Ready or not!: race, education and emancipation: a five-year lingitudinal, qualitative study of agency and impasses to success amongst higher education students in a sample of South African universities

Abstract

It is common knowledge that students, staff and government are all embroiled in a struggle to transform South Africa's institutions of higher education, and that these struggles are simultaneously historical and contemporary, practical and ideological. Set in universities, the focus of this study asked: Who succeeds, who does not? and is therefore intentionally student-centred. It aimed to follow a cohort of students from eight universities in their journey through university, and asked what obstacles these students encountered, and what they, along with their institutions are doing about these problems. As we entered the third year of the study in 2015, we encountered the beginning of the national student protests that brought national attention to many of the stories we had already heard from the students involved in this study. In the subsequent years of the study we heard from students who were actively involved in these transformation struggles as well as those who sat on the side-lines.