The study of higher education presupposes the ‘goodness’ of the university and the academy, and the scholars who study them. Yet the social justice intent of both have long been questioned and may be emptied out. This book explores generative developments of ‘other’ ways to study, more critically and productively, the university across disciplines. While framed affirmatively, this endeavour is a space of refusal. Refusal of the status quo, of the taken-for-granted and of hegemonic powers and violences that continue within and outside higher education institutions.

Join us for a conversation about the important new edited volume, Emancipatory Imaginations: Advancing Critical University Studies, with the editors Dina Zoe Belluigi and André Keet, contributors Su-ming Khoo & Jenny Boźena du Preez, and respondents Duduzile Ndlovu & Andrew Gibson.

Please register here: https://forms.office.com/e/ZkGqxQBdM

You can purchase the book here.

 

SPEAKER BIOS 

André Keet

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research Chair

Nelson Mandela University

André, originally from Kylemore, Stellenbosch, is a teacher and scholar-practitioner whose work spans academia and executive leadership, in the never-ending pursuit of a transformative and responsive university. After working at the South African Human Rights Commission and the Commission for Gender Equality, he transitioned into academia at the end of 2007. He has since held professorial roles at various institutions both within South Africa and internationally.

He currently serves as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Engagement and Transformation and Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University.

His work is relational and intergenerational, exploring the intersections of friendship, politics, love, and justice. These themes inform his praxis in higher education transformation, human rights, decentered critical university studies, and the relationship between universities, science, industry, and society.

 

Jenny du Preez
Senior Manager: Programmes

Nelson Mandela University

Jenny Boźena du Preez is the Senior Manager: Programmes of the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University. She has a PhD in Literary Studies in English with a thesis on the representation of queer sexualities and genders in contemporary short fiction by African women. 

She is an active member of ACUSAfrica, a network of scholars and practitioners interested in Critical University Studies and other alternative and radical approaches to studying the university. Her research in this area explores the representation of the university in South African fiction and how literature and Literary Studies might offer a ‘disclosing critique’ of the social imaginary of the university. 

She is also interested in the representation of gender and sexuality, literature from Africa and the diaspora, women’s writing, and the erotic. She supervises Master's and PhD candidates in Literary Studies across her areas of interest and co-supervises postgraduates across the Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines.

 

Su-ming Khoo

Professor of Sociology

University of Galway

Su-ming Khoo is Professor in Sociology at the University of Galway and Visiting Professor in Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University (2022-27).

She researches, teaches and writes about critical development studies, human development, human rights, public goods, development alternatives, decoloniality, global activism and learning, higher education, and transdisciplinarity. She is co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Creative Research Methods with Sophie Woodward and Harriet Shortt. Her newest publication is: The Modern World After Colonialism: Remaking the Social Sciences, edited with Gurminder Bhambra, Ipek Demir, Paul Gilbert, and Lucy Mayblin, Bristol University Press, 2026.

 

Duduzile Unathi Ndlovu is a Hardiman scholar and early career researcher based in Ireland, at the University of Galway’s School of Politics and Sociology where she teaches and is pursuing her PhD. She is also a visiting researcher at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT).

A transdisciplinary Afro-feminist scholar, her work explores the (im)possibilities of advancing justice-oriented, decolonial, and Afrocentric imperatives in and through higher education. Her current research -supported by the Hardiman Scholarship and Nelson Mandela University’s Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) - critically ‘re-members’ the RhodesMustFall movement from within through Collective Memory Work, examining its implications for decolonial discourse in South African higher education and beyond.

 

Dina Zoe Belluigi

Dina’s research considers intellectuals’ negotiation of the critical function of universities in contexts undergoing transition from conflict and oppression; and conditions for their enactment of authorship, authority, flourishing and freedom. With contrariness about reproducing static concepts in a changing world, she works with collaborators invested in addressing ahistoric consciousness, and open to methodologies recognising darkness, unknowing and counter-visuality. She is Professor of Authorship, Representation and Transformation in Academia at Queen’s University Belfast, and Visiting Professor to the Chair for the Critical Study of Higher Education Transformation (Nelson Mandela University) and the School of Women’s Studies (Jadavpur University). She is pleased to have co-edited with Andre Keet Emancipatory Imaginations: Advancing Critical University Studies (Sun Media, 2024); and edited Being in Shadow and Light: Academics in Post/Conflict Higher Education (OBP, 2025).