Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-63). Also available in print.

When a black student threw feces against a bronze statue of British imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes, located at the University of Cape Town (UCT), it sparked the formation of the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) student movement in March 2015. The Black-led #RMF movement sought to decolonize the university by confronting institutional racism and patriarchy at UCT through a series of disruptive and creative tactics including occupying university buildings and erecting a shack on campus. As part of their decolonization process, black students tried to make sense of their experiences in a predominantly white university by de-linking from UCT’s dominant model of Euro-American knowledge to construct their own decolonial framework comprised of Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness and Black radical feminism. A few weeks later in May 2015, students at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who were inspired by the student movement at UCT, created the #RhodesMustFall Oxford movement, using the Rhodes statue at Oriel College as a focal point in their call to decolonize the university. This dissertation explores the formation of the radical #RMF student movements at UCT and Oxford—referred to as the Fallist movements. I first consider what led the #RMF movement at UCT to adopt a decolonial framework centered on Black radical feminism, Black Consciousness, and Pan-Africanism, and then examine how the #RMF’s decolonial framework generated the emergent idea of “Fallism” that extended beyond the students’ demand for the Rhodes statue to fall. Finally, I assess the ways in which the formation of #RMF Oxford was influenced by the #RMF movement in Cape Town. The #RMF mission statement characterized the black experience at UCT as “black pain” or as “the dehumanization of black people” informed by the “violence exacted only against black people by a system that privileges whiteness”. In order to better understand their experiences of black pain, student activists de-linked from the university's dominant knowledge production systems that privileged whiteness through its epistemic architecture. The #RMF UCT movement’s de-linking or “epistemic disobedience”, was also employed by students at Oxford who wanted to integrate “subjugated and local epistemologies” into the Eurocentric university curriculum. Based on this empirical analysis of the #RMF’s engagement in epistemic disobedience at both UCT and Oxford, I argue that the university occupies a paradoxical position for Black and other marginalized bodies: it is simultaneously empowering and dehumanizing; it offers the possibility of acquiring knowledge that could serve as a liberatory tool from the violence of socio-economic marginality (Black liberation), while at the same time, the physical and epistemic architecture of the university can create an oppressive, alienating space for Black, queer and disabled bodies among others (Black pain). This assertion leads me to experiment with developing Fallism into an emergent decolonial option that emanates from acts of epistemic disobedience to unveil the hegemonic intellectual architecture of the university. Through a combination of 98 interviews, one year of observations, and document analysis, this study offers insights into the formation and evolution of the #RMF student movements at UCT and Oxford, while contributing to a critical understanding of the university’s paradoxical epistemic architecture.

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The Canadian Union of Students (CUS) was Canada's national postsecondary student organisation from its founding in September 1963 as the successor to the National Federation of Canadian University Students (NFCUS), until its dissolution in October 1969. This thesis recounts the political history of CUS by tracing the development of CUS policies on access to higher education and on student involvement in the governance of postsecondary institutions. The central argument of this thesis is that over time CUS policies and activities became increasingly "left wing," causing CUS to become ever more isolated from the mainstream students who constituted its membership. The loss of confidence by the members resulted in campus student associations withdrawing support from the organisation, leading to the dissolution of CUS in October 1969. This thesis is not strictly an historical policy analysis, although such an analysis appears throughout. This thesis also offers comparative discussions, recounting developments in the Quebec student movement, in the Canadian anti-nuclear and social justice movements, and in the American civil rights and student movements. To a lesser extent, this thesis also contains elements of social history, collective biography and organisational history. This variety of approaches helps in more fully explaining CUS's changing politics. As demonstrated by the developments in policies on access to higher education and institutional governance, CUS was not content with merely treating the symptoms of educational inequity, but increasingly sought to identify the causes of such inequity and eliminate them. This put the organisation in conflict with prevailing social, political and economic arrangements and divided the CUS leadership from its membership. Although a significant minority of disaffected youth and students challenged the norms of the day, they were unable to bring large numbers of people to their cause and thus unable to sustain pressure for change. The CUS leadership's attempt to reverse the course of the organisation to save it from collapse was unsuccessful and CUS folded under the weight of a rapidly declining membership.

Thesis (B. Div.)--Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, 1968. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [i]-iv).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 347-373).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisor: Susan L. Miller, Dept. of Sociology & Criminal Justice. Includes bibliographical references.

With the demise of apartheid the higher education landscape of South Africa (SA) had to change as well. As a guiding document, the Restructuring of the Higher Education Act 101 of 1997 (RSA 1997) sets out the programme for the envisioned new higher education system. Among some of the changes envisaged by this Act was that higher education needed to be responsive to the broader process of SA’s socio-economic and political transition. Of note is that, by virtue of the history of the higher educational landscape in SA, the changes were experienced in two phases. The first phase just after 1994 was characterised by debates on the restructuring centred on the changed political environment. This was a period where issues such as equal access to higher education institutions and opportunities for staff and students across race and gender lines, unequal funding, appropriateness of curriculum, shortages of graduates in the fields of science, and inefficiency and ineffectiveness of university management were attempted to be addressed. The second (current) phase is the “globalisation of education” – market principles are introduced into education, with a resultant rise in study fees; academic training is being steered more by market forces than by government; and incorporations and mergers of higher education institutions are being enforced to ensure efficiency, amongst other things. My intention to undertake a study on the restructuring of higher education was because the subject has raised different views and different reactions from different stakeholders. There are authors who are against the manner in which the restructuring of higher education is being formulated and implemented, especially in this second phase, i.e. the globalisation of higher education. Such authors include Komane (2002:7), Goedegebuure, Kaiser, Maassen and De Weert (1994:3), Berstelsen (1998:130), Kgaphola (1999:19) and Clark (1998:5). / Ms. Carina van Rooyen

The Canadian Union of Students (CUS) was Canada's national postsecondary student organisation from its founding in September 1963 as the successor to the National Federation of Canadian University Students (NFCUS), until its dissolution in October 1969. This thesis recounts the political history of CUS by tracing the development of CUS policies on access to higher education and on student involvement in the governance of postsecondary institutions. The central argument of this thesis is that over time CUS policies and activities became increasingly "left wing," causing CUS to become ever more isolated from the mainstream students who constituted its membership. The loss of confidence by the members resulted in campus student associations withdrawing support from the organisation, leading to the dissolution of CUS in October 1969. This thesis is not strictly an historical policy analysis, although such an analysis appears throughout. This thesis also offers comparative discussions, recounting developments in the Quebec student movement, in the Canadian anti-nuclear and social justice movements, and in the American civil rights and student movements. To a lesser extent, this thesis also contains elements of social history, collective biography and organisational history. This variety of approaches helps in more fully explaining CUS's changing politics. As demonstrated by the developments in policies on access to higher education and institutional governance, CUS was not content with merely treating the symptoms of educational inequity, but increasingly sought to identify the causes of such inequity and eliminate them. This put the organisation in conflict with prevailing social, political and economic arrangements and divided the CUS leadership from its membership. Although a significant minority of disaffected youth and students challenged the norms of the day, they were unable to bring large numbers of people to their cause and thus unable to sustain pressure for change. The CUS leadership's attempt to reverse the course of the organisation to save it from collapse was unsuccessful and CUS folded under the weight of a rapidly declining membership. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

This dissertation examines how three contemporary Mexican intellectuals confront the cultural milieu and political economy of the neoliberal era by revising the utopian imaginaries of Mexico’s major 20th century student movements. Building on recent scholarship on Mexican history and geography, urban studies, and political theory, I analyze the cities and politics that Mexican intellectuals have imagined to challenge the neoliberal cultural injunction against alternative forms of utopian thinking. The principal works studied in this dissertation are Roberto Bolaño’s novels Amuleto (1999), Los detectives salvajes (1998), and El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción (2016); Eduardo Ruiz Sosa’s novel Anatomía de la memoria (2014); and Alonso Ruizpalacios’ film Güeros (2014). The first chapter examines Roberto Bolaño’s treatments of the 1968 student movement and the Tlatelolco massacre within his broader Mexico City works. Bolaño uses metaphors derived from horror film to critique traditional historiographies of ’68 that are colored by morbid fascination with the violence, while positing science fiction as a utopian method for rethinking the relationship between the past and the future. The second chapter analyzes how Eduardo Ruiz Sosa’s novel Anatomía de la memoria conjures the specters of the 1970s student guerilla uprising in Sinaloa to shed light on the present struggles against the contemporary violence plaguing cities like Culiacán. I approach Ruiz Sosa’s novel as a study of the ruins of revolutionary Third Worldism which politicizes individual and collective processes of mourning and reaffirms a future open to possibilities beyond narco-neoliberal sovereignty. The third chapter unpacks the utopian resonances of Alonso Ruizpalacios’ film Güeros about the 1999-2000 National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) student strike against the neoliberal effort to privatize higher education. I read the portrayal of the student occupation of the UNAM campus as an exploration of the dialectical utopian tensions between the needs for access to urban resources and poetic encounters with the unexpected in city life. By studying these intellectuals as critics of neoliberalism and as visual and textual philosophers of the utopian, my dissertation conceives of utopia as a strategy of finding potentialities within historical narratives to restore a sense of possibility to contemporary political landscapes.