Professor Norman Duncan, Vice-Principal: Academic at the University of Pretoria, cordially invites you to a public lecture on Curriculum Transformation presented by Professor Fazal Rizvi, Professor of Global Studies in Education, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Title: Challenges of Decolonisation in Higher Education

Date: Wednesday, 31 July 2019

Time: 17:00–19:00

Venue: Senate Hall, Hatfield Campus, University of Pretoria

Dress: Daywear

RSVP: here by 29 July 2019

Enquiries: Ms Maliga Govender, 012 420 2444

Persons with disabilities are kindly requested to contact Neo Maseko on 012 420 2631 if assistance is required.

The idea of decolonizing the university has become a central motif of the progressive forces in universities around the world, nowhere as robustly articulated as in South Africa. Over the past two
decades, the aspiration of decolonization has gained political momentum. Yet the challenges facing this aspiration are considerable, not only practical but also conceptual and political. In this talk, I will discuss the nature and complexities of these challenges, as a way of inserting some analytical vitality in the conceptualisation of the tasks that lie ahead. I will suggest that one of the key analytical problems associated with the contemporary discourse of decolonisation is its tendency to work from a range of binaries, both epistemic and political. These binaries are historically constituted and their continuing use, even in the ways in which resistance is often conceptualized and organized, undercuts the political aspirations of decolonisation, rendering it ineffective.

Fazal Rizvi is a Professor of Global Studies in Education at the University of Melbourne Australia, as well as an Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States. He has written extensively on issues of identity and culture in transnational contexts, globalization and education policy and Australia-Asia relations. A collection of his essays is published in: Encountering Education in the Global: Selected Writings of Fazal Rizvi (Routledge 2014). His most recent books include a co-authored volume, Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalization (Palgrave 2017) and a co-edited volume, Transnational Perspectives on Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education (Bloomsbury 2019). Professor Rizvi is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences and a former Editor of the journal, Discourse: Studies in Cultural Politics of Education, and past President of the Australian Association of Research in Education 2019.