Metaphor drawing as decolonial research and feminist care among Black women academics in selected South African higher education institutions in times of crises

abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic and devastating floods in parts of Southern Africa in 2022 intensified the competing gender role expectations for women academics in the home and workplace, with negative consequences on their effective participation and success in their institutions. This article explores the value of participatory visual methodology generally, and metaphor drawing as feminist decolonial praxis and a research as social change approach to develop a community of practice among a group of 20 South African Black women academics. Participants drew animal metaphors to reflect on their experiences of COVID-19 and the gendered impacts of the neoliberal policies and processes in universities during crises. The participants exhibited and shared their reflections in a workshop format. These were audio-recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed using decolonial feminist care as a conceptual lens. Two main themes highlighting women’s vulnerabilities and strengths emerged. Metaphor drawing as a decolonial method has the potential to generate counter-narratives that disrupt pathologising discourses about women academics’ experiences and capacities. The drawing workshop (and previous ones) contributed to generating deep relationality and sociality in the group, with care embedded deeply in the various interactions and formations that arose throughout the workshop and the project.

keywords:

• metaphor drawing
• decoloniality
• decolonial feminism
• feminist care
• Black women academics
• participatory visual methodology
• South Africa

“Women have to be much better than men to land top jobs, they have to work doubly hard, and this gradually becomes an albatross as more women attain executive positions, because talented women are often constructed as ambitious rivals; and gender politics harshly depicts them in patriarchal stereotypes, caricaturing their personalities to curb their influence.” – Mamokgethi Phakeng (2015, p. 2)

Introduction

In the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and political unrest violence in some parts of South Africa in 2021–2022, the impacts of the competing academic and social demands on women were further compounded. Due to their marginal social position as gendered and racialised members of their communities and institutions, Black women – particularly those in poorly resourced rural and township contexts – were particularly vulnerable. For example, citing the work of Nigam (2020), Parry and Gordon (2021, p. 800) wrote:

It is evident that during lockdown many women in the home [had to] shoulder the burden of responsibility, taking care of the household and children, they [had to] do so under very different circumstances. Furthermore, as a result of increasing tensions and distress of COVID-19, some women may [have faced] an increase in violence. This suggests that the home exposes how the power manifestation, feminization of unpaid labour, violence, and reproduction of patriarchy is reinforced.

Women working in higher education institutions (HEIs), although somewhat shielded by their middle-class positions, were no exception. Indeed, studies emerging from the COVID-19 period suggest that within their institutions, curricular demands and expectations competed with social demands for care in the home, including teaching or supervising remote learning for their own children’s schooling and providing care for the family (Khosa & Pillay 2021; Makura 2022; Walters et al. 2022). For example, in their mixed-methods study involving 2029 women academics from the 26 public HEIs in South Africa, Walters et al. (2022, p. 1) found that

a dramatic increase in teaching and administrative workloads, and the traditional family roles assumed by women while “working from home,” were among the key factors behind the reported decline in research activity among female academics in public universities.

Linked to the shift to online teaching – for which many were unprepared – were expectations and demands for students’ support and care. As expected, the burden of care in institutions also fell heavily on women, and in those HEIs where students from poorly resourced rural and township contexts were enrolled, Black women (as we will illustrate in this article) often reported carrying the bulk of the responsibility for providing care and support for students and peers. This negatively impacted their own academic productivity.

For example, writing in the Brazilian context, in their study which examined the influence of gender, race and parenthood on academic productivity during the pandemic, Staniscuaski et al. (2021) found that Black women, particularly those who were mothers, were the most negatively affected. They concluded that “the well-known unequal division of domestic labour between men and women, which has been exacerbated during the pandemic” (p. 1), and factors such as racism meant that Black women bore the brunt of the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the work from home measures that were implemented to mitigate its spread in communities.

To respond to these challenges and to support each other through the COVID-19 lockdown, members of the Feminist Decoloniality as Care (FEMDAC) community of practice (CoP), described below, came together in a series of online and later face-to-face workshops that used participatory visual methodology (PVM) to reflect on and respond to the issues. The workshops involved participants producing numerous visual artefacts, such as collages, photovoice and drawings, among others. This article focuses on an analysis of and reflections from a metaphor drawing workshop involving members of the FEMDAC CoP from three participating public universities in South Africa.

Our project

Our collaborative and participatory transnational project, ‘Neoliberalism, Gender and Curriculum Transformation in Higher Education: Feminist Decoloniality as Care’ (FEMDAC) involves early-career women academics from three South African institutions (the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Stellenbosch University and Durban University of Technology) and two in the United States of America (USA) (the Universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and New Mexico). Black women are the most underrepresented group in higher education globally (Bamberg et al. 2021). Even if Black women have access to becoming academics, the burdens of institutional racism and patriarchy combined often leave them feeling isolated and exploited, with arduous prospects of promotion (Zulu 2020). Further, even though women are registering and completing doctoral degrees in higher numbers, they still tend to be underrepresented in senior academic and leadership positions (Subbaye & Vithal 2017; Zulu 2020). Often, due to their junior status, as discussed above, in addition to other academic roles they often end up doing more of the teaching, usually at undergraduate level where there are larger classes, and more of the care work, which increased exponentially during COVID-19 (Hardman et al. 2022).

As argued elsewhere (Bamberg et al. 2021), another reason for these trends relates to neoliberal practices, which intersect with gendered expectations and contextual factors that often impact on women academics in universities. For example, the performance management expectations and practices that require all academics to ‘publish or perish’, and to teach and be involved in community engagement activities, have become non-negotiable as they are tied to government subsidies for the institution. For those who do not perform to expectation, their rewards are withheld. These rewards include salary increases, bonuses, and promotions.

For women academics, particularly those from communities and families that do not have the resources to enlist domestic help, and who carry the responsibility of care and support in the home, time for academic tasks is a rare commodity, and performance in the academic space is often a struggle. As a research team¹ we therefore wanted the women in FEMDAC to use the workshop space to critically reflect on their individual and collective experiences and to develop their capacity for participation in academic spaces, including in teaching, curriculum development, decision-making and research.

The aim of the FEMDAC project is therefore three-fold: 1) to create a CoP that brings together a network of women academics from public universities across the two countries to collaboratively develop scholarship on the nature and influence of gender, its intersectionalities and neoliberalism on their research and teaching capacities; 2) to examine the ways in which the women understand and contribute to scholarly debate about the competing discourses of neoliberalism and gender inequality on the one hand, and debates around decoloniality, decolonisation and transformation in higher education on the other; and 3) to explore the ways in which Black women academics understand, respond to and resist the gendered and neoliberal policies, structures and processes in universities.

Methodologically, FEMDAC draws on a feminist pedagogical methodology developed by feminist scholar Penny Jane Burke (see Burke, Crozier & Misiaszek 2017), which involves a series of participatory research and praxis-based workshops that use PVM and other creative arts-based methods. The aim is t0o facilitate women’s engagement with a range of gender and feminist analytical and methodological tools to understand and respond to how social, cultural and symbolic inequalities affect their academic capacities in the university. Understanding (through research) and challenging and addressing (through praxis) women’s domination and exclusion in patriarchal and often violent institutions and communities will not only benefit women as an oppressed group, but will impact social transformation within and across community contexts (Aina 2010). A further aim of adopting visual methodologies and critical feminist methodologies and pedagogies is to disrupt the valorisation of cognitive knowledge only and to generate novel knowledges through embodied knowledges and affect in knowledge production in the academy.

Recognising the added burden of care and work in the home and workplace on Black women academics in the context of COVID-19, we used the drawings and our reflections to explore our academic identities and the gendered impacts of the neoliberal policies, structures and processes in universities in this and other social crises that impact on communities and institutions. We preface our discussion of methodology by weaving together the foundational theoretical strands of our project. We consider our key conceptual foundation as (African) feminist decoloniality, both in our conceptualisation of care and of methodology as praxis.

(African) feminist decoloniality as care

Following the work of Tronto (1993, 2017), care is embedded as relational, ethical and political in this project. In this article, we also expand on the work of Tronto to particularise experiences of Black women academics as reflected in the literature on sistah circles as caring spaces (Jones, Davis & Gaskin-Cole 2023). Furthermore we extend our conceptions of care beyond those developed in the Global North, to draw on Global South conceptions of care across the diaspora where we recognise the nature of care as deeply racialised and intersectional (Raghuram 2016).

Fisher and Tronto (1990) define care as “an activity that includes everything that 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 of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Tronto 1993, p. 103). Tronto’s work assumes a relational care ethic. This means that humans, the environment and other beings are dependent on one another, and that all humans are vulnerable and in need of care, but also able to give care (Tronto 2017). For Tronto, care is not merely an individual and interpersonal activity but institutional, as reflected in her concept of democratic caring.

In this understanding, care concerns are concerns of justice, hence its resonance with feminist decoloniality. Similarly, Mignolo and Walsh (2018, p. 1) foreground the concept of relationality as central to “the awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms … with territory or land and cosmos”. For them, relationality unsettles the universalism of academic thought and allows for the creation of pluriversal ways of thinking, being and doing which disrupts the “totality from which the universal and global are often perceived” (p. 2).

Tronto’s four moral elements of care constitute a model for conceptualising non-paternalistic care. She proposes that care consists of attentiveness to a need, caring about someone or something, and empathy. It involves responsibility, taking on the task of responding to needs. Thirdly, it requires caring competence, and fourthly, responsiveness to the needs of the person. Tronto (2013) added a fifth component, solidarity, that focuses on collective responsibility, acknowledging that citizens are both receivers and givers of care in society. Her work has more recently explored HEIs as caring institutions.

There have been strong critiques of the theorisation of the political ethic of care: that they are in the Global North, assume forms of universalism as opposed to contextual or situated understandings of care, and that they are gender myopic, ignoring race and other intersectionalities (Raghuram 2016). Raghuram (2019) further problematises care as deeply racialised, borne out of colonial systems where Black bodies that cared for others seldom did so out of choice, and differential value was given to care performed by Black bodies. This exploitative understanding of care is particularly relevant to Black women in higher education, who are often viewed through mammy tropes. These tropes assume that Black women are unintelligent, invisible and self-sacrificing, and enact the role in contemporary higher education that slaves historically performed in white households (Howard-Baptiste 2014). Furthermore, the critique that while desirable, care should not be valorised uncritically, is pertinent. Care can be paternalistic as it reinscribes power asymmetries when we decide on the nature of care for others, and parochial when we care exclusively about and for those who we deem to be similar to us (Tronto 1993).

Given our work with Black women academics, it is also appropriate to consider the experiences and practices of care that may extend our own theorising about decolonial care and caring practices. To particularise our approach to care, we supplement Tronto’s work with that of Jones, Davis and Gaskin-Cole (2023) on sistah circles which, they argue, are spaces occupied by self-identified Black women. Black women are united in these circles, based on shared struggles and non-familial connections but also the desire to care about improving the lives of Black women, collectively and as a socio-political endeavour across Black diasporas. Sistah circles are meaningful and valuable, since they become spaces where mutually beneficial resources and affirmations can be shared.

Lopez and Gillespie (2016) foreground the importance of feminist care, friendship, and love as a “buddy system” of “caring with” as an act of resistance and transformation to encroaching individualism in the neoliberal academy. This aspect has been central to our FEMDAC group as a CoP. We strived to build strong professional and relational bonds that support Black women academics to navigate circuitous and at times treacherous pathways to access and progress in HEIs. We further extend our argument to suggest that the participatory methodologies employed by FEMDAC are central to decolonial feminist praxis.

Participatory visual methodology as decolonial feminist praxis

Similar to conceptions of care, research globally, including in South Africa, tends to engage ‘othering ideologies’ and to privilege Global North knowledge and ways of producing knowledge (Icaza 2017; Chilisa 2012). Within this context researchers often use criteria and values from the Global North, that are normatively white, capitalist, patriarchal, western and Christian centric (Grosfoguel 2013), to research and write about the lives of oppressed people in the Global South. Such approaches fail to capture the nuanced and complex accounts of the multiple and interconnected oppressions they experience, as well as how they challenge and resist their oppressions. To disrupt this, FEMDAC, like Mignolo and Walsh (2018), recognises the importance of situatedness and praxis in research. Specifically, using decolonial praxis refers to the idea that practice and theory mutually constitute and reconstitute each other and are embedded in the everyday experiences and struggles toward re-existence and re-humanisation (Walsh 2018), our overall research design adopts PVM to co-generate knowledge using methods that will enable us to not only understand but also to challenge policies and legacies that act as barriers to our academic success as academics (Mitchell, de Lange & Moletsane 2017).

The academy is a contradictory site where knowledges are both colonised and contested, and it remains one of the few public spaces in this rapidly globalised world for critical dialogue and engagement and for envisioning a socially and materially just world (Mohanty 2006). We understand the academy, academic work, and scholarly practices as political, inscribed in power and responsive to and embedded in colonial, capitalist and patriarchal structures (Mohanty 2006). What we do, how we do it and what we are meant to produce reflect the power structures within academia. Cognisant of this, we seek to use and develop what we perceive as decolonial ways of thinking, doing and being through decolonial praxis (Walsh 2018), with the aim of making visible the coloniality embedded in and perpetuated through institutional policies and practices informed by globalism. We recognise that without structural and institutional change, namely decolonisation of the university, the best we can do in this context is to create spaces of resistance and refusal, spaces which serve to disrupt coloniality (Walsh 2018).

In our project we work to decolonise our research by centring and privileging the experiences of Black women academics in the modern/western corporate university. Using PVM we engage with and theorise our experiences in these universities. We assume a decolonial feminist praxical stance to collectively co-generate counter-practices and counter-knowledges that seek to resist coloniality, thereby enabling greater access, participation, and mobility for us as Black women academics in the neoliberal university. This too we do by caring together and caring with each other, as practices that run counter to neoliberal individualistic and competitive logics in higher education.

Data generation

In pursuit of decolonial feminist praxis,² as discussed above, we came together in a series of workshops to reflect on our experiences of the various traumatic events that our institutions and communities had gone through in a very short period (2020–2022). These included the COVID-19 pandemic, climate-related floods and political violence and looting, and the impacts thereof on our work as women and academics. In the workshop analysed in this article we used metaphor drawing as an exercise because of its contextual situatedness. In our context, animal metaphors resonate strongly with the close African kinship with the animal kingdom. Beyond the contextual, metaphors are also a “creative linguistic and conceptual device” that facilitates imagination to describe and explore ways of “being, feeling and doing” and represents an “imaginative strategy for communicating nuances that might be lost in describing participants’ lived experiences” (McShane 2005, p. 6). Metaphors are described as psychological tools that people use to think about and make sense of complex conceptual and complicated matters, without even being aware that they are doing so, and are grounded in “embodied experience” (Thibodeau, Matlock & Flusberg 2019). They allow people to use a familiar concept (an animal) or one domain to reflect on and make sense of an unfamiliar situation or concept in another domain (Zhao, Coombs & Zhou 2010).

While linguistic metaphors are the type most used, this article draws on visual metaphors, in this instance, drawings. Metaphor drawing is a critical and reflective form of investigating ourselves and the ways in which we encounter the world around us (Garner 2009; Clark & Holtz 2017). It is also considered a valuable tool for “taking stock of situations and assists in envisioning how things might be different” (Storr 2012, p. 9). Wolf and Perry (1988) argue that drawing embodies meaning making for the drawer and is not a “representative picturing” of the world, i.e. of events, objects or places, but that it reflects the drawer’s interpretation of those events, objects, or situations. The use of metaphor drawing in this workshop was therefore meant to concretise mental images that we as members of FEMDAC had about our COVID-19 experiences as we associated ourselves with the animals we drew.

Furthermore, drawing as a method of data generation also enables participants to articulate emotions and experiences that may be difficult to talk about using language (Tracy & Redden 2015). COVID-19 was disruptive and negatively impacted people’s lives. Using metaphor drawing as a data generation tool to access our experiences of Black women academics in a relatively safe, reflexive manner may contribute to their self-care and healing (Jones, Davis & Gaskin-Cole 2023).

In our workshop, the prompt for the metaphor drawing was:

“As a Black woman academic in the academy, I see myself as  … ” Using this statement as part of your caption:

Identify an animal/insect/bird, which you feel represents you as a Black woman academic in the current higher education context in South Africa. Draw the animal (as best as you can). Below the drawing, free-write an essay/poem/song/letter outlining: (i) why you identify with the animal, (ii) how it reflects your social and academic life in the current context, (iii) how FEMDAC has influenced or supported you in your journey through academia over this period, and (iv) what further support you need to ensure success and wellbeing in the next five years.

Twenty women participated in the workshops. The participants were divided into groups of five and were provided with paper and coloured felt-tip pens. They drew with animated excitement and occasional chatter for approximately 30 minutes and wrote down their captions and reflections next to their drawings. Silence was interspersed with laughter and comments on each other’s animals.

Once the exercise had been completed, the drawings were exhibited on the walls and all participants shared their animals and reflections on their experiences with the group. These discussions/reflections were audio-recorded and later transcribed with everybody’s permission. We used thematic analysis to analyse this data set (Clarke & Braun 2013), and we provide a snapshot of what our metaphor drawings revealed.

Making sense of the world through our metaphor drawings: Findings

Individually, as participants in the workshop, we drew several animal metaphors, many of which were from environments familiar to us. These included chickens, cats, eagles and chameleons. Chilisa and Ntseane (2010) encourage a decolonisation of dominant methodologies by analysing local folklore, songs, dance and poetry to provide insight into the values, history, practices, and beliefs of formerly colonised societies. However, it was interesting to note that some of the drawings were of animals not found in South Africa, including the polar bear, camel, and others; yet participants could easily relate their experiences as Black women academics to what they knew about these animals.

The meanings and interpretations that the participants associated with the animals they drew reflected very personal experiences and feelings that were unique to each participant. Two broad themes arose from these metaphor drawings that the participants generated in the workshop: the first theme demonstrated vulnerability, marginalisation and trauma, while the second can be categorised as strength, agency and resistance. We use two drawings to illustrate each of these two broad themes.

Theme 1: Vulnerability, marginalisation and trauma

In the section below we use two examples to illustrate how the participants used metaphor drawings to communicate the gendered impacts of COVID-19 and other factors related to the COVID-19 crisis.

Example 1. Thabile’s³ metaphor drawing: I’m a bird with no wings

As a Black woman academic, Thabile felt like a “bird with no wings”, especially during the COVID-19 period at her institution. She felt incapacitated, stifled, unseen, and unsupported at her institution – “wants to fly but can’t fly”. A bird without wings cannot fly and is isolated from other birds, a feeling strongly expressed by this participant during the discussion and sharing of drawings. She explained:

A bird, just, it's a cute little yellow bird. Yes, it's yellow. I had the option of using orange because yellow wasn't bright enough. But I felt like during this COVID, I felt like a bird losing its colour. Like it's not as bright as it can be. And it's also like a bird with no wings. Like it keeps wanting to fly, but it's dealing with little things over here – feeling a little bit like a chicken, but it knows it's a bird and it knows it can be an eagle … I identified a lot with what you shared … Just I know that there's so much more to me than administration and putting out fires and oh yes, I will.

And all these little things … Why were you not in class again? You're gonna fail. But now when you fail, it's university will say why did your student fail? But I was there, all of those things. And I find that cause a bird has a soft heart. I don't know, I don't know if that's like … I felt like a bird has a soft heart, and I think I do that a lot. I get emotionally involved with things even when I'm not supposed to get emotionally involved … All of that during COVID has just been getting involved too much and then losing focus on things … the bigger picture of the other things that are supposed to be a part of the thing.

While Thabile felt trapped by these competing demands, she also recognised her own agency and had a vision for a better future for herself:

… I think for the next five years, this bird needs to develop some wings. I see myself growing as a creative, as an academic. Just part of the goal is I want to publish at least one paper per semester for the next foreseeable couple of years.

As a Black woman academic, Ella sees herself as an eagle, albeit a temporarily injured by COVID-19 one. She explained that her mother always called her an eagle because of the “size of my ambition”. While she felt ‘injured’, she also acknowledged her own strengths and ambitions. She elaborated:

Let me start by saying, I am excited. You gave me permission to say I see myself as an eagle. I am an injured eagle. So how has COVID changed me? COVID has made me feel very injured as an eagle. Why did I choose this animal? My mommy always called me an eagle. Yes. And when the children at school by me cry, then she said, and they are all the chickens.

And I also relate to the eagle for the size of my ambition. I've never considered myself ambitious through primary school, high school, university. But when I started working, someone said you're quite ambitious. And for the first time, I considered maybe I am. And maybe this thing, I think as a Christian and a woman you're not allowed to have vision. I know I have a vision, I often see the bigger picture, which means I often struggle with the details and getting things done. But I often have the vision and so I feel injured or I feel wounded by COVID, because I had COVID myself. And it was a very scary experience to feel hurt or wounded by my colleagues and also my students. And at the end of 2021, I really felt burnt out. And for the first three months of this year, I've also, I've been struggling to come back and I'm looking at this eagle with this bandage thinking, can I still fly? Is this academia thing really what I want to do? Should I maybe change my career? So that's how wounded I've been feeling.

But amongst that, at the end of 2019 I completed my PhD. I published two articles, and the third one is in review. I got a lot of positive feedback from students. I think that a lot of the feedback was that they felt heard. They felt seen … And then the top student for [the year] recognised me as the lecturer who made the biggest difference. So that was big for me in a year in a time when you felt like there's no recognition for anything and you're just surviving. That was very special.

Yeah. So, this eagle … how many of you have seen The Next Karate Kid, where she's standing with a hawk on her arm and she takes off the bandage and the hawk must fly. So, I'm in that process. I still need to set off, but in the next five years, I wanna be part of a big project with my students and that's making a difference. That’s producing publications and theses.

As the narrative indicates, Ella (and many of the women in FEMDAC) was not just vulnerable and traumatised by the negative experiences of COVID-19 and other social and institutional factors. While some of her colleagues and students sometimes hurt or wounded her, others provided support (for example, her FEMDAC colleagues and other students). She drew on this support to challenge and find strategies to address the many issues she identifies in her drawing and narrative to achieve success in her career.

Example 2. Ella’s metaphor drawing: I’m an injured eagle

From this theme, while the metaphor drawings communicate the women’s vulnerability, marginalisation and woundedness or trauma, the narratives also communicate agency and acknowledgement of the women’s capacity for success. Despite their overwhelming feelings of helplessness or hopelessness which they all expressed, many of them were also adamant about their agency and capacity to draw on their own and each other’s strength and to challenge the barriers to their own and each other’s success. We discuss the second theme below.

Example 2. Mosele’s metaphor drawing: I see myself as an elephant

Theme 2: Strength, agency and resistance

Example 1. Norma’s metaphor drawing: I’m just a small chick aspiring to be a big chicken

Norma joined FEMDAC as an early-career academic who saw herself as a the “small chicken aspiring to be a big chicken” (a full professor) one day. She explains:

I just thought about how the chicken is always busy, like the business and it felt like during that time of COVID it was extra busy. Academia is chaotic, it's always busy, but the business of it was worsening. I felt during the COVID time one was obviously impacted by other things as well … 

What strategies did she use to cope when things got difficult in her life as a woman academic? She elaborates:

Most of us had to juggle between doing home-schooling, working full-time. My mom got ill and then I had to take over that role of being the carer. She's now staying with me. And so, all those things it was just extra busy. And there was just too much change … But also, in that business, I think I'm a person who tries very much to strategise as well in terms of how do I then go about getting done what needs to get done.

Just having therapy space as well was quite a good enabler or a success for me. Just having a psychologist that was always available if you need to vent and all that was a good resource for me. The other success is that I learned to put boundaries. So always making sure that I don't take on more than I can actually do, because that makes me very much overwhelmed because I always worry about not delivering what I need to deliver … and I submitted [an application] for this year … submitted for [promotion to] Associate Professor … 

In a previous workshop, Mosele had initially described herself as a sheep, but she explained the change as follows:

I happened to chat to my daughter after that and she said, “You're not a sheep, you're an elephant”. And she explained why. Then I thought, yeah maybe I have changed. I'm an elephant – it's steady, but emotionally I can be bold but shy at the same time. But the biggest reason I chose it is that with COVID there was a lot going on and everything had to be tough as an elephant’s skin. But I had to be tough as an elephant both academically and for my children.

In the next five years I want to publish like crazy and apply to be a Senior Lecturer. And hopefully by the end of the five years have submitted [an application for promotion] to be an Associate Professor, obtain a grant and a project with my niche being established.

As her drawing suggests, Mosele did not want to be tough only for her children, she also wanted to be tough for herself and for her academic career.

Notably, from this theme, the metaphors seem to communicate the need to adopt coping strategies and to learn new skills and attitudes in and around the HEI as a black woman and as an academic. The women felt the need to be strong for their own families (mostly their children and other family members, especially during the COVID-!9 crisis), but also for themselves in the context of the ever-changing and competing demands on academics. Some needed to learn new skills or to adapt (for example, from being a sheep in character to being an elephant) if they hoped to survive and thrive in the new academic environment.

Discussion

How do Black women academics position themselves in the higher education system and in their institutions? How did this play out in the context of COVID-19 and other emergencies in South African universities? This article focuses on the use of PVM as decolonial feminist praxis in the project Feminist Decoloniality as Care (FEMDAC). It is a CoP that involves Black women academics from three public HEIs in South Africa and two in the USA. FEMDAC, a CoP or sistah circle involving a group of self-identified Black women academics (Jones, Davis & Gaskin-Cole 2023) foregrounds the importance of decolonial feminism (Lugones 2010), care (Tronto 1993) and support as an act of resistance and disruption of the dominant individualism and competition in most of our universities (Walsh 2018).

Care is deeply embedded in our CoP or sistah circles as care involves, according to Tronto (1993), attentiveness to a need, responsibility to respond to needs, having caring competence, and responsiveness to needs. Throughout the COVID-19 years and beyond our focus has been on nurturing strong social and academic friendships and on supporting FEMDAC members to understand and navigate the challenging pathways to academic success in the higher education system. Central to our efforts and key to our decolonial feminist praxis (Walsh 2018) has been our use of PVM, including drawing as a generative method. For example, using metaphor drawing together we co-generated knowledge, shared and challenged each other’s understandings of the issues (Mitchell, de Lange & Moletsane 2017), and used these insights to contest policies, legacies and practices that act as barriers to our academic success as academics in our HEIs.

Decolonial feminist praxis also meant that we generated contextual knowledge and produced counter-narratives that highlight black women’s strength, agency and resilience, as opposed to highlighting only vulnerabilities. While the animal metaphors we drew and reflected on tell stories of vulnerability, marginalisation and social and academic trauma for many of the FEMDAC women, they also tell of strength, agency, survival, resistance and success for many.

As Black women, drawing on feminist decolonial praxis and care and the values of Ubuntu that most of the women repeatedly referred to during our workshops, the drawings and narratives communicated characteristics such as adaptability, hard work, perseverance, determination and strength as key to surviving an academic career and succeeding. In addition, true to our feminist decoloniality as care and relational values in the project, and drawing on the teachings of Ubuntu, many of the women’s metaphor drawings prioritised values such as friendship and kinship, collaboration, networking, standing with, relying on others, and supporting each other to succeed rather than competition.

Finally, methodologically and pedagogically, metaphor drawing as feminist decolonial praxis for us in this FEMDAC project and PVM generally were generative as a feminist decolonial tool for inquiry (reflection) on, for example, the COVID-19 crisis and its gendered impacts on Black women academics, for representation, and for taking action (Mitchell, de Lange & Moletsane 2017). This is because participatory research, including PVM, is “premised upon the claim that democratic participation in knowledge production can enable otherwise marginalised people to exercise greater voice and agency, and work to transform social and power relations in the process” (Gaventa & Cornwall 2006, p. 122). PVM deliberately positions participants as knowledge producers, an emphasis that Chilisa (2012) foregrounds as key to decolonising methods.

In FEMDAC, as facilitators and researchers, we regarded all FEMDAC members as co-researchers and as such we co-generated all the data (visual, textual, etc.) together in our workshops and it belongs to all members. In line with the principles of feminist decoloniality as care, participatory methods such as metaphor drawing provided us with a space and tools for our voices to be heard, and for our social and academic dialogue about issues affecting us. Using these tools in our workshops promoted collaboration, reflexivity and the significance of friendship and kinship (informed by principles of Ubuntu). It is these values and tools that we believe made PVM generally, and metaphor drawing in particular, a decolonial feminist praxis in this workshop and in the FEMDAC project.

Conclusion

Demonstrating that African decolonial feminist care can be embodied in research values and methodologies, this article draws together two strands: African decoloniality as care and PVM as decolonial praxis. Care is relational, ethical and political, and deeply contextual. Black women academics remain underrepresented, and face ongoing structural racism and sexism in academic institutions in South Africa and globally.

By engaging participants as knowledge producers in metaphor drawing workshops and the FEMDAC project as a whole, a caring CoP imbuing academic friendship and kinship, resonant with sistah circles, evolved. The enjoyable and social nature of PVM and its ability to engage participants as knowledge producers enabled their ownership of the knowledge generation process, a key feature of decolonial methodologies.

While the women experienced deep vulnerabilities during the COVID-19 crisis, a finding shared by previous studies, the metaphor drawings they shared also elicited strengths and resistance among them. This finding is key, as it highlights the potential of metaphor drawing to produce counter-knowledges and counter-practices that may be shared collectively with women in the project and beyond to inform higher education practices and policy.

Moreover, counter-knowledges that focus on both vulnerabilities and strengths resist pathologising, colonial accounts of women’s experience. This constitutes both caring and democratising research, central to the knowledge project of PVM and the feminist and decolonising projects in the higher education system.

Acknowledgement

The project ‘Neoliberalism, Gender and Curriculum Transformation in Higher Education: Feminist Decoloniality as Care’ (FEMDAC) is funded by a grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation (New York) (Grant Number: G-1807-06023).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Relebohile Moletsane

RELEBOHILE MOLETSANE is Professor and the JL Dube Chair in Rural Education at the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her current research interests include rurality, gender transformation, and participatory visual methodology as transformative feminist praxis. Moletsane is Co-Principal Investigator (with Reitumetse Mabokela, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA) of the project ‘Neoliberalism, Gender and Curriculum Transformation in Higher Education: Feminist Decoloniality as Care’ (FEMDAC). She is co-author, with Claudia Mitchell and Naydene de Lange, of the 2017 book Participatory Visual Methodologies: Social Change through Community and Policy Dialogue, published by SAGE. Email: [email protected]

Ronelle Carolissen

RONELLE CAROLISSEN is a clinical psychologist and full Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is a National Research Foundation-rated researcher. Her research expertise and publications explore feminist decolonial pedagogies and critical community psychology perspectives on equity in general, and youth citizenship in higher education contexts. She is a Fulbright research scholar alumnus (2021–2022) and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. Email: [email protected]

Saajidha Sader

SAAJIDHA SADER, who identifies as a decolonial feminist activist scholar, is a lecturer in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her activism, teaching and research focus on decoloniality, social justice and education broadly and more specifically on decoloniality, gender, scholar activism and higher education. She is a founding member of the International Network on Gender, Social Justice and Praxis (commonly referred to as The Network), which is based at the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE), University of Newcastle, Australia. The Network includes founding members from South Africa, Ghana, Sudan, the USA and Australia. Email: [email protected]

Nonhlanhla Mthiyane

NONHLANHLA MTHIYANE is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the School of Education at Durban University of Technology, South Africa. She received her Master of Science in Education from SUNY College at Buffalo, and her PhD in Science Education from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. A recipient of the Spencer Foundation Fellowship and the NRF/NSF award, Nonhlanhla’s career started as a Biology teacher and spans secondary school, college of education and university. She is passionate about teacher education that is impactful and transformative, and that contributes significantly to finding solutions to societal problems. Her research interests include gender in education, teacher development, feminist methodologies and methods, and recently feminist decolonial methodologies. Her focus is on creating supportive and reflexive spaces for students and Black women academics, and in applying feminist decolonial methodologies to decolonise the curriculum, including research. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 The authors of this article are the research team members based at the three public HEIs in South Africa (the rest of the transnational members of the team are based at the two institutions in the USA). We wish to thank them and the rest of the members for their support throughout the COVID-19 crisis and FEMDAC project.

2 As part of our decolonial feminist praxis, we never ask our participants to do tasks that we ourselves as facilitators do not participate in. Therefore, we also drew our own metaphor drawings and presented our experiences and vision for the future. Our drawings form part of the collective/co-generated data set.

3 By this time in the FEMDAC project all members were on a first-name basis, but in this article we use pseudonyms.