Keynote: Universidad Estatal A Distancia, (UNED) San Jose, Costa Rica, 3 September, 2018

1. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/sculpture-head-face-bronze-statue-1698293
(Re)claiming humanity, reclaiming hope: the
role of higher education in the 21st century
Paul Prinsloo
University of South Africa
(Unisa) @14prinsp
Keynote: Universidad Estatal A Distancia, (UNED)
San Jose, Costa Rica,
3 September, 2018

2. Acknowledgement
I do not own the copyright of any of the images in this
presentation. I therefore acknowledge the original copyright
and licensing regime of every image used.
This presentation (excluding the images) is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License.

3. Overview of the presentation
• The own positionality – a White scholar in the
Global South
• Being human in the 21st century
• Who had the power and who still has the
power to define who is human and what it
means to be human?
• The role of higher education
• (Re)membering, (re)claiming humanity
• (In)conclusions – some pointers for
consideration

4. “The global South is not a geographical
concept, even though the great majority of its
populations live in countries of the Southern
hemisphere. The South is rather a metaphor
for the human suffering caused by capitalism
and colonialism on the global level, as well as
for the resistance to overcoming or minimizing
such suffering. It is, therefore, an anti-
capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-patriarchal, and
anti-imperialist South.”
(Santos, 2016, pp.18-19)
Santos, B de S. (2016). Epistemologies of the South and the future. From
the European South 1, 17-29.

5. Being from the Global South and white
I cannot disentangle my position of being White and
male (a settler) in the Global South and how this
identity shaped my own privileges, capital and life
trajectory. My identity produced a set of power
relations that made me (more) human than those who
who were not White and male. In the process I did not
only become part of a machinery that de-humanized
others, but I became de-humanized myself.
(See Freire, 1972; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013)

6. “Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose
humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way)
those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of
becoming more fully human” (Freire, 1972, pp. 20-21)

7. Image credit:
https://kimmonkamera.blogspot.com/2014/02/kirjoja
-hyllyssani-13-books-in-my.html
Image credit: Amazon
This presentation has furthermore been shaped by the
works of Paulo Freire and Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni

8. Being human
Human Not-Human
• Cosmos
• Nature
• Animal
• It
• ‘Other’
Have rights, privileges,
power, ‘power over’
Are afforded rights,
privileges, power,>
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/cave-paintig-prehistoric-rupestral-490205/
What does it mean to be human? Who
defines ‘being human’ and why it
matters…

9. Being human
Human Not-Human
• Cosmos
• Nature
• Animals
• ‘It’
• ‘Other’
Are afforded rights,
privileges, acknowledgement
Have rights, privileges,
power , and ‘power over’ >

10. Throughout human history these narratives about who were
‘human’ and who were not ‘human’, were told, endorsed,
legalized, and sanctioned

11. The colonial cartography of power
Zone of being
Zone of non-being
Abyssal line/human line/color line
Whiteness/whitism
on a world scale
Blackness/blackism
on a world scale
(Adapted from Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p.63)
E.g. Emancipation,
racial privilege, law,
rights, affluence,
peace, visibility,
progress
E.g. War, violence,
dispossession,
invisibility, poverty,
death

12. Image credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Israeli_West_Bank_Barrier.jpg
These narratives formed and continue to
form the basis for genocides,
epistemicides, femicides and ‘othering’

13. Imagecredit:http://pictify.saatchigallery.com/470578/vitruvian-man-leonardo-da-vinci
White 'Man’ (sic) as center of the universe, created in the image
of God and awarded the power to reign over ’others’ – females,
nature, gays, lesbians, blacks, and mestizo/a or whatever
combination did and does not look like and/or think like ‘them’

14. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man#/media/File:Da_Vinci_Vitruve_Luc_Viatour.jpg
We cannot (and should not)
ignore (and we need to
account for) that our
assumptions and beliefs
about what it means to be
human have been shaped by
men in the Global North and
how this became
institutionalized and
normalized

15. Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man#/media/File:Da_Vinci_Vitruve_Luc_Viatour.jpg
What role did/does (higher)
education play in validating
particular understandings of
what ‘being human’ means?
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/seal-wax-red-certificate-wax-seal-2523199/
What role did/does (higher)
education play in confronting
and discrediting accounts of the
world where some are more
human and more worthy than
others?

16. “Degrees cannot fix the cumulative effect of
structural racism that doesn’t just reinforce the
link between family wealth and returns to
educational attainment in the labour market
but exists as a primary function of that link”
(McMillan Cottom, 2014, par. 17)
To “expand education in an unequal society
without a redistribution of resources, you will
[merely] reproduce inequality”
(McMillan Cottom in Prinsloo, 2015)

17. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://za.pinterest.com/pin/180707003769436556/
How would ‘being
human’ look like if
defined and
institutionalized by
women?
How would a
female her-story
instead of his-tory
look like?

18. Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vitruvian_man.jpg
Image credit: https://www.123rf.com/photo_82072469_stock-illustration-chain-of-slavery-icon-
vector-illustration-graphic-design.html
How would those
who have been
and are continued
to be enslaved,
‘otherered’ and
’dis-membered
define ‘being
human’?

19. “I am concerned with moving the center in two senses
at least. One is the need to move the center from its
assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of
spheres in all the cultures of the world.
[Eurocentrism] Within nearly all nations today the
center is located in the dominant social stratum, a
male bourgeois minority. […] Moving the center to
the two senses – between nations and within nations
– will contribute to the freeing of the world of cultures
from the restrictive walls of nationalism, class, race
and gender” (emphasis added)
(Ngugu wa Thiong’o, 1993, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 4)

20. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/feet-tangermünde-foot-ten-shackles-433607/
We need to de-Europeanize the world and center Africa [and
other localities] as “legitimate historical unit[s] of analysis and
epistemic site[s] from which to interpret the world while at the
same time globalizing knowledge from Africa [and other
localities]” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 4)

21. “Coloniality is not over, it is all over”
(Walter Mignolo, 2016, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 44)
Type of empire
• Physical empire
• Commercial-military-non-
territorial empire
• Metaphysical empire
Decolonial trajectory
• Political decolonization
• Economic decolonization
• Epistemological
decolonization
(Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 55)

22. Decolonial trajectory
• Political decolonization
• Economic decolonization
• Epistemological decolonization
The role of (higher) education

23. The onto-decolonial turn
”At the center of the ‘unholy alliance’ of
modernity, racism, imperialism, colonialism
and capitalism emerged new architecture and
configuration of power as well as new …
conceptions of the ‘human’ and knowledge”
(Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 71)
This calls for a rethinking of the ‘human’ with
other ‘selves’ as well as other forms of
‘matter’ (both living and non-living)

24. Imagecredit:http://pictify.saatchigallery.com/470578/vitruvian-man-leonardo-da-vinci
“Hetararchies” – the “multiple, vertical, horizontal
and crisscrossing strings of ‘colonialities’ that
touch every aspect of human life”
(Grosfoguel, 2017, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 61)

25. Imagecredit:https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2014/12/09/jarrett-jack-nets-
cavaliers-i-cant-breathe-t-shirts-lebron-james-kyrie-irving/20125923/
“It is hard for black students to breathe
within universities”
(Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 64)

26. Image credit: https://odyssey.antiochsb.edu/features/social-justice/show-me-the-doll-that-is-the-nice-one/
How were we/are we complicit in giving
students a particular vocabulary for
their worlds?

27. We need to re-think, not only our relationships with nature, the
universe, living and non-living but also with one another, how we
describe one another, and how notions of heteronormativity, whiteness
and humans–as-centers-of-the-universe shape our understanding, our
practices and our being.
Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/statue-bronze-pigeon-185435/

28. Towards an agenda for (re)claiming
humanity in (higher) education

29. The ‘onto-decolonial’ turn means
• Re-humanizing/re-membering – the quest for
wholeness – there is no one way of humaning - it is
a cultural and social process “which we constantly
hone”
• Re-humaning/humaning – “a lifelong process of
life-in-the-making with others”
• Posthumanism
(Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 76-77)

30. Barnett, R. (2000). University knowledge in an age of supercomplexity. Higher education, 40(4), 409-422.

31. Barnett, R. (2000). University knowledge in an age of supercomplexity. Higher
education, 40(4), 409-422.
Higher education has to…
• Offer completely new (radical) frames of
understanding
• Help us comprehend and make sense of the the
different claims to truth and contest/verify/accredit
• Formulate alternative discourses to the inherited
narratives
• Enable us to live purposefully amid supercomplexity
• Knowledge, as a pure, objective reading of the world
does have to be abandoned
• We need epistemologies for living amid uncertainty

32. Students should “develop their power to perceive
critically the way they exist in the world with which
and in which they find themselves; they come to see
the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in
process, in transformation”
(Freire 1972, p. 56; italics in the original)
Image credit: https://sandratrappen.com/2015/05/13/blacklivematter-bluelives-matter/

33. An agenda from the Global South for
reclaiming humanity
• We need to “un-think France”(Leopold Sedar Senghor and
Cesaire in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 104)
• We need scholars and graduates who embraces epistemic
disobedience and learn to live with the inherent ambiguities
when we let go of the inherited (and endorsed) ways of
being and thinking
• We need to “rethink thinking” (Odora Hoppers and Howard
Richards 2012, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018)
• “Disciplinary decadence” must die – “its own centering
because of a commitment to questions greater than the
discipline itself” (Gordon, 2006, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p.
188)

34. de Oliveira Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Ahenakew, C., & Hunt, D. (2015). Mapping interpretations of
decolonization in the context of higher education. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society,
4(1), 21-40.
Spaces of enunciation and reform –
soft reform, radical reform, beyond
reform – epistemological,
ontological and metaphysical

35. From dis-membering to re-membering
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/statue-figure-woman-bronze-art-2500610/

36. THANK YOU
Paul Prinsloo (Prof)
Research Professor in Open Distance Learning (ODL)
College of Economic and Management Sciences,
Samuel Pauw Building, Office 5-21, P.O. Box 392
Unisa, 0003, Republic of South Africa
T: +27 (0) 12 433 4719 (office)
prinsp@unisa.ac.za
Skype: paul.prinsloo59
Personal blog:
http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com
Twitter profile: @14prinsp