Suchergebnisse

In this article, I reflect on the idea of university spaces as potential sites of conscience. I explore how these spaces act not only as continuous reminders of past violence, marginalization, and exclusion, but as reminders also of ethical accountability and redress. The latter discloses opportunities and possibilities for a reinterpretation of such spaces, keeping in mind that the traces of the past will remain and that every attempt at erasure will be incomplete. The article considers how spaces or places that remain in the process of decolonization can be mobilized as sites of conscience. These sites/spaces/places manifest relationality also between materiality and symbol and between judgment and ethical accountability. The article focuses on issues surrounding the removal of a statue of the past president of the Republic of the Orange Free State, President M. T. Steyn at the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The university has a long and troubled history of exclusion, racism, and authoritarianism, among others. Since the early 1990s, many attempts have been made to transform, not all in vain. The statue itself was a site of contention at the UFS for many years and was removed over the last weekend in June 2020. I conclude that space that remains on the UFS campus is one of haunting that urges a certain sense of place and atmosphere that could forge learning, education, and transforming citizenship.

I consider to what extent, if at all, rights – or to take it wider, law – can contribute or even respond to what is referred to as the 'current crisis' in higher education. To what extent does rights discourse still enable radical political claims that could engage with the complexity of the moment and support a politics of resistance? I recall arguments on the limits of law, in particular the inability of law to be self-reflexive, and also some critical responses to rights as such. Could these critical responses disclose possibilities for a radically different conception of right, of a 'Right' – particularly the Right to the university – that emerges from a place of anxiety, disruption and 'unselfing' rather than preservation? What could be at stake in thinking about a 'Right' to the university against the background of the notion of the Right to the city? The potential relevance of the Right to the city, linked to the notion of 'inhabitance', is that it challenges the modern, technical and functional notion of 'habitat'. Habitat is devoid of any notion of politics, most pertinently political resistance. A contemplation of a Right to the university will have to have at its core the notion of 'inhabitance' that will resonate with Lefebvre's notion of "lived space".

Events that have taken place at several South African universities since 2015 have disclosed many fault lines in the social, political and legal arena. One aspect among many others is the extent to which the idea of the university as a public space has been attacked and all spaces of 'action and speech' are under siege. The university as a microcosm of society in general reflects a similar decline of public space, erasure of possibilities for radical dissent and the impossibility of even getting closer to a sense of justice experienced in other spaces. However as the contributions in this edition show it is not only universities and not only South African society that are burdened by neoliberal power.

ABSTRACT The main aim of this article is to reflect tentatively on the importance of a continuing critical jurisprudence. By thinking about the lives and legacies of the late Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela and his second wife, Winnie Madikizela Mandela, I want to reconsider a specific kind of critical jurisprudence, with particular attention to the issue of constitutionalism. I argue for a critical jurisprudence that responds to the many complexities that South African society faces , with nuance - not broad strokes and generalizations ; with care, neither aggressive nor defensive; and with thought, not strategic or calculated. I am of the view that this third position also has an important, albeit minor, place in legal scholarship and legal education and most pertinently in the LLB curriculum. Keywords: Critical Jurisprudence; Constitution As Living Document; LLB Curriculum; Arendt; Derrida; Nelson Mandela; Winnie Mandela

From text: In reading Pieter Duvenage's Afrikaanse filosofie. Perspekti we en dialoë (2016) other texts came to mind – Peter Vale, Lawrence Hamilton and Estelle Prinsloo's edited collection on Intellectual traditions in South Africa (2014); Andrew Nash's 2000 article on what he called 'the new politics of Afrikaans'; the majority and minority judgments in the case of City of Tshwane vs Afriforum; an article by Achille Mbembe on the decolonisation of the university, to name a few. In my reflection on Duvenage's perspectives and dialogues I recall my thoughts arising from these texts.

This was the keynote presentation at the workshop on Diversity and Legal Reasoning held at Queen Mary University of London on 23 November 2016, co-sponsored by the Centre for Research on Law, Equality and Diversity and the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context. Karin van Marle approaches the theme of diversity in legal reasoning from the perspective of epistemology and argues that political and legal institutions should value difference and live with it in a way that amounts to more than mere 'accommodation' or adding a list of different differences. Drawing on the work of Achille Mbembe, Judith Butler, Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey, Albie Sachs, Jacqueline Rose, Adriana Cavarero and Iris Marion Young, she explores ways in which traditional approaches to notions like university, access, space, truth, knowledge, politics and ethics could be challenged at the heart of what they hold dear.

From text: In this special edition of Acta Academica, we called for contributions to engage in critical reflections on law as a humanities discipline against the background of US Crit Karl Klare's suggestion of transformative constitutionalism. We were interested in, for example, reflections on law's epistemological foundations, how the law intersects with historical analyses and with society. A pertinent question was: To what extent does present legal education and training give expression to the transformative ideal of a new order?

In this article, the author considers the relationship of law, morality and reconciliation. Intrigued by the political and ethical stances taken by Arendt and McCarthy, the author supports notions of detachment, slowness and social reconciliation concerning contemporary political and ethical questions.

The starting-point for the article is to provide a brief background on the Ubuntu Project that Prof. Drucilla Cornell convened in 2003; most notably the interviews conducted in Khayamandi, the support of a sewing collective, and the continued search to launch an Ubuntu Women's Centre. The article will reflect on some of the philosophical underpinnings of ubuntu, whereafter debates in Western feminism will be revisited. Ubuntu feminism is suggested as a possible response to these types of feminisms. The authors support an understanding of ubuntu as critique and ubuntu feminism accordingly as a critical intervention that recalls a politics of refusal. The article ends by raising the importance of thinking about spatiality through ubuntu, and vice versa. It may seem strange to title an article Ubuntu feminism when feminism itself has often been identified as a European or Western idea. But, this article will argue that ubuntu offers conceptions of transindividuality and ways of social belonging that could respond in a meaningful way to some of European feminism's own dilemmas and contradictions. Famously, one of the most intense debates in feminism was between those who defended an ethic of care in a relational view of the self, on one side, and those feminists who held on to more traditional conceptions of justice, placing an emphasis on individuality and autonomy, on the other side. The authors will suggest that ubuntu could address this tension in feminism. Thus, in this article the focus will not simply be on ubuntu, in order to recognise that there are other intellectual heritages worthy of consideration, other than those in Europe and the United States. It will also take a next step in arguing that ubuntu may be a better standpoint entirely from which to continue thinking about what it means to be a human being, as well as how to conceive of the integral interconnection human beings all have with one another. This connection through ubuntu is always sought ethically, and for the authors it underscores what we ...