"Sustainability is based on the faith we have towards the work that we are doing": The conditions of academic citizenry in South Africa and India

This paper reflects on a collaborative study which explored academic citizenry in the post-colonial contexts of South Africa and India. We conducted a mixed-method study of academics’ experiences of agency, positioning and participation within universities, to comprehend the conditions of possibility for their shaping of the trans/formation of higher education. While participants’ narratives revealed heterogeneous experiences and understandings, from passivity to ignorance and activism, what was disconcerting was what emerged about the larger conditions of their formation as citizens within boundaries and borderlands of the academy. Imaginaries to effect change seemed dormant or suppressed in India, and battle fatigued in South Africa. As authors, we reflection on how this project made visible the intractable problematics of our ‘work’ within Higher Education Studies, Women’s Studies and Academic Development, and the related im-possibility for decolonising the hidden meso-curriculum.