A significant amount of literature on the student movement in South Africa is characterised by two limitations. Firstly, a significant amount of this literature is found in un-academic and non-peer-reviewed sources, such as social media, online newspapers, blog posts and other platforms. Secondly, some of this literature is characterised by an absence of theory in offering us critical analysis of the emergent conditions of the student movement as a phenomenon in South African higher education (SAHE). In this article, we respond to the above gaps by contributing to the scholarly development and critical analysis of the student movement in SAHE. In order to respond to the above two gaps, we firstly provide a brief historical and contextual environment that has contributed to the emergence of the student movement phenomenon in SAHE. Secondly, we introduce Nancy Fraser's social justice perspective, in offering us the theoretical and conceptual tools we need to look at the struggles and challenges that confront student movements, focusing in particular on the challenges that frustrate them in relating and interacting as peers on an equal footing in society. Using Fraser's social justice framework to look at the #MustFall movements will allow us to better understand them as complex phenomena in SAHE and allow us to properly understand their emergence.

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In this article we examine the ambiguous role that social capital plays in first generation Black working class South African students' negotiation of entry into an elite higher education institutional environment. First generation student experiences have a particular relevance in South Africa where student enrolment increased by 193 000 between 1993 and 2004, with many of the new entrants first-generation students. South African research on first-generation working class Black students has focused on the low proportion of these students who reach university at all and among those who do enter university, the significant number who perform poorly or drop out before completing their degrees. The role played by social capital (social networks, close friends, associations, clubs and other affiliations) in these students' experiences of negotiating their entry into university has been little explored. Using a combination of in-depth interviews, observation and hierarchical mapping with 28 participants at one historically white South African university, we exam here how social networks play a significant role in providing much-needed support to first generation Black working class students as they negotiate entry into the alienating terrain of a historically white university. The article argues however that when social capital networks are closed, tightly policed and inward looking, consisting only of individuals from similar backgrounds, such networks can serve to perpetuate disadvantage. In this context, the role of "brokers" -trusted individuals who are able to act as bridges to wider, more information-and resource-rich networks -becomes critical.able to connect first generation students with other resourceful and richer networks and connections that could help them negotiate their marginality at university. "Brokers" can help overcome the constraints of closed networks of disadvantage which are limited in the quantity and nature of capital that they can offer their members.

Post the 2015-2016 student movement calling for higher education transformation and decolonisation, institutions of higher learning in South Africa have continued to grapple with how to respond to these ethical and imperative demands. These challenges include the need to decolonise and Africanise curricula; diversity; foregrounding knowledge as an object of study. Further, responding to what Keet (2014) terms as the 'plastic knowledges' in the transformations and stagnations in the Humanities; challenging and deconstructing alienating institutional culture(s)particularly in historically white higher education institutions; the often forgotten and marginalised experiences of queer, transgendered, students and staff. One of the disciplines that has come under intensive scrutiny has been Political Science, being accused of being 'irrelevant' and teaching 'dead white men' with no epistemic connection to our local context. In this article, I attempt to respond to the above-mentioned critiques. I rely on Gramsci's notion of the organic crisis and Quijano's epistemic disobedience to bring them together in firstly, making sense of the nature of the crisis in South African higher education curriculum in general and Political Science in particular. And secondly, as both theoretical and empirical tools of de-linking the Political Science curriculum from coloniality and making curricula more transformative, socially just and inclusive. I argue that for Political Science to reclaim its relevance in an increasingly transdisciplinary world, it is necessary for us to not only know and understand the disciplinary crisis that confronts the discipline, but it is also necessary for us to begin to propose some of the epistemic solutions that can Mlamuli Nkosingphile Hlatshwayo 66 respond to the crisis that Political Science is facing. I employ epistemic disobedience to reclaim and re-centre African Philosophy, in particular, ethnophilosophy and nationalist-ideological philosophyas an attempt at making Political Science relevant to both the African experience(s) and to the broader global community.