Repairing epistemic harms through wellbeing in South African universities

Abstract

Widely-reported movements, such as the ‘Rhodes must fall’, and ‘fees must fall’ campaigns in post-apartheid South Africa reflect a deeply disenfranchised and disillusioned generation of students. The daily harms which some students suffer because of who they are perceived to be are often scooped into imposed collective identities. Such collective identities so embed themselves into societal imaginaries that there is little regard or curiosity about how oppression or dehumanisation is experienced in university settings. As a result, universities persist in talking about ‘black student experiences’, as if these are homogenous. Such conceptual aggrandisement simultaneously collectivises and reduces an interest in the actual harms experienced by these students, and hence, an unawareness and unpreparedness to repair. The interest of this paper, therefore, is threefold: first, to look at epistemic harms, how and when they unfold; second, to consider what epistemic reparations are and to whom they apply. Third, while epistemic reparations can become a powerful educational tool to gain deeper understandings of how these harms affect human relationships, it might be as important, however, for universities to focus on the cultivation of epistemic wellbeing as a framing ethos.