance, hidden curricula and structural marginalisation. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews, participant observation and informal conversations, capturing how students experienced, internalised and resisted institutional norms that privileged Eurocentric knowledge systems. The study advances a novel conceptualisation of African international students as epistemic agents operating within institutional borderlands, offering an Africa-centred framework for rethinking internationalisation beyond assimilationist models. This article exposes contradictions within institutional internationalisation discourses and argues for a reimagining of universities as sites of cognitive justice, pluriversality, and co-produced knowledge. Contribution: This article makes three interrelated theoretical contributions to scholarship on internationalisation and decolonisation in higher education. Firstly, it reconceptualises African international students not as marginal or deficit subjects within global mobility regimes, but as epistemic agents who actively produce, contest, and re-signify knowledge within historically colonial universities. Secondly, by bringing theories of internationalisation-as-coloniality into conversation with borderland and contact zone frameworks, the study theorises the university as a cognitive borderland: a space in which epistemic hierarchies are simultaneously reproduced and disrupted. Thirdly, the article advances an Africa-centred conceptual lens that foregrounds epistemic disobedience, cognitive justice, and pluriversality as analytic tools for understanding how internationalisation can function both as a mechanism of colonial continuity and as a site of epistemic possibility. In doing so, the study extends existing debates beyond descriptive critiques of exclusion, offering a theoretically grounded account of how African international students contribute to epistemic transformation within higher education institutions.
Undergraduate training in the Bachelor of Health Science (BHSc): Medical Laboratory Science (MLS) programme requires exposure to contemporary diagnostic technologies. However, infrastructure constraints within Universities of Technology (UoTs) may limit students’ access to modern laboratory systems. This study explored undergraduate MLS students’ perceptions of the impact of industry-based laboratory excursions on their learning experiences. A cross-sectional descriptive survey with a mixed-methods approach was employed among residential BHSc: MLS students at Levels 1–3 (N = 83) at Mangosuthu University of Technology (MUT). A census sampling approach was used, and data were collected using a semi-structured questionnaire comprising Likert-scale items and open-ended questions. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively, while qualitative responses underwent thematic content analysis. Quantitative findings indicated that most students perceived laboratory excursions to enhance exposure to modern diagnostic technologies (M = 4.2 ± 1.0) and support the integration of theoretical knowledge with industry practice (M = 4.0 ± 1.3). Students also expressed strong support for incorporating excursions into the curriculum (M = 4.4 ± 1.2), while perceptions of practical skill development beyond university laboratories were variable (M = 3.3 ± 1.4). Qualitative findings indicated exposure to automation, digital diagnostics, laboratory workflows and equipment not readily available in university laboratories, alongside predominantly observational experiences. Students also identified areas for improving excursion structure and greater integration of industry-based learning within the curriculum. Contribution: This study contributes empirical insight into how industry-based laboratory excursions are perceived to support experiential learning and curriculum enhancement in MLS programmes at UoTs.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools increase the speed and polish of academic writing, but they also destabilise higher education’s reliance on written artefacts as proxies for understanding. This raises a risk that students can submit fluent text while bypassing the effortful discomfort through which information is usually turned into durable knowledge and judgment. This article synthesises how GenAI-enabled cognitive bypass is described in recent scholarship and identifies conditions under which GenAI use shifts from a cognitive extender to a cognitive substitution. This conceptual article bridges existing theories across disciplines to broaden our understanding of GenAI’s role in students’ cognitive development. Firstly, epistemic hollowing occurs when students are seduced by the fluency of large language models’ (LLMs) outputs, leading to weakened verification processes. Secondly, the uncritical use of GenAI may erode desirable difficulties, and retrieval practices may substitute for key cognitive operations. Thirdly, universities’ audit culture and product-oriented assessment regimes make cognitive bypass rational. Cognitive bypass is framed as a mismatch between tool affordances, learner goals and institutional proxy systems. The implications point towards teaching, assessment and supervision designs that validate processes, require defence and verification and preserve epistemic agency in GenAI-saturated universities. Contribution: The study integrates fragmented GenAI in higher education debates into a three-lens explanatory model of cognitive bypass and translates it into process-oriented implications for teaching, assessment and postgraduate supervision.
This study aims to provide a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of global research on entrepreneurial literacy in higher education. Using the Scopus database, 408 publications from 2005 to 2025 were collected and refined to 336 relevant articles for analysis. The period from 2005 to 2025 was chosen because it marked a turning point in how entrepreneurial literacy was integrated into higher education curricula worldwide, prompting a surge in academic discourse and publications on the subject. A five-step bibliometric approach was applied using VOSviewer. Data were analysed using keyword co-occurrence analysis, overlay visualisation and a global research keyword density map. This analysis identified key research clusters related to entrepreneurship education, financial literacy and students. The results show an increasing trend in publication volume, particularly after 2019, reflecting growing academic interest in entrepreneurship education. Keyword co-occurrence analysis highlights emerging themes, including student entrepreneurship and higher education; entrepreneurship education and digital transformation; financial literacy and entrepreneurial intention; and innovation and social entrepreneurship. The bibliometric findings reflect this convergence, as the literature naturally draws upon theoretical and empirical contributions from each of these fields. This cross-disciplinary integration is not merely a methodological choice but a defining characteristic of entrepreneurial literacy as a construct, reinforcing the need for holistic, multidomain approaches in both research and pedagogical practice. Contribution: This study contributes to mapping the intellectual landscape of entrepreneurship literacy research. The results highlight the need for more integrated, cross-disciplinary and evidence-based, long-term research to understand entrepreneurship education in higher education more comprehensively.
This article examines how first-generation commuter students from two working-class South African towns rhythmically negotiated the uneven spatial and temporal infrastructures shaping their educational engagement at a Cape Town university of technology. Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial and temporal analytics, we used a spatial-rhythmic lens alongside a blended, retrospective, multi-sited ethnographic design, ethnography on the move to trace the complex, nonlinear educational trajectories of these students and show how mobility, space and time converge in shaping educational persistence. Excluded from residence through rigid accommodation policies, these students navigated fragmented transportation systems, unfamiliar university terrains and materially constrained home environments through adaptive bodily, temporal and relational practices. Commuting thus emerged not merely as a logistical constraint but as a central rhythm organising students’ educational life. By repurposing arduous journeys for study, cultivating peer networks and crafting self-directed academic routines, participants became rhythmic actors who developed situated, practical strategies for connection, persistence and academic success. Contribution: By foregrounding the spatial-temporal negotiations shaping working-class students’ educational trajectories, the article reframes commuting as a productive rhythm of engagement and argues that meaningful institutional transformation requires time-sensitive, mobility-attuned pedagogies that recognise the differentiated rhythms through which students inhabit and reshape the infrastructures of learning.
Climate change has multiple socio-ecological impacts as recognised in Sustainable Development Goal 13 (Climate Action). There have been numerous calls by the United Nations secretary-general for effective leadership and urgent responses to mitigate these impacts. More than just knowledge and political leadership is needed; students need opportunities to enable agency to develop their environmental leadership potential. To understand students’ perspectives on climate change and environmental leadership a baseline case study was conducted at a higher education institution in South Africa. The respondents were a convenient sample of students (n = 102) within a department in the Faculty of Science. A convergent parallel mixed methods approach was applied to data collection, which involved an electronic questionnaire with open and closed questions, and individual interviews. Forty-eight students responded to the electronic questionnaire (47.1%) and six of the 48 were interviewed. The findings include: a majority (70.8%) believed that climate change is influenced by anthropogenic factors, a greater majority held the belief that people should be given tangible rewards and punishments (60.1%) to achieve objectives and the majority of students (80%) indicated that knowledge is a key driver of environmental leadership in the mitigation of climate change. Contribution: The study demonstrated the need to develop leadership attributes within the transformational Education for Sustainable Development agenda to enhance the agency and potential of higher education students to mitigate climate change. It is recommended that higher education institutional leadership take greater cognisance of environmental leadership and encourage curriculum integration, community engagement and youth-identified development programmes to support present and future students to mitigate climate change impacts.
This Table of Contents reflects the print compilation of peer-reviewed articles published in the journal. Each article listed was originally published online under the journal’s open access model and remains individually accessible and citable. This compilation has been created solely for print distribution, reference, and archival purposes. No new research content is introduced. The publisher affirms that all articles included in this compilation have undergone the journal’s standard editorial and peer-review processes.
A collaborative approach to curriculum transformation (CT) ensures that higher education programmes remain inclusive, future-ready and responsive to societal needs. Guided by Stakeholder Theory and Clark’s Triangle of Coordination, this study examined how a multistakeholder approach shapes CT in a South African Open Distance e-Learning (ODeL) university. The study addressed the question: how does collaborative stakeholder engagement influence CT in an ODeL context? While transformation efforts aim to integrate Afrikan epistemologies, pedagogical renewal, online teaching and innovative assessment, challenges persist. Using a qualitative critical ethnographic case study, the research drew on participant observation, field notes, document analysis and interviews with 15 purposefully selected participants – one CT head, five champions, six lecturers and three students. Findings show that Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), institutional management, champions, lecturers and students each played distinct roles in advancing transformation principles such as Afrikan epistemologies, pedagogical renewal, online teaching and innovative assessment. While stakeholder involvement strengthened collaboration, significant barriers emerged, including epistemological resistance, uneven digital competence, increased workload, misaligned expectations and declining momentum after DHET funding ended. Addressing these challenges is crucial for effective CT. Contribution: The study concludes that sustainable curriculum transformation in ODeL settings requires continuous dialogue, stronger institutional support, internal funding mechanisms and dedicated capacity-building for champions and lecturers. These conditions are essential for embedding Afrikan epistemologies and promoting meaningful, long-term pedagogical renewal.
South Africa’s political trajectory since the advent of democracy in 1994 has been characterised by transformative shifts, periods of instability and contested governance structures. These dynamics have exerted profound influences on public service professions, including social work. Social work education, which is fundamentally oriented towards equipping practitioners to address multifaceted social challenges, is inherently shaped by prevailing political ideologies, legislative frameworks and governance mechanisms. This article provides a conceptual analysis of the interplay between South African politics and social work education, examining how the contemporary political milieu impacts curriculum development, professional accreditation processes, resource distribution and opportunities for field placements. Drawing upon the political economy of education, critical social theory and policy analysis frameworks, the article investigates the degree to which political instability, coalition governance arrangements, corruption scandals and policy oscillations mould the preparation and efficacy of prospective social workers. A conceptual methodology is utilised, synthesising secondary literature, policy documents and professional standards to delineate the political–educational interface. The findings indicate that although the political environment presents substantial threats to the autonomy and integrity of social work education, it concurrently affords avenues for cultivating politically astute and socially attuned graduates. This analysis situates social work education within the broader transformation agenda of South African higher education. Contribution: Recommendations encompass safeguarding curriculum design from partisan influences, fostering enhanced partnerships between academic institutions and policymakers and integrating political literacy into social work pedagogy.
This study examines gender representation in leadership across South African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), building on a 2015 investigation that revealed limited progress two decades after the advent of democracy. Framed within the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and South Africa’s national commitment to gender equality, this quantitative study compares the representation of women in leadership positions, including vice-chancellors (VCs); deputy vice-chancellors (DVCs) for academic, research, and institutional culture (IC); registrars; and deans across 23 HEIs in 2014 and 26 HEIs in 2024. Guided by a transformative paradigm, the research compares the 2014 data to the 2024 data and estimates future trajectories in gender representation. Findings indicate a notable increase of women in positions of leadership, from 23.7% in 2014 to 39.6% in 2024, a 15.9% point increase. The most substantial gains were observed in DVC (academic) positions, which rose from 28.6% to 62.5%, followed by DVC (research) positions, increasing from 38.5% to 54.2%. Deans and registrars also showed positive change, reaching 38.4% and 34.6%, respectively. In contrast, VC positions saw only a modest increase from 17.4% to 26.9%, while DVC (IC) positions declined from 36.4% to 18.2%. Statistical analysis confirms meaningful shifts in gender representation; however, women remain 36% less likely to occupy leadership positions overall. Despite progress at many institutions, persistent disparities suggest that entrenched gender barriers and patriarchal norms continue to obstruct full parity. Gains made can also easily decline if not consciously addressed and continually monitored. Contribution: The study concludes that sustained, targeted interventions are essential to dismantle these systemic obstacles and advance genuine gender equity in HEI leadership.
This article offers a reflective account of co-supervising a doctoral study that drew on elements of Health Sciences and Education to explore interdisciplinary supervision. Rather than uniting entire disciplines, the collaboration brought together specific epistemological and methodological traditions from both fields, grounded in the lived experience of an interdisciplinary doctoral journey. The focus is not the doctoral thesis per se, but the supervisory process and how interdisciplinary practice reshapes research design, supervisory relationships, and student development. Rather than offering a generic account, the article draws on situated experience to provide practical insights into supervision practice, examination challenges, and institutional dynamics. A central tension emerged between institutional commitments to interdisciplinarity and the persistence of disciplinary expectations. The study highlights the challenges of navigating methodological dissonance, sustaining coherence in co-supervision across paradigms, and managing assessment processes that often default to monodisciplinary standards. It underscores the need for better support for both students and supervisors engaged in cross-border research. Ultimately, the article calls for more responsive supervision models and institutional cultures that recognise and accommodate the complexity of interdisciplinary doctoral journeys. Contribution: This article contributes to ongoing debates on interdisciplinary doctoral supervision by offering a grounded, practice-based reflection on how academic structures and supervision models shape knowledge-making across disciplines. It emphasises reflexivity, dialogical engagement, and institutional responsiveness as key enablers of epistemic hybridity, and encourages closer attention to how supervision practices can evolve to support complexity, fluidity, and collaboration in doctoral education.
Technology is widely utilised as a learning tool in higher education, yet its adoption in counselling services within institutions remains limited. The growing use of online counselling is recognised internationally in providing mental health services. However, this mode of delivering mental health services is generally under-explored in South African universities. Research suggests that it is essential to determine the extent to which clients would be interested in using online counselling before implementing it. Therefore, this study investigates university students’ attitudes towards the use of online counselling services and explores the significance of age and gender differences in these attitudes. Data were gathered from students through self-administered questionnaires, with a total of 266 respondents (N = 266). The data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings confirmed a generally mixed attitude towards online counselling, which was not significantly influenced by gender and age differences. Overall, the findings encourage a critical reflection on modern psychological practices in higher education institutions to better meet students’ needs.Contribution: This study explores the evolving digital landscape in higher education and its impact on student well-being, with a focus on information and communication technology-based counselling in the South African context. By examining students’ attitudes towards these digital interventions, the study contributes to ongoing discussions on the accessibility and effectiveness of mental health support in higher education. The study also acknowledges artificial intelligence’s potential to enhance accessibility, efficacy and ethicality in navigating mental health challenges.
Education increases a person’s skills and competencies, thereby improving their efficiency and earning capacity while delivering economic benefits for both the country and society. For this reason, many developing countries including those in sub-Saharan Africa have increased their government expenditure on education. Research suggests that government expenditure can have a positive impact in various aspects, including economic growth, educational quality, graduate employment and access to higher education. However, a critical question remains: Does increased expenditure lead to improved student performance? The main objective of the study was to determine the effect of government expenditure on higher education, focusing on how it affects student performance. Student performance was operationalised as graduate outcomes, measured by the annual number of students graduating from public higher education institutions in South Africa between 1991 and 2021. Using secondary data from the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and the World Bank, a multiple linear regression model with ARMA (1,2) was applied. The findings revealed a complex relationship: While government expenditure across all levels of education has a greater impact on student performance in higher education, there is a negative relationship between tertiary expenditure and graduate outcomes. These mixed results complicate the assumptions of human capital theory, which predicts positive returns from investment in human capital development, and are better explained through general systems theory, which views expenditure as an input that must be effectively converted, through institutional processes, into outputs. Contribution: The study contributes to debates on education funding by demonstrating that expenditure does not yield improved outcomes and recommends that future policy focus on optimising resource use, targeting support to the most vulnerable students and strengthening monitoring systems.
Searching for the humanity African descents lost through European colonisation, Post-1994 South Africa continues the struggles in large-scale protests that have become it’s defining feature. And not much in the way of scholarly rigour interrogates this antagonism. Privileging the narrative of hope as a humanistic approach for nation building, creative interventions from radical social movements have not been intellectually engaged as such, but have been characterised as backward and unlawful, therefore requiring violence as a mediating force. But the slow and constant growth of radical black studies in the midst of post-colonial scholarship has been met with academic resistance. This is because the ‘post’ in the post-colonial is an open-ended accommodation that expands by way of inter- and trans-disciplinary scholarship required to conform to already established methodologies, while black studies pose more disciplinary challenges informed by anti-colonial-slavery movements. In this article, I argue that the call for ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and a decolonised curriculum was not for an expansion of the current disciplinary measures of learning rooted in colonial scholarship, but a push for an anti-colonial method of learning. I argue that current attempts at accommodating by way of expanding post-coloniality are rooted in the academy’s self-reflection’s self-perpetuating mechanism. I contend that there exists outside the academy what I call ‘creative radical interventions’ that come from black social movements. Land occupations that result from community protest such as the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ student movement’s ‘Shackville’ was one of the many testing grounds at the call for an embrace for theories emanating from outside institutional disciplinary confines. Contribution: As the curriculum expands towards more disciplines, with it comes methodologies which I posit cannot deal with what it means to accommodate protests that resist academic disciplinary measures. Looking at creative interventions from social movements, this article interrogates what it means to be creative beyond academic disciplinary confines.
This article listens through an account given by a participant interviewed as part of an ongoing project on abuse in music-pedagogical and music-professional spaces in South Africa. It follows two trajectories in this account, which narrates the relationship between the participant, music and the master pedagogue: one that narrates the potential held in the relation between master and disciple in the language of freedom and self-realisation, the other in the language of madness and the asylum. How might this account be heard in the arrested present of post-apartheid South Africa? This article offers two responses. First, it argues that the emotional abuse described in the music-pedagogical account at the centre of this article enacts a foreclosure of the erotics of knowledge and communication some have seen as fundamental both to pedagogy and political emancipation. Second, the failure, artistically and politically, to which this pedagogical encounter leads – a failure at the practice of Western art music which, in apartheid South Africa, marked out the cultural preserve of whiteness – constitutes a very particular kind of failure that puts bodies in those places assigned to them by apartheid. Taken together, the account and these responses show how apartheid is sedimented pedagogically as a renewed affront that plays with desire as it refuses knowledge and emancipative politics. Contribution: This article is the first to consider abuse in classical music pedagogy in South Africa and suggests new theoretical ground by theorising ‘the pornographic in pedagogy’.
Theological training institutions play a pivotal role in equipping human resources for the holistic mission of the Church. The training they provide is highly recommended to meet rising demands for, and to ensure capacity building, integrity and competency for the rapidly growing Church in Africa, and to reverse the mission of the Church to Europe and countries in the West amid escalating secularisation. While Africans are now benefactors of the gospel beyond their motherlands, the challenge is that the majority of African theological institutions are still depending on European and Western support to cover their operating costs. Foreign generosity must be appreciated because it yields products that eventually serve the Church and society across the world. However, failure to indigenise sustainability affects institutional economics, autonomy and mission. Through a qualitative case study of the Theological College of Southern Africa (TCSA), purposively sampled in-depth interviews, participant observations and a literature review under theonomic reciprocity theory, this study questions how institutional economic sustainability can be achieved and explores strategies that are feasible for theological colleges in volatile contexts. Finding TCSA’s sources of revenue to be unsustainable, it concludes that contextually feasible, innovative and entrepreneurial strategies can build up sustainability. Contribution: This study offers strategies to sustain theological training institutions in volatile contexts.
The transformation of universities has focused on the systems of governance, epistemologies and pedagogies to the detriment of people who are drivers of transformation. This lack of focus on people results in assimilation into the existing institutional culture, which is Western. Notably, Western culture is individualistic in nature and privileges profits over life. This is what many scholars have called a dehumanising culture. There is a need, therefore, to think about transformation from different epistemologies that centre a person. This conceptual article uses Ubuntu, an African philosophy that privileges life over materiality. From an African epistemology, umuntu [a person] is understood as an enabler of Ubuntu because umuntu is an embodiment of ethical existence. To ensure this ethical existence, the restoration of a person is embedded in the everyday language and cultural practices that correct human behaviour. This article argues that Ubuntu provides an opportunity to think about an institutional culture that centres a person. This leads to the transformation of the systems that will be concerned with the ethical person. Contribution: The article recommends that before we can imagine a transformed university, the focus should be on the institutional culture to ensure that it nurtures ethical existence. As such, let us make humans who will drive the transformation agenda.
This article explores the ontological conflict between two academic identities: the human as an embodied, emotional being, and the researcher as a detached intellectual operating solely through reason. We examine how social science research within neoliberal universities perpetuates this division by marginalising emotional and embodied ways of knowing, questioning whether one can authentically exist as both human and researcher within institutions that enforce knowledge production through detachment and abstraction. Despite academia’s claims of embracing anti-imperial, postcolonial, and decolonial epistemologies, these commitments remain largely theoretical, while rationalist approaches continue to dominate. Humanised research methods and emotional experiences, particularly in fieldwork, continue to be marginalised, as researchers’ discomfort routinely dismissed rather than recognised as meaningful data. Decolonial epistemologies grounded in emotional, spiritual, and embodied knowledge fundamentally challenge Northern ontologies that privilege detachment and reductionism. As students and early-career researchers, we employed collaborative autoethnography to critically examine our academic positionalities. Through three reflexive workshops (2022–2024) at the University of Cape Town and the Political Ecology Network conference in Durban, participants utilised meditation as emotional methodology, exploring which truths are negated by researcher rationalism and how these negations impede institutional transformation. Drawing on feminist epistemologies, decolonial theory, and critiques of neoliberalism, we analyse tensions in fieldwork and knowledge production, arguing that discomfort functions as a powerful site of truth-telling and catalyst for higher education transformation. Rather than silencing affective dimensions, we embrace them as transformative humanising praxis that moves beyond the harmful limitations of traditional academic approaches towards life-affirming expressions of our political potential as human beings. Contribution: We propose a meditative practice as an emotional methodology to unmask and humanise the researcher, facilitate reflexivity and critical conversations, and develop concrete strategies for inhabiting both researcher and human subjectivities within a more humanised academic praxis.
