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This paper explores shifts in students' writer identities in a tumultuous South African higher education context. Within the Humanities Extended Curriculum Programme, our transformation agenda triggers tensions between assimilationist and disruptive approaches to teaching writing. On our course, attempts are made to ease student's acquisition of discipline-specific writing norms, while encouraging them to draw on their brought-along resources, a negotiation causing discomfort. We invite such discomfort as productive, and ask: How do discomforting spaces inflect on our understanding of writing and writer identities? We invite students to write reflectively about how the course may or may not have influenced their identities and worldviews. Drawing on Foucault, we see the reflective essay as confessional writing, and an enactment of our writing pedagogies in discomforting spaces. We argue that in such spaces, writing can create possibilities for change, particularly as students adopt an ethical stand in their writing, calling us to reconceptualise writer identities. We apply Biko's (2017) 'envisioned self' concept to capture the ethical dimension in students' writing, by introducing a new layer of Clark and Ivanic's (1997) clover model of writer identity. Our paper contributes conceptually to existing views of writer identities, with implications for writing pedagogies in the current context.

The accurate modelling and simulation of vehicle dynamics is a fundamental prerequisite for the design and experimental flight testing of aerospace vehicles. In the case of high-altitude supersonic sounding rockets, it is critically important to produce realistic trajectory predictions in a representative range of operational and environmental conditions as well as to produce reliable probability distributions of terminal locations. This article proposes a methodology to develop high-fidelity flight dynamics models that accurately capture aeroelastic, turbulence, atmospheric and other effects relevant to sounding rockets. The significance of establishing a high-fidelity model and of addressing such a problem in the context of developing a digital twin are sed upfront, together with the key tools utilised in the analysis. In addition to state-of-the-art computational methods to determine the aerodynamic forces, moments and mass changes in various flight regimes (including parachute release), a detailed methodology for incorporating the dynamic aeroelastic response of the rocket is presented. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated through a simulation case study, which utilises data from an existing rocket prototype. Results corroborate the correct implementation of the proposed algorithms and provide foundations for future research on virtual sensing and digital twin for autonomous navigation and guidance.

This December issue of Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning marks a significant moment in the history of our educational institutions, our country, and indeed the world, as humanity as a whole continues to confront the devastation wreaked in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.The pandemic has brought out the best in some, but also the worst in others. It has forced us to look inward, to become quiet and more thoughtful about what really matters and why it should matter in a world turned upside down. Covid-19 has inspired us to broaden our frames of reference on a global scale, amassing strengthened resilience, and renewed conviction in the fight against suffering and injustice.At the same time, the pandemic has also focused our concerns on the local, on the communities we inhabit, and on those privileges we (hopefully) no longer take for granted.Covid-19 has forced us, in the very least, to acknowledge those communities differentiated by a lack of resources and historical invisibility. As a result of these multiple foci, our movements have not necessarily taken us forward but have instead become schizophrenic at times. We often found ourselves moving with clear direction, but the terrain has been unpredictable.