Articulating selfhood through the therapeutic: Teaching for justice and social transformation in contradictory spaces

In this article, we argue that it is in engaging with the particularly socio-politically loaded topics such as racism, gender-based violence, homophobia, and classism, where we urgently need to find new ways of simultaneously opening up, holding, and containing the visceral responses of students in relation to continuously renegotiating boundaries of the learning environment. Specifically, we contend that under the current conditions of calls for decolonization in South African higher education and elsewhere, the university as a whole (its curriculum, the classroom and its dynamics, teaching methodologies, and its governance structures) needs to be questioned and its pedagogical practices in general need to be reviewed. We take as the point our separate, but related experiences of teaching in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Some of the questions that frame our theoretical and methodological concerns are: How do we actually teach social justice related topics in diverse classrooms; how can we teach within, across, and beyond our own situatedness, especially where privileges and experiences of discrimination intersect and; how does one, ultimately, hold a space where the collective engagement with structural violence in its multiple intersecting expressions and the factual complexity of a dialogical pedagogical practice often lead to both moments of productivity and also repressive chaos? What we struggle with in this article, then, including the incidents foregrounded in it, are the complexities of engaging with social justice within the South African higher education context that is constantly grappling with being both the best and the worst example of political imagination.