Introducing Black Academic Voices South Africa and Beyond

Abstract

This special issue is part of efforts by the Department of Leadership and Transformation, at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria, to make a contribution towards the building of the scholarship of transformation in an effort to continue the work to making our universities our own. Again, this special issue builds on the work started in the 2019 award winning edited volume Black Academic Voices: The South African Experience to share the multiple stories of experiences of the higher education sector. The only exception in this issue is that the experiences shared include those from other parts of the world. From the multiple launch seminars hosted for Black Academic Voices (2019) it became clearer that there are multiple Black academic voices in the university that require our ear, thus this special issue provides the much-needed reflective space for the unpacking of the politics of being black in the academy. In South Africa such reflective undertakings are recent and timely (Mabokela and Magubane, 2004; Khunou, Canham, Khoza-Shangase, Phaswana, 2019; Magoqwana, Maqabuka, and Tshoaedi, 2019).