The Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) in collaboration with the NRF South African Research Chair in Community, Adult, and Worker Education (CAWE) in the Faculty of Education at UJ invite you to a webinar titled:

Critical Thinking for Postgraduate Research in Education

Presenter: Prof Mondli S. Hlatshwayo

Date | 30 March 2025

Time | 11:00 – 13:00 (SAST)

Venue | Cottage 3, Research Village, UJ’s Bunting Road Campus

MS TEAMS Link | Click HERE to join [Meeting ID: 344 796 723 15 | Passcode: Eo7bR6Gd]

OFFICIAL INVITATION

The Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) invites you to a Public Seminar:

Title: Transforming knowledge & research for just & sustainable futures: Implications for higher education policy & practice

Presenter: Prof Leon Tikly

Date | 25 March 2025

Time | 10:00 – 12:00 (SAST)

Venue | Cottage 3, Research Village, UJ’s Bunting Road Campus

MS TEAMS Link | Click HERE to join [Meeting ID: 382 907 298 501 | Passcode: bk6vG6gg]

OFFICIAL INVITATION

Catch up on the latest news from the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT)

& the SARChi in Community and Adult Worker Education (CAWE).

READ IT HERE: NEWSLETTER JUL – DEC 2024

The Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) invites you to a Public Lecture:

Title: Indigeneity in Colonial and Decolonial Horizons: Spectacles of Culture and Identity in South Africa

Presenter: Prof Morgan Nkululeko Ndlovu

Date | 20 August 2024
Time | 11:00 – 13:00 (SAST)
Venue | MS TEAMS
Link | Click HERE to join.

OFFICIAL INVITATION

Public Webinar and Hybrid Seminar – 14/21 May 2024

The Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) invites you to the following events:

Public Webinar: 

Title: Repositioning African Women’s History in the University Curriculum: Gain and Gaps

SPEAKER: Dr Babere Kerata Chacha

Date: 21 May 2024
Time: 11:00-13:00 (SAST)
Venue: Ms Teams (Click here to join)

OFFICIAL INVITE

Hybrid Seminar:

Title: Water Boundaries – Financialised Expropriation, Trans-local Solidarity & Water Justice.

SPEAKER: Dr Adrian Murray

Date: 14 May 2024
Time: 14:00-15:30 (SAST)
Venue: In person: Research Village, UJ Bunting Road, boardroom cottage 3

Online: MS Teams (Click here to join)

OFFICIAL INVITE

Public Webinar – 7 May 2024

The Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) invites you to a Webinar.

Title: Pan African Ubunt/Utucentric feminist engagement for equality and humanity.

SPEAKER: Professor Wangũi wa Goro

Date: 7 May 2024
Time: 11:00-13:00 (SAST)
Venue: Zoom
Link: Click here to join.

OFFICIAL INVITATION

Public Lecture – 17 April 2024

CERT warmly invites you to a Public Lecture on 17 April 2024 presented by: PROFESSOR DANILO STRECK

UNESCO CHAIR: EDUCATION FOR GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION & SOCIAL JUSTICE Graduate School of Education, Universidade de Caxias do Sul-UCS International Journal of Action Research – Editor

Date: 17 April 2024
Time: 11:00-12:30 (SAST)
Venue: Cottage 3 Seminar Room, Research Village, Bunting Road Campus
Hybrid link: Click here to join.
R.S.V.P.: Ms Cindy Baatjes (cindyb@uj.ac.za)

OFFICIAL INVITATION

Research Collaboration Workshop – 4-5 April 2024

CERT   warmly invites you to a Research Collaborative Workshop on 4-5 April 2024 hosted by:

PROFESSOR DANILO STRECK

OFFICIAL INVITATION

UNESCO CHAIR: EDUCATION FOR GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION & SOCIAL JUSTICE
Graduate School of Education, Universidade de Caxias do Sul-UCS
International Journal of Action Research – Editor

Seminar’s Theme:

People’s education (Popular education) and social justice: Latin American perspectives and African connections

A historical overview (indigenous educational practices; emancipatory educational movements)

Paulo Freire as a reference for liberating/emancipatory educational practices

Popular education (people’s education) and participatory research methodologies

The interactive research collaboration workshop will be held with interested researchers and scholars/activists. Places are limited. Please register your interest to participate with juneb@uj.ac.za

Neville Alexander Commemorative Conference 2023 – Friday 25 August 2023 from 9:30 to 16:30

Re-centering Indigenous Feminism in Knowledge for Education Transformation in Africa

Women’s Day Event: INDIGENOUS FEMINISMS – WHAT IS IT AND (WHY) DO WE NEED IT?

Against Racial Capitalism.

Edited by Salim Vally and Enver Motala

Against Racial Capitalism – Book

The first book launch will be at the annual Neville Alexander Commemorative Conference on August the 25th in Jo’burg and thereafter events in CT, Gqeberha, East London and Durban. It will also be launched in the UK, the US and elsewhere. Please contact CAWE and CERT if you would like to be involved in these events

This edited book features a foreword by John Michael Samuel and Karen Press; a timeline of key events in the life of Alexander and the context of the times; a comprehensive introduction and a bibliography of his writings. The book is divided into 4 parts: Prison Writings: ‘The University of Robben Island’, 1964-1974; Reaping the Whirlwind: The 1970s and the 1980s; The Transition to Democracy: 1990 to 1994 and Post-1994 Essays, Talks, and Op-Eds. Each period has a separate introduction.

REVIEWS

Profound and provocative. Grounded in history, engaged with revolutionary theory, and informed by a lifetime of practice, Neville’s intellectual acuity and passion for freedom shine through in every page. Read, learn, and join the growing global struggle against racial capitalism.

~ Barbara Ransby, historian, activist, author of Making All Black Lives Matter.

Alexander’s beautiful writing patiently connects theory and method with purpose. Against Racial Capitalism is absolutely necessary for all who struggle to understand and change twenty-first century conditions.

~Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography

Salim Vally and Enver Motala have done an admirable job in putting together the writings of one of Africa’s foremost revolutionary intellectual. Neville Alexander did not merely combine theory and praxis but lived it. For him the analysis, critique and struggle against racial capitalism was a lived reality. A life to learn from.

~Issa Shivji, Professor Emeritus of Public Law & First Julius Nyerere Professor of 
Pan-African Studies, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

More endorsements

The Marketisation of Higher Education invitation

Prof. Salim Vally will be the main speaker of the seminar titled “The Marketisation of Higher Education: Compromising the Role of Intellectuals and the Purpose of Education?”

Date: 11 July 2023 – 10:00 to 12:00

Click Here to join the meeting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0BpH5u00vE

Prof. June Bam-Hutchison and music educator Eugene Skeef join Duduzile Ramela to dissect the transformation of education in Africa as the continent observed Africa Day.

CERT CAWE Newsletter APRIL MAY 2023

Read the newsletter of the centre for education rights and transformation and the South African research chair in community, adult and worker education.

25 – 26 Eugene Skeef_Africa Day May 2023 CERT_Poster

CERT and CAWE invite you to celebrate Africa day in a ritual archive convocation with internationally renowned South African composer and educator Eugene Skeef.

23 May – Public Seminar Prof. Leon Tikly Final

CERT’s Director wins 2023 Human and Social Sciences (HSS) Book Award in Best Non-fiction Monograph category

Prof. June Bam is the third from left in front row.

The prestigious joint award was presented to Professor June Bam for her monograph Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter (published by Jacana, 2021) at an HSS gala dinner held in Pretoria on 16th March. The book was praised by the judges for its innovative methodology in interpreting and researching the past through the community’s knowledge of plants, astronomy and livestock. A previous work that she was lead editor of, Whose History Counts: Decolonising precolonial historiography, co-edited with Lungisile Ntsebeza and Allan Zinn (SunMedia, 2018), was also a finalist in the inaugural HSS Awards of 2020. Her collaborative work with the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation titled Turning Points in History won the UNESCO Peace Education Award for South Africa in 2008. June has also co-authored another pathbreaking book with Bernadette Muthien, titled Rethinking Africa: Indigenous Women re-interpret southern Africa’s Pasts (Jacana, 2021). According to June, ‘these new approaches to deep knowledge which I try to capture in my research and writings help to inform a transformed education for environmental sustainability and an understanding of the importance to protect and respect community knowledge and their rights to protect land, ecosystems, their languages and the important aspects thereof to sustain livelihoods and peace embedded in our diverse ancient cultures and their interconnectedness. These knowledges help us to appreciate and understand what makes us equal humans on this planet since deep time’.

NEWS: Education has a broader purpose, says UJ’s Prof Salim Vally

Here’s a formal statement from the Review of African Political Economy:

The Editorial Working Group of Review of African Political Economy is pleased to announce the 2018 winner of the Ruth First prize. The prize is awarded for the best article published by an African author in the journal in a publication year.

This year, the prize was awarded to Mondli Hlatshwayo for his article ‘The new struggles of precarious workers in South Africa: nascent organisational responses of community health workers.’ It was published in ROAPE Volume 45, Issue 157 in Autumn 2018.

The article shines the spotlight on community health workers (CHWs), who remain a blind spot in the literature on South African labour studies. Abandoned by mainstream unions and often ignored by labour scholars, the article reveals that CHWs are crafting their own nascent organisational responses as women and as precarious workers.

Hlatshwayo highlights the ‘paradox of victory’ for the African National Congress (ANC), by which trade unions and workers achieved a formal dismantling of apartheid laws and gained organisational rights for labour, but economic liberalisation led to massive retrenchments, the rise of labour flexibility and the pauperisation of workers. This demands more focus on workers’ struggles outside the formal union structures. In Hlatshwayo’s case-study of health workers, it is a struggle for recognition as employees of the state who receive a living wage, rather than the ‘volunteer’ with a stipend and no employment benefits. They have constructed alliances that include left wing, labour-supporting non-governmental organisations and health organisations. Beyond this, the Gauteng Health Workers’ Forum is influenced by the Cuban health care system and debates the reconceptualisation of their role as agents for social change, no longer alienated from control of their work and with the interests of the poor and marginalised at the centre of their practice.

The ROAPE Prize Committee commented on Hlatshwayo’s article: ‘it was a strong piece of research exploring precarious work and alternative forms of organising, outside the straitjacket of established unions. The struggles of CHWs represent new worker-led initiatives in South Africa. This is bread and butter analysis for ROAPE. Particularly pleasing is that the women themselves are at the centre of the article.’ Furthermore, ‘in terms of Ruth First’s legacy, the paper was the most relevant and crucially engages actively with the flesh-and-blood subjects of its theoretical arguments and assumptions about labour struggles, something unfortunately all too rare in academic literature.’

Another member of the committee said it ‘addresses an understudied area in labour struggles, through examining the labour struggles of precarious community health workers. It also explores the human consequences of many key themes of neoliberal state policy by showing the effects of precarious labour, the rise of ‘volunteerism’, cuts in health spending and the outsourcing of public services in South Africa. I really liked the way that it engaged with the health workers themselves, allowing them to make key empirical and theoretical points. Also, this paper is definitely the most in line with Ruth First’s work, looking at labour struggles, the exploitation of workers, and issues of gender and class.’

Mondli Hlatshwayo is a Senior Researcher in the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg. Previously he worked for Khanya College, a Johannesburg-based NGO, as a researcher. His areas of research include precarious work, female migrants, migrant workers, workers’ education, trade unions and social movements. Hlatshwayo has published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on these topics. He is co-editor (with Aziz Choudry) of the Pluto Press book, Just Work? Migrant Workers’ Struggle Today. His Doctoral thesis, which he completed in 2012, was on trade union responses to technological changes.

The article can be read for free until July 2020 and can be accessed here.

The Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (UJ) and the Chair in Community, Adult and Workers’ Education congratulates Dr Mondli Hlatshwayo for the Review of African Political Economy’s Ruth First award for his article on the struggles of precarious workers in South Africa and specifically the organisational responses of community health workers. The article can be accessed for free from our website.

What school textbooks in South Africa say about the Cold War – and why it matters

https://theconversation.com/what-school-textbooks-in-south-africa-say-about-the-cold-war-and-why-it-matters-180817

An article co-authored by Prof Linda Chisholm