Papers by Injairu kulundu
This thesis relates the work of a non-governmental organisation, The Spirals Trust, to discussion... more This thesis relates the work of a non-governmental organisation, The Spirals Trust, to discussions on human and participatory development. The focus of the study is one of The Spirals Trust’s projects, the 2006/7 Tantyi Youth Empowerment Project, which is discussed in relation to theoretical material on human development and participatory development. Collectively these perspectives are defined in this thesis as ‘participatory human development’. The 2006/7 Tantyi Youth Empowerment Project illustrates some of the challenges that face the practice of participatory human development. Workshops and focus group interviews were conducted with participants who were part of the 2006/7 Tantyi Youth Empowerment Project in order to draw out their experiences of the project. Questions were created from themes that emerged from the participants’ discussion of their experiences and these questions were then posed to members of staff of The Spirals Trust. The experiences of both the participants ...
This monograph gives insight into the collective learning under way in response to the COVID-19 p... more This monograph gives insight into the collective learning under way in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the first series of work emerging from the South African Hub in the network plus project on Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures (TESF), the monograph explores and demonstrates what kinds of collective learning support, skills ecosystems and capacity mobilisation are needed for a 'just recovery' from COVID-19 that can inform basic livelihoods, new forms of work, climate action and long- term transformations for sustainable futures. Eight South African based projects – ranging from the work of long-standing non-governmental and community-based organisations to newly formed constellations of practice in social solidarity – and research that occurred during the first wave of the pandemic, undertook to reflect on the collaborative efforts, ethics, knowledges, practices and technological scaffolding that are needed for education to respond faithfully to these tim...
Environmental Education Association of Southern Africa, 2018
Queer Ecopedagogies, 2021
Research report on the JET Education Services/UNESCO southern African regional office for souther... more Research report on the JET Education Services/UNESCO southern African regional office for southern Africa/Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures South Africa OpenUpYourThinking Research Challenge. The #OpenupYourThinking: SADC Researchers Challenge took place in May and June 2020 and involved a wide range of universities located in SADC countries. This is a report from Theme 1: Education for sustainable development: COVID-19 education response intersections with the food, water and economic (livelihoods) crisis.
Southern African journal of environmental education, 2011
This paper reflects on the practice of social learning by using my experiences as a social develo... more This paper reflects on the practice of social learning by using my experiences as a social development practitioner in two projects. The first, the Arkwork Collective, is an art-junk process that engages marginalised youth in Grahamstown, South Africa in a process that uses creative sculpture and drama to explore personal and social issues that exist in their immediate context. The second, Jonga Phambili Sinethemba looks into the impact of climate change and HIV/AIDS (amongst other issues) in the rural and peri-urban communities of Willowvale and Lesseyton in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. It seeks to provide a platform where members of each community can define the vulnerabilities, capabilities, social networks in their areas with the aim of bolstering the adaptive capacity of these communities. Snippets of my experiences in these projects are shared with the intention of demonstrating constraints to learning in a social context. Key ideas that the paper explores include honouring...
Three scholar activists from South Africa reflect on what it means to transgress the limits of a ... more Three scholar activists from South Africa reflect on what it means to transgress the limits of a neoliberal world and its crisis times, particularly considering transgressions in the service of a decolonial future. The authors explore three questions: i) What kind of learning can help us transgress the status quo? ii) How do we extend this learning into a commitment to actively living in transgressive ways? iii) What does it mean to lead in ways that re-generate a transgressive ethic in a neoliberal world? In a dialogical conversation format, the authors outline nine different but interconnected perspectives on learning, living and leading into transgression, with the aim of concurrently revealing the multiple layers of work that a decolonial future depends on, while demonstrating the ambitions of a pluriversal decolonial future through their writing. The intertwined narrative is not conclusive, as the processes marked out in brief are experiences that still need to be fully practis...
The “Not yet Uhuru!” project positions itself as emancipatory African research in motion. It is a... more The “Not yet Uhuru!” project positions itself as emancipatory African research in motion. It is a regenerative project that responds to the concern that whilst dominant discourses can articulate what African states, societies and economies are not, we still know very little about what they actually are. This is a particularly important gap in how research on Africa is conceptualised, especially as it pertains to apprehending the futures that the majority of young people on the continent are instinctively leading themselves to (Mbembe, 2001, p.9). The project seeks to forgo youth development strategies that act as a form of containment by prescribing normative aspects of citizenship on young leaders in ways that stifle the transgressive impulses they have reason to value (Kelley in Tuck and Yang, 2014, p.89). The study traces rising cultures in transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis across times, as a way of “khapa(ring)” or accompanying the contemporary questions that Change Dr...
This handbook presents the experience of a participatory social learning process that evolved to ... more This handbook presents the experience of a participatory social learning process that evolved to support individual and community level adaptation to the myriad of stressors affecting rural people. While the social learning process is presented as a ‘package,’ this is more out of convenience than attempting to represent a perfect model. In other words, genuinely responsive social learning processes may well vary in content, but possibly not in core features from what is presented here. This handbook should therefore be considered as a framework to guide thinking and reflection around how such processes might unfold, and further provide guidance towards possible approaches and activities that may be appropriate in some circumstances. The most critical factor emerging through the experience of this social learning process is how facilitators see their roles and their relationships with participants. It is essential to strive for a balance between responsiveness and guidance, achieved ...
This monograph provides four different reviews on social learning literature. Rather than seeking... more This monograph provides four different reviews on social learning literature. Rather than seeking to be comprehensive, the reviews provide views on the social learning literature, from different perspectives. The papers scope aspects of the social learning literature, providing access to a wide body of literature(s) on social learning. This monograph should be useful for researchers interested in social learning in the fields of environmental education and natural resources management. In partnership with the SADC REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION PROGRAMME
NJAS - Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences, 2013
Envisioning futures for environmental and sustainability education, 2017
Southern African Journal of Environmental Education, 2020
Three scholar activists from South Africa reflect on what it means to transgress the limits of a ... more Three scholar activists from South Africa reflect on what it means to transgress the limits of a neoliberal world and its crisis times, particularly considering transgressions in the service of a decolonial future. The authors explore three questions: i) What kind of learning can help us transgress the status quo? ii) How do we extend this learning into a commitment to actively living in transgressive ways? iii) What does it mean to lead in ways that regenerate a transgressive ethic in a neoliberal world? In a dialogical conversation format, the authors outline nine different but interconnected perspectives on learning, living and leading into transgression, with the aim of concurrently revealing the multiple layers of work that a decolonial future depends on, while demonstrating the ambitions of a pluriversal decolonial future through their writing. The intertwined narrative is not conclusive, as the processes marked out in brief are experiences that still need to be fully practised in new relations in times to come within academia-in-society-and-the-world with human and more-than-human actors. However, they do offer a generative set of questions, concepts and metaphors to give courage to boundary-dwelling scholar activists attempting transgressive research. These reflections seek to regenerate the transgressive 'decolonial gestures' (decolonialfutures.net) that we can undertake in a neo-liberal world, as an important part of environment and sustainability education practices. It draws out what an embodied practice of transgressive learning can entail when we become discerning of hegemonic discourses that reproduce the status quo. We pay homage to those decolonial scholars in the field of environment and sustainability education as we traverse this terrain, recognising their imagination and the transgressive movement that has come before us, but importantly we seek to also open pathways for those yet to come.
Southern African Journal of Environmental Education,Vol. 34, 2018, 2018
Understandings of collective learning and change agency often conjure up an image of a particular... more Understandings of collective learning and change agency often conjure up an image of a particular group or community identifying important concerns and finding the momentum to learn together to address them. In reality, gaining consensus around what issues need to be addressed is a complex process in polarised societies. It requires an attentiveness to different standpoints and experiences of the social dynamics at play, and the ways in which ecological, political, socio-economic and psychic experiences manifest themselves within different contexts, generating disparate and connected views on what is missing and what is needed to create a more just society.
This paper asks questions about what it means to learn in-between and through complex and interrelated societal dynamics amongst a community of change drivers. By highlighting the individual, communal and collective learning of a diverse group of change drivers in a very polarised South Africa, we can begin to ask questions about the following: 1) how different embodied experiences or ‘a multiplicity of being’, as referred to in this paper, are essential in the pursuit of a sustainable society; and 2) why we need to learn in ways that can foster a sense of ‘intersectional resonance’ between and amongst change drivers in a polarised world.
Books by Injairu kulundu
Ngos and Social Justice in South Africa and Beyond, 2017
This chapter critically analyses the obscure anatomy of the NGO sector from my perspective as a p... more This chapter critically analyses the obscure anatomy of the NGO sector from my perspective as a practitioner in the field. My reflections are based on my experience of the diverse people, programmes and practitioners I have come across in my seven years of work within the NGO sector. In this chapter I unapologetically use my role as an ‘insider’ (on various levels) to surface the contradictions between the knowledge about NGOs that we make public and the private knowledge that we only dare to whisper in corridors among colleagues and members of inner circles. In addition, I tease out the hidden spaces through which the work of NGOs steadfastly persists and produces real results – regardless of its inherent contradictions. Key themes that are explored in this chapter include internal integrity or internal schizophrenia in NGOs, how NGOs minimise the complexity of those who participate in their projects, and participants’ various ‘performances’ through the roles they play within the NGO system. Lastly, this chapter looks at where the NGO sector could be if it were to genuinely work with some of the contradictions of its anatomy, and suggests how praxis within the sector could shift to better address issues of social justice in South Africa.
Thesis Chapters by Injairu kulundu
Rhodes University, Faculty of Education, Environmental Learning Research Centre , 2020
The “Not yet Uhuru!” project positions itself as emancipatory African research in motion. It is a... more The “Not yet Uhuru!” project positions itself as emancipatory African research in motion. It is a regenerative project that responds to the concern that whilst dominant discourses can articulate what African states, societies and economies are not, we still know very little about what they actually are. This is a particularly important gap in how research on Africa is conceptualised, especially as it pertains to apprehending the futures that the majority of young people on the continent are instinctively leading themselves to (Mbembe, 2001, p.9). The project seeks to forgo youth development strategies that act as a form of containment by prescribing normative aspects of citizenship on young leaders in ways that stifle the transgressive impulses they have reason to value (Kelley in Tuck and Yang, 2014, p.89). The study traces rising cultures in transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis across times, as a way of “khapa(ring)” or accompanying the contemporary questions that Change Drivers in South Africa hold at the edge of their praxis.
The study co-conspired with 21 Change Drivers in South Africa who were interested in regenerating and re-imagining what transgressive decolonial praxis could be in these times based on their experiences and learnings. Residential art-based workshops that explored each co-conspirator’s offerings on the subject were distilled through the medium of film. These in turn were analysed using an “ethics of attunement” that produced songs as a reflexive pedagogical tool (Lispari, 2014, p.176). Sharing the resonate echoes of their praxis through song created another iterative reflection on their praxis two years after their initial offerings.
As a way of weaving together the findings with a historical perspective, the resonant praxis of Change Drivers was put into conversation with three unconventional reviews that trace impulses around transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis through fictional texts, political theory, poetry and intergenerational analysis, in order to surface resonant themes in praxis that echo across different times in history. This methodology sought to engage the question of the archive in pluriversal ways that appealed to different sensibilities, including the imaginative and hermeneutical, the traditionally analytical as well as the gifts of the lyrical and the erotic as different conceptual threads needed to resource the study. The reviews additionally spanned periods in the history of the continent that hold questions around precolonial and nascent colonial encounters, efforts to transgress within the liberatory
i
movements and the intergenerational transmissions embedded in women and queer people’s struggles.
The themes that coalesced across times were leveraged into capsules of rising cultures that form an experimental nexus for the practice of transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis that is already underway. These rising cultures were conceptualised as meditations on what it means to live into a vision of home built on the explorations of a paradigm of peace, humanness, pluriversality and decolonial love for those like and unlike us that strive for freedom on this continent (Dlala, 2017, p.52; Ndlovu- Gatsheni, 2013, p.142; Gqola, 2017, pp.197, 199). The rising cultures were reconciled through the creation of a litany that chronicles different refrains in transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis in contemporary times. The litany is a tool that charts particular experiences that are surfacing as symptomatic. It seeks to generously surface the contradictions that we are collectively starting to see past, whilst acknowledging the tensions that we need to straddle, integrate and navigate towards greater synthesis.
The litany is an honest way of acknowledging the glimpses gained of who we are in this present moment, while we continually challenge ourselves to open up to questions about what it means to grapple towards decolonial futures. This stance has influenced my role as an educator to unconditionally embrace movements that already underway, and reflect these back to those that I am conspiring with in ways that promote an ethic of care, solidarity and critical engagement.
The study celebrates what is possible when we do not theorise ourselves away from the questions embedded in our current praxis. This is an ethic that chooses to stay close to the phenomena arriving at present, whilst acknowledging the historical experiences that echo it as a collective pulse for meaningful experimentation and praxis. The study believes by being faithful to ways of amplifying, integrating and reflecting what has been emerging for us over time, we build our capacity to better respond with an ethic centred on transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis. This is the kind of accompaniment and care that Change Drivers across the continent deserve as they make the way towards a future worthy of their longing (Rushdie, 1999).
HEILA LOTZ-SISITKA'S PUBLICATIONS RECORD by Injairu kulundu
#OpenUpYourThinking, 2021
The #OpenupYourThinking: SADC Researchers Challenge took place in May and June 2020 and involved ... more The #OpenupYourThinking: SADC Researchers Challenge took place in May and June 2020 and involved a wide range of universities located in SADC countries.
The main purpose of the Challenge was to contribute to the generation of evidence on how education and training systems in SADC were affected by and could respond to COVID-19.
The Challenge covered six themes and
• Provided researchers with an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to shaping solutions to pressures being placed on education systems using an evidence-based approach
• Allowed for real-time inputs to be made into other national education processes led by organisations in SADC and
• Ensured that a wider group of younger researchers (below 35 years) was collectively engaged during the lockdown period, while giving them an opportunity to grow as they worked under the guidance of experienced researchers
This is a report from Theme 1: Education for sustainable development: COVID-19 education response intersections with the food, water and economic (livelihoods) crisis.
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Papers by Injairu kulundu
This paper asks questions about what it means to learn in-between and through complex and interrelated societal dynamics amongst a community of change drivers. By highlighting the individual, communal and collective learning of a diverse group of change drivers in a very polarised South Africa, we can begin to ask questions about the following: 1) how different embodied experiences or ‘a multiplicity of being’, as referred to in this paper, are essential in the pursuit of a sustainable society; and 2) why we need to learn in ways that can foster a sense of ‘intersectional resonance’ between and amongst change drivers in a polarised world.
Books by Injairu kulundu
Thesis Chapters by Injairu kulundu
The study co-conspired with 21 Change Drivers in South Africa who were interested in regenerating and re-imagining what transgressive decolonial praxis could be in these times based on their experiences and learnings. Residential art-based workshops that explored each co-conspirator’s offerings on the subject were distilled through the medium of film. These in turn were analysed using an “ethics of attunement” that produced songs as a reflexive pedagogical tool (Lispari, 2014, p.176). Sharing the resonate echoes of their praxis through song created another iterative reflection on their praxis two years after their initial offerings.
As a way of weaving together the findings with a historical perspective, the resonant praxis of Change Drivers was put into conversation with three unconventional reviews that trace impulses around transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis through fictional texts, political theory, poetry and intergenerational analysis, in order to surface resonant themes in praxis that echo across different times in history. This methodology sought to engage the question of the archive in pluriversal ways that appealed to different sensibilities, including the imaginative and hermeneutical, the traditionally analytical as well as the gifts of the lyrical and the erotic as different conceptual threads needed to resource the study. The reviews additionally spanned periods in the history of the continent that hold questions around precolonial and nascent colonial encounters, efforts to transgress within the liberatory
i
movements and the intergenerational transmissions embedded in women and queer people’s struggles.
The themes that coalesced across times were leveraged into capsules of rising cultures that form an experimental nexus for the practice of transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis that is already underway. These rising cultures were conceptualised as meditations on what it means to live into a vision of home built on the explorations of a paradigm of peace, humanness, pluriversality and decolonial love for those like and unlike us that strive for freedom on this continent (Dlala, 2017, p.52; Ndlovu- Gatsheni, 2013, p.142; Gqola, 2017, pp.197, 199). The rising cultures were reconciled through the creation of a litany that chronicles different refrains in transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis in contemporary times. The litany is a tool that charts particular experiences that are surfacing as symptomatic. It seeks to generously surface the contradictions that we are collectively starting to see past, whilst acknowledging the tensions that we need to straddle, integrate and navigate towards greater synthesis.
The litany is an honest way of acknowledging the glimpses gained of who we are in this present moment, while we continually challenge ourselves to open up to questions about what it means to grapple towards decolonial futures. This stance has influenced my role as an educator to unconditionally embrace movements that already underway, and reflect these back to those that I am conspiring with in ways that promote an ethic of care, solidarity and critical engagement.
The study celebrates what is possible when we do not theorise ourselves away from the questions embedded in our current praxis. This is an ethic that chooses to stay close to the phenomena arriving at present, whilst acknowledging the historical experiences that echo it as a collective pulse for meaningful experimentation and praxis. The study believes by being faithful to ways of amplifying, integrating and reflecting what has been emerging for us over time, we build our capacity to better respond with an ethic centred on transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis. This is the kind of accompaniment and care that Change Drivers across the continent deserve as they make the way towards a future worthy of their longing (Rushdie, 1999).
HEILA LOTZ-SISITKA'S PUBLICATIONS RECORD by Injairu kulundu
The main purpose of the Challenge was to contribute to the generation of evidence on how education and training systems in SADC were affected by and could respond to COVID-19.
The Challenge covered six themes and
• Provided researchers with an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to shaping solutions to pressures being placed on education systems using an evidence-based approach
• Allowed for real-time inputs to be made into other national education processes led by organisations in SADC and
• Ensured that a wider group of younger researchers (below 35 years) was collectively engaged during the lockdown period, while giving them an opportunity to grow as they worked under the guidance of experienced researchers
This is a report from Theme 1: Education for sustainable development: COVID-19 education response intersections with the food, water and economic (livelihoods) crisis.
This paper asks questions about what it means to learn in-between and through complex and interrelated societal dynamics amongst a community of change drivers. By highlighting the individual, communal and collective learning of a diverse group of change drivers in a very polarised South Africa, we can begin to ask questions about the following: 1) how different embodied experiences or ‘a multiplicity of being’, as referred to in this paper, are essential in the pursuit of a sustainable society; and 2) why we need to learn in ways that can foster a sense of ‘intersectional resonance’ between and amongst change drivers in a polarised world.
The study co-conspired with 21 Change Drivers in South Africa who were interested in regenerating and re-imagining what transgressive decolonial praxis could be in these times based on their experiences and learnings. Residential art-based workshops that explored each co-conspirator’s offerings on the subject were distilled through the medium of film. These in turn were analysed using an “ethics of attunement” that produced songs as a reflexive pedagogical tool (Lispari, 2014, p.176). Sharing the resonate echoes of their praxis through song created another iterative reflection on their praxis two years after their initial offerings.
As a way of weaving together the findings with a historical perspective, the resonant praxis of Change Drivers was put into conversation with three unconventional reviews that trace impulses around transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis through fictional texts, political theory, poetry and intergenerational analysis, in order to surface resonant themes in praxis that echo across different times in history. This methodology sought to engage the question of the archive in pluriversal ways that appealed to different sensibilities, including the imaginative and hermeneutical, the traditionally analytical as well as the gifts of the lyrical and the erotic as different conceptual threads needed to resource the study. The reviews additionally spanned periods in the history of the continent that hold questions around precolonial and nascent colonial encounters, efforts to transgress within the liberatory
i
movements and the intergenerational transmissions embedded in women and queer people’s struggles.
The themes that coalesced across times were leveraged into capsules of rising cultures that form an experimental nexus for the practice of transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis that is already underway. These rising cultures were conceptualised as meditations on what it means to live into a vision of home built on the explorations of a paradigm of peace, humanness, pluriversality and decolonial love for those like and unlike us that strive for freedom on this continent (Dlala, 2017, p.52; Ndlovu- Gatsheni, 2013, p.142; Gqola, 2017, pp.197, 199). The rising cultures were reconciled through the creation of a litany that chronicles different refrains in transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis in contemporary times. The litany is a tool that charts particular experiences that are surfacing as symptomatic. It seeks to generously surface the contradictions that we are collectively starting to see past, whilst acknowledging the tensions that we need to straddle, integrate and navigate towards greater synthesis.
The litany is an honest way of acknowledging the glimpses gained of who we are in this present moment, while we continually challenge ourselves to open up to questions about what it means to grapple towards decolonial futures. This stance has influenced my role as an educator to unconditionally embrace movements that already underway, and reflect these back to those that I am conspiring with in ways that promote an ethic of care, solidarity and critical engagement.
The study celebrates what is possible when we do not theorise ourselves away from the questions embedded in our current praxis. This is an ethic that chooses to stay close to the phenomena arriving at present, whilst acknowledging the historical experiences that echo it as a collective pulse for meaningful experimentation and praxis. The study believes by being faithful to ways of amplifying, integrating and reflecting what has been emerging for us over time, we build our capacity to better respond with an ethic centred on transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis. This is the kind of accompaniment and care that Change Drivers across the continent deserve as they make the way towards a future worthy of their longing (Rushdie, 1999).
The main purpose of the Challenge was to contribute to the generation of evidence on how education and training systems in SADC were affected by and could respond to COVID-19.
The Challenge covered six themes and
• Provided researchers with an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to shaping solutions to pressures being placed on education systems using an evidence-based approach
• Allowed for real-time inputs to be made into other national education processes led by organisations in SADC and
• Ensured that a wider group of younger researchers (below 35 years) was collectively engaged during the lockdown period, while giving them an opportunity to grow as they worked under the guidance of experienced researchers
This is a report from Theme 1: Education for sustainable development: COVID-19 education response intersections with the food, water and economic (livelihoods) crisis.