The essence of the university manifests in its ontological design, which determines future goals and shapes processes and practices across all dimensions of the institution. In this paper, we argue that ontological design matters for universities, for fundamentally transforming institutions, enabling aspirations for decolonisation, and driving a more meaningful contribution to addressing the climate and Nature emergency. Drawing on a study across two South African universities that examined sustainability perceptions and practices in terms of integrated social and ecological justice, the paper interrogates three forms of ontological (re)design in universities – neoliberal policies, a capabilities and well-being orientation, and African ubuntu philosophy. The paper concludes that an ubuntu-capabilitarian ontological design that embeds ecological consciousness and values would steer universities towards an education that fosters pluriversal knowledges, embraces human, spiritual, and non-human interconnection, and embodies ethics of caring, sharing, and repairing. Ontological redesign in this direction could promote more radical transformation possibilities for universities to advance human and ecological flourishing.

This paper proposes that the public good in higher education can be understood as a project of repair, that is, contributing to the removal of past injustices, to fairer higher education and to better social futures. Drawing in the first instance on the global South, specifically higher education in post-colonial South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the available literature addressing the public good and higher education is first sketched, before the case is made for repair as both a regional and global project. Having outlined a conceptualisation of repair for higher education, the disrepairs of colonialism and neoliberalism are considered as obstacles standing in the way of a regional and necessarily global repair process in the light of Bhambra's entangled 'colonial global' of former colonizers and colonized. In response, a repair project is proposed underpinned by normative theorising using human development and the capabilities approach, as well as the significance of fostering moral sentiments for the formation of the whole person. In this approach expanding plural wellbeing freedoms and wellbeing achievements are the focus of development and education for equitable and effective educational processes and practices which can foster public spiritedness and public values and undo injustices. To expand the valuable capabilities and functionings of all students and encourage public values would be to foster repair as a public good project. The idea is to move beyond only critique to constructing potential guiding ideas and actions, with attention to student learning and formation outcomes.

Literature on emerging adulthood often centres on the ways in which individuals navigate youth transitions to assert their place in the world as independent adults, where a key marker of achieving adult status is gaining financial independence from one's parents. Our paper offers a counter narrative. Through our engagement with the concept of 'black tax', which is linked to notions of filial responsibility against a backdrop of racialised inequality, we explain how becoming financially independent is complicated by the interplay between race, intergenerational poverty and familial dynamics in a global South context. We use the capability approach to theorise the complexities of the black tax, by analysing the story of a young black woman in South Africa who has been providing financial support to her mother and extended family members since the age of 18. Our paper thus provides a particularly relational account of the transition from youth to adulthood, by focusing on experiences of financial interdependence and ways of living that are valued in collectivist, rather than individualistic cultures. This account shows that some assumptions that underpin the international discourse on youth financial goals, financial decisions and transitions are incongruent with the realities of Southern youth.

The paper contributes to current debates about decolonising curriculum and advancing corresponding ‘humanness pedagogies’ in South Africa by developing a capabilitarian approach and foregrounding epistemic justice capabilities. This is aligned with and to fostering a shared African ethic for individual transformation-in-context and for building universities which benefit communities and societies. It is proposed that epistemic justice capabilities are foundational to decolonising curriculum and foundational for pedagogies which mediate disciplinary content and the dismantling of comparative inequalities among students in order to foster humanness. The capabilitarian framework seeks to secure the expanded wellbeing, co-flourishing and agency of all, in this case in and through higher education and a quality, decolonising curriculum oriented to an ecology of knowledges and a generous, inclusive humanity. The paper concludes with suggestions regarding a way forward to dismantle an exclusionary ‘epistemic line’ and associated oppressions.

The claim made is that dignity matters in both legal and recognitional aspects for flourishing and lifelong learning opportunities for young adults. Dignity is understood here as a foundational capability and functioning to be and to do in ways which matter to a person, requiring the material and non-material conditions which enable and secure equal dignity for each person. The claim is first explored drawing on both the capability approach and conceptualisations of dignity, especially the inflorescent form. Then, to empirically animate the claim, the article draws on a participatory story-telling project undertaken in a South African university in 2020 with graduate students, in which they were co-creators of knowledge. Participants were supported pedagogically in producing their own individual and collective digital stories, focusing on their lived experiences of social justice and specifically of human dignity. The project shows that dignity is an especially important capability for young people's present and future wellbeing and their aspirations. Dignity is formed in and sustained relationally in collective spaces. Further, dignity enables repair of the injustices of the colonial and apartheid past. If dignity is not fostered in and through education in adult and higher education spaces, education will always fall short of social justice aspirations and lifelong learning conditions.

South Africa is home to a large youth population, defined in South Africa as aged between 18 and 34 years. In working to transform our unequal society, we need to take diverse youth voices, including young people at university, into account regarding what matters to them. To enable their voices, the paper recounts a participatory storytelling research project with students in the educational space of one South African university. Using individual and collective digital storytelling, participants produced an archive of everyday stories, which then comprised a data base for them to analyse social in/justice issues and themes and co-create knowledge from the ground-up, with their emergent ideas categorised in a social injustice map. Through the iterative action learning and reflective process, participants developed their critical awareness of injustices and enhanced their sense of their own epistemic agency to contribute to change. Both the project process and the formation of intersecting capabilities for the co-creation of substantive reparative knowledge about social injustices and fairness were advanced through the project. Finally, it is suggested that these two capabilities might be applied to young people globally as crucial for contributions to epistemic agency and for making more just future societies.

The paper discusses repair as valuable for thinking about and acting towards sustainable human development. Repair asks us to take account of intersections of past, present, and reimagined futures; the end is becoming and being full human beings with dignity, attentive to the lives of others and to what Achille Mbembe calls the “living world”. We seek to repair that which is valuable to us, while also setting aside what cannot be fixed (for example colonialism and apartheid). The concept of repair is proposed as a lens to think about some disrepair challenges facing development: the enduring effects of history on justice, skewed global knowledge relations, and racism. The ideas are then applied to the space of education. A repair praxis framework is proposed based on four overlapping dimensions: conviviality as incompleteness; advancing epistemic freedoms; fostering transformational learning; and, spaces of dialogue and participation. The paper concludes with an example of renaming the world to repair the world and finally reminds us that we should pay attention to who we are with others, to what we repair, and to the kind of ancestors we choose to be for future generations.

In South Africa, low-income rural black youth are assumed to exhibit endurance in their higher education agency while yet not really being agentic, because they accommodate an oppressive university and settle for less ambitious aspirational horizons. Drawing on illustrative empirical data from a longitudinal study of black youth without hot knowledge of higher education to deploy from their families' biographies, the project explored students' accessing, participating in and moving on from their studies at five South African universities. In exploring youth aspirations and agency, the concept of repair is employed to position aspirations as reparative and temporal where past injustices, present and future intersect in shaping agency and in projecting imagined futures for youth. The cultural lens of aspiration offers a space to interrogate and dismantle past exclusions and unsettle norms of the "disadvantaged student" to avoid reinscribing past injustice in ways which are globally relevant to marginalised university students from poor backgrounds compared to better off students. It shows how day to day negotiated conditions of living in universities by these students are agentic; enduring poverty and exclusion is an active aspirational struggle for dignity and recognition, even if these students are not able to undo relations of power. Ubuntu is mobilised as an ontological means to further deepen how we understand aspirations and agency as interdependent and interacted between person and community and as refusal of the neoliberal university. Finally, features of universities as potential spaces of aspirations and repair for transformative change and transformative futures are sketched.

Learning outcomes are predominantly framed in narrow and measurable terms, with students as decontextualised learners. As an alternative, the paper outlines a capabilitarian approach, building a four-dimensional matrix for reconceptualising learning outcomes. It is made up of a varied, multi-dimensional set of opportunities, processes and outcomes to enable students to flourish and become people who can live fulfilling and connected lives in and beyond higher education. The matrix dimensions are made up of a capability set, corresponding functionings, material resources and conversion processes, underpinned by Constitutional and human development values. The paper draws on a project on higher education outcomes in South Africa, especially the longitudinal life history data. It makes the case for a reparative futures orientation which might dismantle the colonial-apartheid past and present, and outlines key capabilitarian concepts. The social and higher education context is sketched, followed by a focus on the capability set and what data supports its value to students.

Drawing on Amartya Sen, this paper proposes that clinical legal education and training should be evaluated in the light of contributions to wellbeing and agency freedoms, foregrounding people’s capabilities as an appropriate metric for judging access to justice. The context is post-apartheid South Africa and aspirations towards transformative Constitutionalism which seeks to operationalize values of dignity, equality and freedom for all. The role the legal system, mediated by legal practitioners, should support Constitutional values and the public good as envisaged by the National Standards for university legal education. This challenge is explored in the article, drawing on a qualitative interview study. The researchers interviewed candidate attorneys across six University Law Clinics to identify the professional capabilities they valued for the purposes of contributing to enabling people to flourish in their everyday lives. Transformative Constitutionalism further suggests a set of capabilities which legal practice should enable. Through the perspectives and voices of practitioners, valued legal capabilities and the corresponding university education and training practices are also identified. The idea of legal capability is developed and broadened both conceptually and empirically, building on work both by Atkins and Habbig and Robeyns. The claim is made that legal education, lawyers’ professional capabilities, and transformative Constitutionalism should be grounded normatively in a capabilities metric of justice and hence what matters for people’s wellbeing and agency freedoms.

South Africa can be considered a post-conflict, although not conflict-free, society, given massive inequalities arising from poverty and unemployment, and social inequalities such as racism and gender violence. Nonetheless, since 1996, South Africa has had a robust Constitution underpinned by human rights, human dignity and democratic values and a functioning, if fragile, democratic system. It is a country in the process of reinventing itself politically and socially, which makes the present moment opportune to understand social change and new subjectivities in the space of higher education through participatory storytelling. The chapter first outlines the meaning of reparative futures, before explaining relevant capabilitarian ideas. The conceptual frames are taken up in relation to the digital stories-as-practice produced by participants. The paper is located in the space of higher education in South Africa and the possibility of an inclusive decolonising education future (weaving together reparative futures with freedom, equality and dignity as our key reparative values). Here we understand decolonising as an ongoing process of dismantling a Eurocentric epistemic canon for its negative impact on black and indigenous knowledge systems, arguing rather for re-centring African knowledge and dismantling broader historical colonial oppressions that persist into the present. In particular, we propose that reparative futures require expanding and expressing human capabilities and functionings and the opportunity to live flourishing lives. Dignity, freedom and equality are integrated with the storytelling process described in the paper to make clear that ordinary people living everyday lives have always had agency and have always been present and active as historical agents, even in the face of constraining structures. Drawing on the 12 digital stories and a recuperative pedagogic practice in a participatory 'Youth Voices for Social Justice' project at one South African university, the chapter discusses black histories, voices and experiences that have been silenced or erased through assimilative forms of education and social practices and structures which attribute worth differently to men and women, to black and white, to well-off and poor. It seeks to explain the possibility of reparative humanness as an ongoing decolonising project which anticipates a new humanity beyond and against apartheid and colonialism's material, cognitive and affective grip. The chapter is situated in a literature on decolonising higher education and epistemic freedoms, capabilities and social justice, and participatory storytelling.

This chapter draws together all the preceding chapters to tease out common and divergent themes and approaches and evaluate the conceptual-empirical praxis contributions.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 The 2022 conference was hosted by the Universidad Autónoma Latinoamericana, Medellín, Colombia, and was a collective endeavour of the International Development Ethics Association, the Universidad Autónoma LatinoAmericana, and the Red para la formación ética y ciudadana. Details concerning the conference may be found at https://developmentethics.org/idea-unaula-ibague-2021-congress-development-in-times-of-conflict/.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlejandra BoniAlejandra Boni is professor at Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) and deputy director of Ingenio (CSIC-UPV). She is extraordinary professor at the University of the Free State in South Africa. Her research interests focus on human development, higher education, global citizenship and transformative innovation. She is the codirector of the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. She has been involved in research projects, trainings and policy advice in different European countries, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and Nigeria.Melanie WalkerMelanie Walker holds the South African research chair in Higher Education & Human Development at the University of the Free State in South Africa. She is current president of the Human Development and Capability Association, and honorary professor at the Universities of Nottingham and Pretoria. In South Africa she is a National Research Foundation A-rated social scientist.Diana VelascoDiana Velasco is a Research Fellow at Ingenio (CSIC-UPV), bringing broad experience in shaping academic and research policies within Colombian universities, where she has held pivotal roles such as Provost and Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation. Her academic journey includes a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, where she specialized in innovation policies in the Global South. In recent years, Diana has been actively engaged in a fruitful collaboration with the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC). Currently, she is leading the Experimentation Programme at the Deep Transitions Lab, hosted by the Global Challenges Centre at the University of Utrecht

South Africa still faces inequalities with regard to access to higher education opportunities. Foregrounding student voices at one university, the paper compares how students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds make decisions about going to university. The focus is on those who have succeeded, but ideas can be extrapolated regarding those who do not make it. The argument draws on Amartya Sen's capability approach to explore individual stories and the interactions between agency and the intersectional conversion conditions of possibility which shape the capability for university access. Narrative interviews show how students are enabled or constrained in their educational decision-making in relation to selves, schooling, family and income. Some implications are suggested for enhancing access, while not making claims for South African higher education as a whole.

Current epistemic governance analyses in higher education ignore systemic power relations between Northern and Southern researchers. This paper does focus on previous approaches to understanding epistemic governance, but rather moves beyond these towards a Southern evaluative and prospective comprehension. The paper is primarily theoretical. We draw on Fricker's theorizing of epistemic justice, but note the importance of the institutional. Amartya Sen's capability approach enables envisioning possibilities for change at individual and systemic levels, placing agency and epistemic freedoms at the centre of epistemic governance to foster solidarity and reflexive actions for change. To make the case, the paper explores testimonial and hermeneutical (including hermeneutic obstruction) injustices in research, presenting unfair practices and the unjust consequences for scholars in the South arising from 'the colonial epistemic structure'. The paper proposes that this structure, and its West-centric episteme, shapes epistemic governance which, among other effects, invisibilizes race and racism and is unable to account for the experiences of Southern subjects. The paper concludes by suggesting that it is a moral responsibility in higher education to exercise reasoned agency to promote equal epistemic opportunities, especially for those situated on the wrong side of the epistemic line. This requires epistemic humility and ethical responsibility.

Meaningful participation of people as agents in development practice has been a central concern in capabilitarian scholarship and of Amartya Sen's own work, as a valuable freedom and functioning in itself. Yet, there has been limited attention until now about knowledge generation processes and who is fully included, despite a growing body of literature arguing for pluriversality and decolonial approaches against historical and geographical inequalities at many levels. The paper proposes that capabilitarian scholarship could be enriched by considering a pluriverse of methodological perspectives, building on the work already undertaken but taking it further to create multi-epistemic conversations. This paper explores why the methodological and cosmological - onto-epistemological - unexplored areas of participatory research in capabilitarian scholarship should be embedded in our research culture and practice for more inclusive, decolonial, methodologically challenging empirical strategies (beyond methods and methodologies) that will place those situated at the margins of epistemic divisions and conflicts in the centre of knowledge production and debates. To this end and adding to the debates, the paper first considers participatory projects reported on in the journal before presenting an original framing of a capabilitarian participatory paradigm. The paper further proposes some principles that underpin its operationalisation.

This book explores learning outcomes for low-income rural and township youth at five South African universities. The book is framed as a contribution to southern and Africa-centred scholarship, adapting Amartya Sen’s capability approach and a framework of key concepts: capabilities, functionings, context, conversion factors, poverty and agency to investigate opportunities and obstacles to achieved student outcomes. This approach allows a reimagining of ‘inclusive learning outcomes’ to encompass the multi-dimensional value of a university education and a plurality of valued cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes for students from low-income backgrounds whose experiences are strongly shaped by hardship. Based on capability theorising and student voices, the book proposes for policy and practice a set of contextual higher education capability domains and corresponding functionings orientated to more justice and more equality for each person to have the opportunities to be and to do what they have reason to value. The book concludes that sufficient material resources are necessary to get into university and flourish while there; the benefits of a university education should be rich and multi-dimensional so that they can result in functionings in all areas of life as well as work and future study; the inequalities and exclusion of the labour market and pathways to further study must be addressed by wider economic and social policies for ‘inclusive learning outcomes’ to be meaningful; and that universities ought to be doing more to enable black working-class students to participate and succeed. Low-Income Students, Human Development and Higher Education in South Africamakes an original contribution to capabilitarian scholarship: conceptually in theorising a South-based multi-dimensional student well-being higher education matrix and a rich reconceptualisation of learning outcomes, as well as empirically by conducting rigorous, longitudinal in-depth mixed-methods research on students’ lives and experiences in higher education in South Africa. The audience for the book includes higher education researchers, international capabilitarian scholars, practitioners and policy-makers.

The paper explores the contributions of undergraduate university education to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)' goals and development outcomes, proposing a normative capability-based approach oriented to human development. The approach is aligned with a developmental model of the university and development policy in sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa, where the study is located. It draws empirically from a four and a half year mixed-methods research project conducted with low-income, mostly rural students at five historically diverse universities in South Africa. The paper presents a justification for using the capability approach, and outlines the rationale and methodology for synthesising a specific capability set generated by theorising and empirical data. A set of corresponding functioning indicators offers an expansive approach to understanding 'learning outcomes' in contrast to dominant neoliberal approaches that seek quantification and efficiency, overlooking what cannot be easily measured. An indicative sketch of university arrangements required to advance and evaluate each functioning for development outcomes is then outlined.