Putting the South back into Global South: SoTL as scholarly and social activism

Abstract

In unpacking the theme of ‘Sustainable Futures for Teaching and Learning’, I explore the discourse of ‘grand challenges’ for SoTL in the South. I offer provocations to unsettle the premise that these challenges are in fact universally ‘grand’ and question our acceptance of the trope that what applies to the North applies equally to the South. In higher education (HE), themes like futures thinking and sustainability have enormous purchase as they encourage innovation to shape a better future. I challenge our complicity as SoTL authors in taking up these themes uncritically. I invite us all to consider how much our location and context in the Global South matter as an explanatory framework for the teaching and learning challenges we face and whether we can use our context as a locus of enunciation for the scholar-activist work we are called on to do. As long as our teaching contexts, linked to historical coloniality and the matrices of power, are sub-optimal for our students to thrive and succeed, we have an obligation to activate scholarly awareness and action towards bringing these into balance. My hope is that through collective scholar-activism, we enter a social imaginary where the world is socially inclusive and morally just, where location and context are immaterial to the possibilities that exist for human flourishing.