Symbolic inclusion and systemic exclusion: Exploring our precarious journeys to becoming black women academics at a South African university through the lens of fieldwork

abstract

This perspective piece surfaces financially vulnerable black (women) students as predominant fieldwork research assistants and precarious frontline workers of/in the university in marginalised and volatile communities, often with disabling consequences. Research is a time-consuming, indispensable site for knowledge production and empowerment. Yet, as ‘assistants’, black women’s contributions and capabilities remains in a constant phase of infancy and potentiality characterised by income inequality. Included in hard labour while excluded from recognition, we find tension in demands to meet neoliberal time while experiencing racialised and colonised embodiment, leading to temporal fragmentation. We contend through a Feminist Decoloniality as Care framework that fieldwork viscerally produces potential for epistemic disobedience in black students, and holds transformative and reparative potential for the university to recognise both the students and communities as knowers/collaborators in knowledge production privileging African/local epistemes. However, this potential is minimised and/or foreclosed as a competitive neoliberal university framework is sustained through exploitative labour conditions and extractive relationships with vulnerable students and communities. We conclude that individualised forms of care counter-intuitively sustain the status quo and call into question methods, terminologies, and the ethics of ethics as we unmask the in-built costs and risks associated with fieldwork that the university relegates to individual researchers.

keywords:

• black women
• research assistants
• fieldwork
• disabling
• neoliberal precarity

Introduction

Black students, once again, put their bodies on the line to demand inclusion in the 2023 academic year. At the start of each academic calendar at universities around South Africa (SA), financially marginalised students are subject to routine organised violence and humiliation, apparent embedded costs which accompany the desire to belong to the academy. More than just a civilising discourse, education remains a site for many complex struggles, anxieties, and aspirations for majority black students in the country. Through a feminist decolonial perspective (Mignolo 2007; Lugones 2010) this perspective piece reads the cry for education symbolised by student protests as, in fact, a cry for inclusion in the human race. Black people were ejected from the category of the human on claims of lacking reason and rationality, Western essentials required “for achieving modern personhood, joining civil society, and participating in liberal politics” (Bruce 2021, p. 4). Modernity as an apparatus positions education as an equaliser and a pipeline, albeit a precarious one, to achieving these essentials. Furthermore, education as a modern ideal holds promise for economic emancipation and eradication of the indignities caused by poverty and inequality. However, educational inclusion carries explicit and implicit costs.

During an online method workshop targeted at postgraduate students across various disciplines and schools recently, one student asked the facilitator if she could hire someone to collect her data (paraphrased): “It is not as if I will be asking the person I hire to think for me, I know where the data is, I will direct them to get it for me.” The facilitator responded “Well, if you put it that way, it should be fine, this is how we mostly do research.” As the workshop came to an end, some of us were struck by how this seemingly mundane exchange captured the essence of the various discussions those of us who from time to time ‘collect data’ – on behalf of other students, senior academics as grant recipients and various university departments/research institutions – have been grappling with over the last few years.

Subsequent to our overlapping experiences and identified patterns therein, our ruminations culminated in the following questions:

What is the place of fieldwork¹ in the university? Whose labour is reflected in fieldwork and who/which are the likely research subjects/sites? What does the nature of fieldwork – based on our subjective experiences – tell us about the relationship the university has with us as financially vulnerable students/communities which serve as research sites, and the decolonial project broadly?

In the South African context of legacies/ongoing forms of racialised capitalism and extreme inequalities, a neoliberal university framework often leads to financial exclusion of predominantly black students. In this instalment, we surface the hidden aspect that financially vulnerable black students predominantly perform the essential service of fieldwork as precarious frontline workers of/in the university, often with disabling consequences. The analysis we offer here is informed by the subjective experiences of black women postgraduate scholars in the field and the academy.

We contend that fieldwork is empowering due to our move as first-generation postgraduate scholars from research subjects to researchers/thinkers. Arguably, fieldwork holds transformative and reparative potential for the university to recognise both the students and communities as knowers/collaborators in knowledge production privileging African/local epistemes. However, this potential is minimised and/or foreclosed, as a competitive neoliberal university framework is sustained through precarious and exploitative labour conditions and an extractive relationship with marginalised students and communities wherein their dreams, aspirations, contributions and deepest hurts are translated into ‘data’ and the private property of the university. Presently, our survival and success mostly reflect individual forms of care shared between us, our families and radical senior academics, as market-centred logics in research make extraction thinkable while repair and reparations are rendered unthinkable. Against this logic, we call into question exploitative methods, reductive terminologies, and the ethics of ethics as we unmask the in-built costs and risks associated with fieldwork that the university relegates to the individual researcher.

The making of servanthood subjectivities

Historically, education has been a site of socio-economic and political struggles as the apartheid regime through the Bantu Education Act of 1953 ensured separate and inferior education as a tool to fashion black servanthood subjectivities for “non-competitive cheap labour” (Christie & Collins 1982). Using Bantu Education as a lens we can see “the concept of the coloniality of being … as related to the process of dehumanization … developed by Nelson Maldonado Torres (2008)” (Lugones 2010, p. 745). In this case, the term coloniality refers

not just [to] a classification of people in terms of the coloniality of power and gender, but also the process of active reduction of people … that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings. (Lugones 2010, p. 745)

In SA, for the colonised education is yet to be experienced as a fundamental human right. Constitutionally, rights are guaranteed on paper but violently contested in reality. Lugones (2010, p. 743) argues that coloniality saw to “a hierarchical, dichotomous distinction between human and non-human imposed on the colonized”, resulting in ongoing contestations for human status, often met with violent repression. Lugones (2010, p. 743) further asserts that the dichotomous hierarchy was “accompanied by other dichotomous hierarchical distinctions, among them that between men and women” in reference to gender dynamics. In the African context the coloniality of gender “systematically made African female power invisible … thus effectively foreclosing access [to] a wide set of social, cultural, and political power structures” (Amadiume 1987, cited in Magadla, Magoqwana & Motsemme 2021). Consequently, “black women were crafted out of the biopolitics of knowledge” (Khunou et al. 2019, p. 2).

The current decolonial wave in South African education

Our experiences, observations and discussions around fieldwork as black postgraduate scholars and in particular black women feminists have been ongoing between 2016 and 2023, generally unstructured and constitutive of our daily intimate conversations and interactions through a variety of the identities we embody as students, colleagues and research assistants. This period coincided with our postgraduate transition to PhD amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Although unstructured, our conversations fall into the broader discourse of #FeesMustFall or Fallism, “a social and epistemic movement that seeks to transform SA by identifying the multiple ways in which apartheid continues in the country” (Maldonado-Torres 2017, p. 14, cited in Chinguno et al. 2017). Drawing on a framework inspired by decolonial scholars, Fallists define decolonisation as:

the rejection of white supremacy (racism); heteropatriarchal order and other forms of prejudices that characterise the on-going colonial project and the quest to redress the socio-economic, political and spiritual depredations of colonial history. It includes the transformation of institutional and academic cultures, epistemological and ontological dimensions, curriculum development and pedagogical practices to that informed by local experiences. (Chinguno et al. 2017, p. 4)

The movement called into question the neoliberal² framework that sustains the inequitable post-apartheid order beyond the university, rendering SA an unviable society for millions.

In the same vein, this article explores fieldwork as a form of precarious livelihood and an explicit cost we pay to remain in academia, as black women who cannot afford the cost of quality education.

Attentive witnessing

We are welcomed with care in communities we work within. Our education positions us as symbols of success anticipated to bring change and our identities as black students broker levels of trust. As we shall demonstrate below, we are attentive not only to the devastations of poverty and inequality but also to the signs of community fatigue from the relentless onslaught by outsiders demanding stories of their lives. We approach fieldwork/writing/teaching with critical reflexivity and within our work care manifests as (Tronto & Fisher 1990; Tronto 1993):

an activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all in a complex, life-sustaining web of which we seek to interweave.

An overview of our experiences shows that we have been stranded in the ‘field’ when rented cars break down; we bear witness/endure detailed descriptions of gratuitous violence, for example, mob justice killings in informal settlements; uneven development juxtaposes beauty and squalor, we see first-hand communities living with the indignities caused by lack of basic services; in some cases human waste runs through the make-shift dwellings where people live and close to where we sit to conduct our in-depth interviews. We write not to essentialise pain and trauma but rather to demonstrate care as attentiveness, responsiveness to community needs, using our competence to take responsibility to surface those needs (Tronto 2017).

Negotiating (un)safe spaces

We experience heartbreak as a result of the inescapable psychological and sometimes physical violence encountered in the course of work; as Thuli³ narrates:

I arrived in the province at 08h00 am in the morning. I was tired from a 3-hour drive from Johannesburg. I worried about how unsafe the road is, especially since the evening was drawing closer, remembering the potholes, with no streetlights and one petrol station at the next in town. I anxiously get in the car and drive off. There was no way of sleeping at the community hall where I was conducting the ethnographic fieldwork, neither was there a friend that could accommodate me even for the weekend. My phone was running on 10% battery life after a full day of recording, taking pictures and videos. No navigation, no emergency contact, no one to drive with me through the dark alley. I drove hoping for the best only for my biggest fears to be realised … 

Thuli lamented the absence of institutional emergency contact numbers, or support structures to depend on while in the field. The research process is individualised, this despite SA presenting with overwhelming evidence of violence against women. In the case of Thembi,⁴ she confided in some colleagues on her return from fieldwork where she combed through genocidal archives that the process had been brutal on her. In Tendai’s⁵ case, he was juggling at least three small jobs, in addition to teaching in his department and trying to complete his PhD thesis. Most nights he slept on his foam mattress on campus in his allocated office. Both Thembi and Tendai died within six months of graduation. Their intellectual work is celebrated, even amid institutional silence on the conditions contributing to their deaths. We break with this tradition.

In one case a student contracted COVID-19 while on assignment, and her hospital bills far exceeded her wages. In another case, a researcher experienced an extreme decline in her mental health after witnessing xenophobia-related violence. Impacts of ill-health on workloads and deadlines are, however, met with paternalistic concern and/or weaponised into deficit narratives against us. Our names are excluded and footnoted on co-authored published articles on xenophobia. Therefore, as ‘assistants’, black women’s contributions and capabilities are perpetually infantilised as potentiality.

Fieldwork constitutes “new forms of work often precarious, organised with the aim of ensuring that employers can avoid the obligations imposed by generations of trade union organisation and struggle” (New Frame 2021). We perform labour-intensive work under short contracts with low pay, without life, health, injury, death or pension protection, resulting in severely casualised labour.⁶ Wages are routinely late. Our contracts require use of our personal resources such as laptops, mobile phones and numbers, which opens us up to contact with communities in duress or predatory men long after we exit the field.

The university places the onus of our own safety upon us. As demonstrated so far, through neoliberal logics, not only does the university transfer institutional responsibility for certain functions onto cheap labour, it also transfers in-built costs and risks associated with work onto the individual researcher.

Contesting exploitative forms of knowledge production

“Universities are the most influential institutions in any society, they produce the theories, ideas, technologies and products upon which the modern world is built”, says Mangcu (2014). In this respect research is the backbone of universities, fundamental to institutional performance rankings and international recognition. Yet these privileges preclude those most central as knowers/collaborators on the ground, discounting local epistemologies (Magoqwana & Adesina 2020).

Social inquiry is invasive; in exchange we ask communities to sign our so-called ‘ethics’ agreements, which exempt the university from any meaningful responsibility towards them. We experience disillusionment and struggle with feeling like being ‘sell-outs’, as we become the vehicle used for exploiting black communities and thereby becoming complicit in the violence that sustains the status quo of inequality.

We argue that Western epistemes currently inform research methods, where ideas around ‘ethics’ and terminologies such as research ‘assistant’, ‘field’, ‘data’, and ‘data collection’ collapse the rich tapestries of black lived realities while also devaluing frontline workers’/thinkers’/communities’ contributions to knowledge production. Ethics represent the dominant/prevailing social norms, those of Western thought and neoliberal capitalist monopoly centralising extractive market-centred logics.

Thinking in our spare time

Students with access to financial means buy time by hiring other students to carry out their fieldwork in peer-to-employer⁷ relationships that reflect and reproduce asymmetrical racial and class dynamics.⁸ There is tension between insurmountable workloads and keeping neoliberal university time. “Processes of racialisation and colonisation keep [us] tether[ed] to a temporal past”, hence we experience “temporal fragmentation” and are always “too late” and out of time (Fanon 1967, cited in Ngo 2019, p. 240). Most importantly, private property and neoliberal time are sustained disingenuously through theft.

Conclusion

Institutional violence/negligence is disabling, and sometimes fatal for black PhDs, adding to our lamented statistical minority in academia. From our shared positionality, listening to each other is an empowering form of decolonial feminist care as it excavates and externalises the violence/s leading to day-to-day forms of resistance. We refute the devaluation⁹ of our skills and knowledge and call for a reimagining of current reductive terms, and the rehumanising of meaning-making forms informed by local realities. Following Joy James (2023, cited in Almore 2023), we concur that individual forms of care counter-intuitively sustain the status quo.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mercy Mupavayenda

MERCY MUPAVAYENDA is completing her doctoral studies in International Development at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She is a researcher, writer, gender transformation trainer and policy analyst focused on women and girls in the Global South, and a 2022/23 Fellow of the Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa of the Social Science Research Council, New York. Email: [email protected]

Fikile Masikane

FIKILE MASIKANE is a social scientist and researcher. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Industrial Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. She holds fellowships at the Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa of the Social Science Research Council 19/20, National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences 20/23 and Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation 21/23. Her research interests include black thought, labour studies and religious studies. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Here fieldwork entails in-person, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and other methods for gathering stories/information/knowledge in social sciences from predominantly marginalised (in)formal black communities, clinics and rural and peripheral communities.

2 “Neoliberalism … a theory of political economic practices … proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to … guarantee, … by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets.” (Harvey 2005, p. 2). (Bold Italics ours.)

3 Not her real name. Her experience is recent, and she was not in a position to recount the gruesome details here.

4 Not her real name.

5 Although Tendai (not his real name) was a black male, his identity to an extent was feminised because he was kind and soft and abhorred confrontation, characteristics which defy hegemonic views of black masculinities and increased his vulnerability to exploitation.

6 During the pandemic, reports reiterated that black women and girls are overrepresented in precarious formal and informal work and the care industry, predominantly constitute essential and at-risk frontline workers and were the most affected by job losses (Casale & Shepherd 2021).

7 In student-to-senior male scholar grant recipient working relationships, support roles are open to sexual advances and in-built gendered allocation/expectations of labour.

8 In SA, according to Oxfam (2020), black women disproportionately carry the burden to reproduce others (and ourselves) both in private and public domains.

9 A “CEO takes home as much as 461 black women from the bottom ten percent of earners. Labour market inequality is a key driver to stubborn gender, race, income and wealth inequality in South Africa” (Oxfam, 2020).