Re(image)ining: What may Visual University Studies bring to Critical University Studies in Africa

In this presentation, I ask you to think with me about the possibilities and problematics of the visual in re(image)ing the university and its citizens. Drawing from a mapping of Visual University Studies published in English-language academic articles since the cessation of the Cold War (1992-2023), the technologies of representation are probed for the ways in which they operationalise ‘the visual’ in the study of the university as source, method and methodology. Thirty-one publications on the 5 African countries (of the 54 studied internationally) will probed for what they explored about the university, its citizens and purposes in Egypt, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. These will be situated within a wider ground for discussion about re(image)ining, with discussion on (a) the thematics explored through the 206 VUS articles over each decade in the period, and (b) the interest groups served, honoured or challenged through such studies. The ways in which ‘the visual’ was positioned will also be mapped, including its operationalisation for the 11 purposes categorised from these studies, which include evaluation, depiction, discovery, care, reflection, expression, critique, commemoration, marking and probing temporalities, evocation, and creation. Tentative reflections will be shared about how these may re(image) the university of the past, present, future; and our re(image)inings as agents studying the university critically.

The questions we raise are related to the ways in which Visual University Studies may/not productively trouble praxes of technologies of presentation, politics of representation and authoring/ authorising, and repair. This would be held as part of a panel discussion with Dina Belluigi and Curwyn Mapaleng.