(Mis)framing higher education in South Africa

The question of how to make higher education more inclusive has been a central concern in South Africa and elsewhere over the past two decades. However, in South Africa there remains a disjuncture between policy aimed at promoting inclusivity and the experiences of students and staff in the higher education sector. In this article, the relationship between equity of access and equity of outcomes and the expectations that follow from these policy imperatives are examined from the perspective of Nancy Fraser’s normative framework of social justice. In particular, her notion of misframing is used to analyze the current situation in the higher education sector in South Africa. The article concludes that a focus on individual higher education institutions is not sufficient to gain a perspective on the social arrangements required for participatory parity in higher education, and in fact, such a focus is an instance of misframing and thus a form of injustice. Introduction The question of how to make higher education more inclusive has been a central concern internationally over the past two decades (Drakich et al. 1995). In South Africa, inclusivity has been even more of a concern since the first democratic election given the structuring of educational opportunities on the basis of race under apartheid (Soudien 2010). This article uses Nancy Fraser’s (2008, 2009) three-dimensional theory of social justice as a normative framework to identify and analyze the conceptual logics that underpin specific problem representations (Bacchi 2009) in South African policy and practice with regard to inclusivity in higher education. The initial part of the article provides a brief outline of Fraser’s notion of social justice, after which we discuss South African higher education both during and after apartheid. The current position regarding higher education and inclusivity is then analyzed using Fraser’s normative framework, with a particular focus on participatory parity with regard to misframing, as it is this notion that foregrounds inclusivity. Fraser’s normative framework on social justice Fraser equates social justice with the ability to participate as equals and full partners in social interaction. She proposes that justice requires social arrangements that enable people to interact as peers on an equal footing and identifies three distinct dimensions that affect participatory parity: the economic, cultural and political. Social arrangements must be such that they allow individuals to participate as equals in all three of these spheres. Fraser sees these three dimensions as different and distinct species or genres of social justice, all of which necessarily affect people’s abilities to interact as equals.