Paper short abstract:

A hybrid participatory photovoice project with staff and students at one university in South Africa explored the theme of a sustainable, just and reparative university community. An epistemic community was formed as a transformative learning space, enabling many voices and perspectives.

Paper long abstract:

The Sustainablity Universities in South Africa (SUSA) project ran from July 2022 to December 2023. The research team were interested in how can/does higher education mobilize and develop transformative, just learning spaces towards sustainable values, practices and futures across classrooms, campus, and communities. We interviewed people at two university sites to map and compare diverse university stakeholders understandings and looked for transformative actions. We brought together multiple narratives: from above (university leadership), from the middle (academic staff), and from below (students and workers) to understand the sustainable university in our context, what enables and what gets in the way of transformative education and sustainable futures. We adopted an intersectional conceptual framing of planetary consciousness, reparative humanism and transformational learning to analyze how human development and capabilities expansion were enabled and achieved. This paper focuses on one strand of the project, a participatory hybrid photovoice project (PHP) with staff and students at one university on the theme of sustainable university communities. The PHP project generated a tentative response to the question: what is emerging now in universities that is suggestive of the kind of future embodied in the vision of a sustainable world? Crucially it enabled diverse bottom-up voices to emerge and to contest the sustainability space. The project comprised three moments which are discussed in the presentation: 1) collective discussions and substantive understandings of sustainability to produce a common definition for further discussions, also drafting the implications of our definition for university policy and practices; 2) training, production and discussion of photo narratives focused on a self-chosen personal theme that mattered to each participant, each person scripting up to 200 words and selecting around 6 to 12 images which could include photographs they took themselves; 3 ) sharing, revising and curating the photo-stories and holding a public seminar.