The Thinking University Expanded: On Profanation, Play and Education (Routledge Research in Higher Education)

The Thinking University Expanded considers how the university can be extended and developed to an institution of play that becomes a gateway to new compositions and enactments of opportunities and happiness for university academics and students alike. A university of and in continuous play can shape the public sphere in ways that reimagine both the epistemological and political, and the metaphysical and the ethical.

Without abandoning the university’s emphasis on thinking, the book examines the prospects of opening the university to ‘a new, possible use’. The singular outcomes-based lens of seeing higher education distorts the humane and ethical nuance of what a university can potentially do and aspire towards. For this reason, the book intends to find a new use for the idea of a university – one that is responsible and responsive in both its pursuit of the truth and being open to different kinds of truth, as made manifest in diverse contexts and life-worlds.

This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the field of higher education.

Yusef Waghid reads Philosophy of Education at Stellenbosch University. He is the editor-in-chief of South African Journal of Higher Education and principal editor of Citizenship Teaching and Learning, South Africa.

Nuraan Davids is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.