Subjectivity and Social Change in Higher Education: A Collaborative Arts-Based Narrative (Social Theory and Methodology in Education Research)

Informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the assemblage and the wound-event, this book examines the complexity of educator subjectivity and social change within the higher education context in South Africa. The authors use arts-based methods to explore educators’ experiences of personal and professional challenges in a rapidly changing context. The method is informed by critical, narrative and arts-based research traditions that extend into post-qualitative, autobiographical, performative and collaborative methods of inquiry. The book plays with the conflation of theory and methodology, to think about educator subjectivity as fluid and responsive to changing contexts. By understanding educator subjectivity as multiple and emergent rather than centered and fixed, the authors open new research avenues to explore themes of transformation, decolonisation and social change.

Liezl Dick is a Researcher at the Free State Center for Human Rights, University of the Free State, South Africa.

Marguerite Müller is Lecturer in Curriculum Studies at the University of the Free State, South Africa.

Mark Murphy is Reader in Education and Public Policy at the University of Glasgow, UK.