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The paper discusses repair as valuable for thinking about and acting towards sustainable human development. Repair asks us to take account of intersections of past, present, and reimagined futures; the end is becoming and being full human beings with dignity, attentive to the lives of others and to what Achille Mbembe calls the "living world". We seek to repair that which is valuable to us, while also setting aside what cannot be fixed (for example colonialism and apartheid). The concept of repair is proposed as a lens to think about some disrepair challenges facing development: the enduring effects of history on justice, skewed global knowledge relations, and racism. The ideas are then applied to the space of education. A repair praxis framework is proposed based on four overlapping dimensions: conviviality as incompleteness; advancing epistemic freedoms; fostering transformational learning; and, spaces of dialogue and participation. The paper concludes with an example of renaming the world to repair the world and finally reminds us that we should pay attention to who we are with others, to what we repair, and to the kind of ancestors we choose to be for future generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus is on the micro-possibilities of student capabilities formation as the end of public-good higher education, rather than on a systems or organizations approach more commonly found in discussions of the public good and higher education. This does not discount other valuable public-good ends. Using South Africa as a global South context, a capability-based approach to the public good of higher education is proposed for its humanizing ethic, attention to fair opportunities, and participation in terms of what students are able to do and to be in and through higher education. A capability frame is complemented by thinking about decoloniality and epistemic justice to help identify central higher education capabilities. The three proposed intersecting capability dimensions are as follows: personhood self-formation, epistemic contribution, and sufficiency of economic resources, intended to guide university practices and policy interventions in the direction of the public good. By populating the space of the public good with capabilities, a shift is made away from micro-economics which see the public good as a reductionist space of commodities and human capital development. Higher education is rather understood as having both instrumental and intrinsic value, generating an alternative logic to that of neo-liberalism, and an individualist ontology of competition and untrammeled markets. The pressures of the global context are acknowledged so that the public good is understood as both 'ideal-aspirational' but also 'practical-feasible' in the light of local South African conditions. An expanded capability-based framing would contribute to reducing higher education inequalities as a public-good and public-accountable contribution by universities., Author(s): Melanie Walker [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000 0001 2284 638X, grid.412219.d, CRHED, University of the Free State, , 9301, Bloemfontein, South Africa Introduction 'Our parents were sold a dream [...]

The paper explores a conceptual approach to the question of what it means to provide a university education that addresses equity, and encourages the formation of STEM graduates oriented to public-good values and with commitments to making professional contributions to society which will advance human well-being. It considers and rejects resource-based and utilitarian approaches to well-being and opts for Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach which involves developing graduates' capabilities and functionings to be and do in ways which they have reason to value. The capabilities approach argues for educational and social development as the expansion of such freedoms. The approach is sensitive also to diversity through the focus on the choice of a plurality of functionings and a wide informational basis for policy, practice and social justice evaluations. It allows an analysis of how different individuals can convert available resources into functionings through attending to conversion factors: personal (internal) conversion factors, social conversion factors and environmental (external) conversion factors. All make a difference to how an individual converts her resources into functionings and makes advantage and disadvantage visible. There is a further education-specific issue, that of selecting core valuable capabilities because not any form of science and engineering education will do. Educators need to deliberate and agree which capabilities and corresponding functionings are valuable and so should be supported in policy and practice. In a capabilities-friendly education, education would aim to secure and distribute valuable education capabilities to diverse students (women and men, black and white, rural and urban and so on) paying attention to the social arrangements in education (pedagogies, institutional culture and education policy) and to conversion factors and barriers that might impede the development of opportunities and valued outcomes., Author(s): Melanie Walker[sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa Introduction Higher education, including science and technology, is central to development agendas globally (World Bank 2002; [...]

South Africa still faces inequalities with regard to access to higher education opportunities. Foregrounding student voices at one university, the paper compares how students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds make decisions about going to university. The focus is on those who have succeeded, but ideas can be extrapolated regarding those who do not make it. The argument draws on Amartya Sen's capability approach to explore individual stories and the interactions between agency and the intersectional conversion conditions of possibility which shape the capability for university access. Narrative interviews show how students are enabled or constrained in their educational decision-making in relation to selves, schooling, family and income. Some implications are suggested for enhancing access, while not making claims for South African higher education as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper takes up Sen's concerns with education on the one hand and public reasoning on the other, and shows that his concerns require that formal education develop a capability that potentially fosters inclusive public reasoning in all students. Drawing on and extending Miranda Fricker's work, and informed by a global South positionality and empirical research, the argument is made for an epistemic capability that includes attention to the cognitive and knowledge but also to a domain of sharing and giving values. How this capability can be fostered and how it can also be thwarted is discussed. Finally, a concern with how an adequate living standard underpins this epistemic capability and the goodness of an educational life that a student can lead is considered. Overall, the paper argues that education—and fostering an epistemic capability—can make a crucial contribution to inclusive reasoning and democratic participation in a (more) just society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a methodological approach, participatory action research (PAR), and its variant of critical action research in education, aims to further social justice and generate transformative change. Although this understanding of PAR is well rehearsed, there is still a gap in detailed explorations of the transformative impact of PAR projects in higher education settings beyond the classroom: how do we then know whether transformative change through PAR has taken place, in which ways, through which processes, and for whom. This article aims to address these questions through proposing the use of a participatory action research cube (PARC) as a human capabilities evaluative framework for personal and structural transformative change enabled by PAR projects. Evaluating transformative change from this perspective rests on both the normative nature of the capabilities approach in its justice concerns, as well as consideration for individual well-being, understood as the expansion of freedoms people have to live the lives they value. Evaluating change both includes personal well-being as well as broader social or structural impact in the direction of more social justice. To demonstrate this empirically, we report on an eight-month PAR project on one rural South African university campus, where 13 undergraduate students were involved in researching gender inequalities on their campus. The PARC analysis highlights the development of capabilities and agency through axes of participation, knowledge development, and public deliberation, as well as identifying the developmental impact of these axes on transformative change for the participants, as well as the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the continuing effects of race-based inequalities in South Africa, with a particular focus on university education; it seeks to understand what lies beneath the persistence of race-based thinking. A conceptual framework which aligns everyday racism as a daily practice and the normative yardstick of human capabilities is outlined before examining an empirical case study of a student development programme at one South African university. The policy and historical context of the case study is sketched before proceeding to an interpretation of 70 qualitative interviews with black and white students who have participated in the programme. The data was analyzed for evidence of personal and interpersonal dimensions of racism, but also for evidence of self transformation enabled by the programme. The article argues that persistent though race inequalities still are in South Africa, there is the possibility of change and the development of inclusive social relations among diverse students through education, and that it is then the responsibility of a university to fashion critical educational opportunities that can foster this potential and reconfigure views, attitudes and relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper re-considers girls' education in Turkey from both a capabilities and a feminist perspective. First, it critically looks at the policies, legislation, and NGO and government led campaigns aiming to increase girls' enrolment, and points out the lack of feminist perspectives and concerns in these initiatives. Then, drawing from 20 in-depth interviews with girls and 5 interviews with teachers in the most socio-economically deprived region of Turkey, the paper explores girls' schooling and educational opportunities in Eastern Turkey from a combined capabilities and feminist perspective, in order to generate a richer information basis than numbers alone for policy and evaluation. The findings tease out capabilities which are missing in the focus of policies and campaigns, and invite a re-design of educational policies and initiatives from a capabilities-focused praxis that is context and gender sensitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the global dimensions of gender and education, human diversity in relation to public reasoning and gender justice, and the case of anti-racist education in Norway.

The article argues for an alliance of the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen with ideas from critical pedagogy for undergraduate university education which develops student agency and well being on the one hand, and social change towards greater justice on the other. The purposes of a university education in this article are taken to include both intrinsic and instrumental purposes and to therefore include personal development, economic opportunities and becoming educated citizens. Core ideas from the capability approach are outlined, with examples, before possible articulations of capability and Sen's notion of process freedom with critical pedagogy are investigated. It is argued that each approach has something to offer when brought alongside as 'critical capability pedagogies', which seek to enhance and expand student experiences of learning and their 'valuable beings and doings'. Finally core capabilities in a university education are considered and some of the problems of domesticating the capability approach addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In global times, university education policy that holds the greatest promise for social responsibility is the focus here; the argument made is that such policy ought to be conceptualised using a normative human development and capabilities approach, drawing on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Their ideas offer a values-based way of seeing higher education policy and development. Reasons are advanced for the necessary contribution of universities to the public good and to poverty reduction, while the contested purposes of universities are further outlined before human development and capabilities are presented for consideration as a superior approach to that of dominant reductionist human capital policies. The political dimension of policy development is acknowledged and explored to show that different normative frameworks generate different policies. The ideas are operationalised in relation to pedagogical arrangements and in the indexing of policy aims informed by human development, against pedagogies and graduate capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a human capabilities approach for evaluating student learning and the social and pedagogical arrangements that support equality in capabilities for all students. It outlines the focus on valuable beings and doings in the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum's capabilities focus on human flourishing. For both, education is understood to include both intrinsic and instrumental aims and to be foundational to other important capabilities. A method for applying the capability approach to evaluating what students said about their own learning is suggested, and from this a list of valued functional capabilities is then outlined. The multi-dimensionality of the approach is emphasised and its relationship to economic opportunities and human security. Finally, generic graduate outcomes are considered but rejected as not being the same as capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the life history narratives of a group of 12 black and white male and female undergraduate students at a historically white Afrikaans medium university, now undergoing its own transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. Conceptualizations of identity and discourse across four elements of context, setting, situated activity and self are employed to examine their accounts. Three framing discourses, comprising the official storyline of a rainbow nation and new higher education policies, the formal storyline of institutional change, and the informal space of relationships and interactions are used to analyse student narratives in terms of how they produce, reproduce and transform race and identity. What emerges is a complicated picture in which identities cannot be simply read off either from the official discourse or from colour and culture as the levels of discourse articulate and collide with a history of racial separateness and context and setting, with particular identity effects. What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? ( Mills, 1959 , p. 7) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the educational work that narrative does. Against the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that examined the crimes of apart-heid, it discusses the narrative implications of South African poet Antjie Krog's multi-layered text of Truth Commission testimony, and autobiographical and philosophical musings. The paper argues that narrative points to education in four ways. The first involves research practices in which subjectivity and experience are acknowledged, celebrated and recognised to be powerful and compelling, allowing us to learn moral truths. Secondly, narrative can be utilised as part of a pedagogy of care, compassion and concern in which we ask questions regarding what it means to be taught by the lives of others, and how stories that are not our own speak to those we already have, enabling us to learn how to act morally through others' experiences. The third aspect of narrative is then the identity work it enables, offering the possibility for the reconstruction of the learning ‘I’, inflecting away from past perspectives to new ways of seeing. Through listening to others we might produce more accountable and more responsible knowledge. Fourthly, we explore how narratives might produce trustworthy accounts in which evidence is not endlessly plastic, but where the narrative form enlarges the scope for understanding. Throughout we show that individual and collective narratives are played out on a structural field, embedded in the political, social and historical conditions of a racial and gendered power, with real material effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]