Reimagining SoTL through Sumud and Ubuntu — Call for Papers

2026-06-23

Call for Papers

Special Issue: Reimagining SoTL through Sumud and Ubuntu

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) in the South

Introduction

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has become an influential field within higher education globally, characterised by its commitment to systematic, evidence-informed, and reflective inquiry into learning and teaching (L&T) practices (Hutchings, Huber & Ciccone, 2011). While early conceptualisations focused on improving pedagogical effectiveness, current discourses increasingly foreground ethical, political, and epistemic dimensions. Some scholars argue that SoTL could move beyond instrumentalist notions of quality enhancement to engage more critically with questions of power, justice, relationality, and the purposes of higher education (Felten, 2013; Fanghanel et al., 2016). As higher education confronts widening inequalities, intensifying marketisation, and accelerating digital transformation, SoTL is being reimagined as a practice that contributes to more just, inclusive, and contextually responsive educational futures.

In South African and broader African contexts, SoTL has developed within higher education systems shaped by historical inequalities, structural marginalisation, and enduring colonial legacies that affect access, participation, and epistemic recognition (Leibowitz, 2017; Soudien, 2021). As a result, South African SoTL scholarship has foregrounded the relational, affective, and political dimensions of L&T, emphasising socially just pedagogies, decolonial praxis, and contextually grounded knowledge-making (Bozalek & Boughey, 2020). While foregrounding African and Southern higher education contexts, the Special Issue also welcomes contributions from other contexts that engage meaningfully with Sumud, Ubuntu, justice, relationality, and epistemic transformation. At the same time, global calls for SoTL frameworks that honour diverse epistemologies highlight the lived experiences of educators and students navigating conditions of precarity, technological change, and institutional constraint. It is within this context that the present Special Issue positions itself, reimagining SoTL through the intertwined philosophies of Sumud and Ubuntu, which emphasise steadfastness, relationality, dignity, and collective flourishing. By mobilising these concepts, the Issue seeks to expand global conversations about criticality, justice, and the future purposes of higher education.

Building on Bozalek, Zembylas, and Shefer (2019), the Special Issue is anchored in the principles of attentive care, responsibility and accountability, and responsive engagement. These values frame SoTL as an ethical and relational undertaking and seek to foster a culture that privileges active engagement, shared growth, and solidarity.

Within this context, the Arabic term Sumud, referring to steadfastness and perseverance (Hamad and Tribe, 2019), signals the importance of “connectedness,” as well as “cultural and critical pedagogy, heritage, and self-determination” (Scott, Ujvari, Bakeer, and Shanaa, 2025, p. 1). Intersecting with the African concept of Ubuntu, often expressed as I am because we are, which emphasises relational dignity, mutual becoming, and communal care, Sumud encourages a SoTL approach attentive to how educators and students navigate adversity without romanticising it, foster belonging within inequitable systems, and imagine epistemic possibilities beyond Western-dominated paradigms. Read together, Sumud and Ubuntu offer a relational vocabulary for understanding how educators and students persist, care, resist, belong, and create knowledge within unequal higher education systems. Through this framing, the Special Issue introduces an African perspective to global SoTL debates, highlighting resilience, relationality, and epistemic justice as central to the future of higher education.

Practicing Sumud thus entails steadfast, ethical, and relational scholarship that creates space for others, nurtures belonging, and sustains scholarly communities within and across institutions. This is particularly significant in an era marked by the marginalisation or erasure of oppressed groups. In this way, the Special Issue advances pedagogical frameworks that move beyond knowledge transmission towards the co-creation of new knowledge, aligned with the broader purposes of higher education.

We invite contributions that explore how SoTL, informed by Sumud and Ubuntu, might deepen global conversations on criticality, justice, and the future of higher education.

Guiding Questions

The Special Issue includes both an open call for submissions and a selection of invited contributions from scholars whose work speaks directly to the themes of Sumud, Ubuntu, and justice-oriented SoTL. Three questions that this Special Issue asks are:

  •  What forms of pedagogical thinking and practice emerge when current conditions are viewed through the lens of Sumud and Ubuntu?
  • How might such practices further global conversations on criticality, justice, and the future of higher education?
  • How could deeply ethical, political, and epistemic pedagogies challenge dominant Northern paradigms and draw attention to the resilience, relationality, and ingenuity that characterise teaching and learning across African contexts?
  • We welcome conceptual, empirical, methodological, and practice-based contributions. Abstracts should clearly indicate the proposed article’s focus, theoretical or conceptual framing, methodology or approach where relevant, contribution to the Special Issue theme, and connection to one or more of the subthemes below.

Themes and Subthemes

This Special Issue frames teaching and learning as relational, justice-oriented work shaped by steadfastness (Sumud), communal care (Ubuntu), and the uneven conditions of contemporary higher education.

Subtheme 1: Context, Identity, and the Conditions of Belonging

Explores how institutional, historical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts shape belonging, participation, and exclusion in higher education.

Topics may include:

  • Belonging and exclusion in higher education
  • Structural and institutional formation of student and staff identities
  • Disciplinary cultures and transitions
  • Workload, time-on-task, and temporal constraints
  • Institutional rigidity, possibility, and transformation

Subtheme 2: Learning Through Struggle: Resilience, Failure, and Becoming

Interrogates the role of struggle, persistence, and vulnerability in teaching and learning without romanticising hardship.

Topics may include:

  • Failure as pedagogy
  • Persistence in constrained environments
  • Emotional labour in teaching and learning
  • Identity formation through struggle and vulnerability
  • Student-to-graduate transitions

Subtheme 3: Knowledge, Meaning-Making, and Epistemic Engagement in Uneven Learning Environments

Examines how knowledge is engaged, valued, and constructed within unequal and diverse higher education settings.

Topics may include:

  • Epistemic justice and whose knowledge counts
  • Curriculum design and decolonial praxis
  • Assessment as a site of epistemic access
  • Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary SoTL approaches
  • Cognitive, affective, and relational dimensions of learning

Subtheme 4: Digital Pedagogies, AI, and the Politics of Technological Possibility

Explores the opportunities and tensions presented by digital technologies and AI in resource-constrained contexts.

Topics may include:

  • Critical digital pedagogy in African and Southern contexts
  • AI in teaching and learning (contextual and culturally responsive approaches)
  • Digital coloniality and infrastructural inequalities
  • Hidden harms and unintended consequences of technology
  • Student and educator agency in digital environments
  • Attention, emotional labour, and learning in digitally saturated spaces

Submission Timeline

  • Abstract submissions (500 -750 words): 18 August 2026
  • Notification of selected abstracts: 18 September 2026
  • Full paper submissions: 31 January 2027
  • Reviewer workshop: 15 March 2027
  • First round of reviewer feedback: 15 May 2027
  • Revised manuscripts due: 15 July 2027
  • Second round feedback: 01 August 2027
  • Final manuscripts due: 31 August 2027
  • Copy-editing and proofreading: September – October 2027
  • Publication date: December 2027

We hope to publish between 8 and 10 articles in December 2027.

Guest Editorial Team

  • Nicole De Wet-Billings nicole.dewet-billings@wits.ac.za - Senior Director: Academic Affairs, University of the Witwatersrand; Professor of Demography and Population Studies
  • Nazira Hoosen nazira.hoosen@wits.ac.za – Academic and Educational Developer, Centre for Learning, Teaching and Development (CLTD), University of the Witwatersrand
  • Raazia Moosa Raazia.Moosa@wits.ac.za – Head of Academic Support, University of the Witwatersrand
  • Najma Agherdien najma.aghardien@wits.ac.za – Curriculum and Teaching Practitioner and SoTL Scholar, Wits School of Education , University of the Witwatersrand
  • Fatima Rahiman fatima.rahiman@wits.ac.za – Online Learning Programmes Manager and Learning & Teaching Development Practitioner, CLTD, University of the Witwatersrand
  • Mei Luo mei.luo@wits.ac.za – Learning Experience Designer, CLTD, University of the Witwatersrand

Submission Details

Please submit your extended abstract (500–750 words, including references) via the online submission form by 18 August 2026.

For further enquiries, please contact SOTL.AcademicAffairs@wits.ac.za

Kindly use the SoTL in the South Journal author guidelines at https://journals.uj.ac.za/SOTL/index.php/sotls/instructions_for_submission 

Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be invited to submit full papers via the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South (SOTL in the South) online submission system. The detailed submission process will be shared upon abstract acceptance.

Open Access Policy

Open access

This is an online open-access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access.

There are no article submission or processing fees.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSING:

All journal content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Contributors to SOTL in the South retain copyright over their contributed material, but grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship along with its initial publication in SOTL in the South.  important to acknowledge the initial publication in SOTL in the South. Each article's DOI can be used to link back to the original publication in SOTL in the South.

The authors warrant that their contribution is an original work not published elsewhere, that they have the full power to make this grant and that the article contains no matter unlawful or which invades the right to privacy or infringes any proprietary right.

Indexation and Accreditation

SOTL in the South is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as well as on Sherpa/Romeo. The Journal is also accredited by Scopus (institutional access needed to view) and is currently under review for inclusion in Thomson Reuters/Web of Science. Note that the South African Department of Higher Education (DHET) accredits DOAJ journals, as well as Scopus-listed journals.

Call for Contributions

We particularly encourage submissions that are theoretically grounded, empirically rich, and attentive to the lived realities of educators and students. Contributions may include conceptual, empirical, methodological, or practice-based work that advances justice-oriented, relational, and contextually grounded approaches to SoTL.

This Special Issue seeks to foreground African perspectives while contributing meaningfully to global SoTL conversations. Through the lenses of Sumud and Ubuntu, we aim to foster scholarship that is ethical, critical, and transformative.

References

Bozalek, V., Zembylas, M., & Shefer, T. (2019). Socially Just Pedagogies in Higher Education: Critical Posthumanist and New Materialist Perspectives. Bloomsbury Academic.

Bozalek, V. & Boughey, C. (2020). Using the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to promote a socially just pedagogy. Higher Education, 79(2), 129–143.

Fanghanel, J., Pritchard, J., Potter, J., & Wisker, G. (2016). Defining and supporting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): A sector-wide study. Higher Education Academy.

Felten, P. (2013). Principles of good practice in SoTL. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 1(1), 121–125.

Hamad, S., & Tribe, R. (2019). Teaching amidst adversity: Conceptualising Sumud within Palestinian higher education. Journal of Peace Education, 16(3), 308–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2019.1650905

 Hutchings, P., Huber, M. T., & Ciccone, A. (2011). The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact. Jossey-Bass.

Leibowitz, B. (2017). The significance of academic development: An introduction. In B. Leibowitz (Ed.), The Politics of Learning and Teaching in South African Higher Education. Sun Press.

Scott, H, Ujvari, M, Bakeer, AMA and Shanaa, K. (2025). Sumud as Connected Learning: Towards a Collective Digital Commons in Palestine. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2025(1): 8, pp. 1–15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.877

Soudien, C. (2021). The decolonial moment in South African higher education. In Student Movements in Late Neoliberalism. Routledge.