ABSTRACT
Nancy Fraser’s theorising of social justice has in a time of rising educational inequality is relevant in how it illustrates how colonialism, apartheid, neoliberalism and edu-capitalism work together to perpetuate and indeed exacerbate social and economic inequality. Fraser’s focus on three interconnected issues of redistribution, recognition and representation facilitates analysis of how inequality in higher education works at the level of the global, the national and the institutional levels. Highly disadvantaged universities in South Africa are misframed because limited to more affirmative rather than transformative responses to student protests due to the long-term historical and differentiated higher education sector within South Africa exacerbated by global ranking systems. The notion of participatory parity at each level argues that representation is inadequate unless all voices are able to influence decision-making. Fraser’s work suggests a transformative politics of higher education can develop through transnational movements such as those drawing on neo-Marxism and posthumanism who are working with Indigenous scholars to develop transformative agendas which foreground the environment and create social protections.
