On Friday 4 October 2024, NOG member Francois Jonker will defend his PhD project ‘Towards Response-able Arts-based Practices in Higher Education’.

Jonker’s dissertation aims to contribute to the proliferation of scholarship concerned with the challenging of normative traditions within higher education by foregrounding a methodological interest in ‘how else’ to do higher education research, pedagogy and assessment. Creatively investigating how to do academia differently, this thesis challenges the conception of learning as a pre-figured logical progression of predetermined outcomes, the centring of the individual as the unitary subject of learning, as well as the commonplace assumption that language has the ability to capture meaning in its expansive fullness. These critical educational concerns are considered from the position of a private higher education institution, the Cape Town Creative Academy (CTCA), located in Cape Town, South Africa.

Within the context of the CTCA, this thesis brings together ‘postphilosophical’ orientations with concrete classroom and assessment scenarios in order to propose conceptual and practical reconfigurings of educational practices. As a whole, this thesis challenges normative and normalising neoliberal tendencies in higher education by paying attention to the material, affective, and processual dimensions of learning encounters.

Jonker’s  thesis argues for the central importance of ‘response-ability’—as collective practices through which ‘we’ prioritise ‘our’ mutual ability to respond and enable responsiveness. As its primary contribution, this thesis offers propositions for a deepening of embodied experimentation with response-able practices as a means with which to engage the transformability of higher education institutions and their potential to affect societal transformation.

Details PhD Defense
Date: Friday, October 4, 2024
Time: 14:15-15:15h.
Location: Hybrid. Live: Senate Hall, Utrecht University Hall, or click here to attend online.
Title: Towards Response-able Arts-based Practices in Higher Education
Supervisors: Prof. dr. Kathrin Thiele and Prof. Dr. Vivien Bozalek (University of the Western Cape, South Africa).