No abstract

While exploring the everyday experiences of Tonga youth, this paper draws on a participatory graffiti-on-board project in Binga, a rural community in Zimbabwe. Focus is placed on what shapes and drives youth aspirations in precarious contexts marked by unemployment and poverty. Using graffiti to create participatory and artistic engagements, the research aims to stretch the limited boundaries of social and political space available to the youth for discussing issues that concern their development pathways and livelihoods. The article presents everyday narratives that impact on Tonga youths' aspirations, endeavouring to create a space where they can visualise their prospective futures. Additionally, exhibition spaces are seen as sites for the construction of a collective voice and political capabilities for the youth. We argue that aspirations among disadvantaged youth evidence the broader geopolitical conflict that exists in marginalised communities in Southern Africa. A lack of spaces to construct political voice among the youth curtails their capabilities and agency to choose from existing development opportunities in an uncertain future. We discuss the potential role of participatory art in relation to this in providing spaces for political voice, unsettling established power dynamics and developing a collective, unified voice that might influence governance processes in fragile contexts.

In a context where “African identity” is a category that is often homogenised across a vast and diverse continent and beyond, there is a need to interrogate and better understand the concept. The prevalence of migration and cultural exchange in our interconnected world makes it imperative to look beyond race and space as a way of understanding identity, speaking both to sameness and difference. Acknowledging the complexities and the contested nature of identities and in particular, African identity/identities, this paper argues against an essentialised approach to identities in a global context. It explores and builds on arguments for plural identities, mobilising concepts of heterogeneity and plurality, agency and public deliberation from the Capability Approach in order to advance a way of understanding and negotiating identities that allows for a reasoned, flexible and inclusive approach. The Capability Approach is proposed as a generative normative framework which provides an important way to explain and negotiate identities in Africa based on human development grounded in social justice. In doing so, the paper acknowledges an understanding of identity as multifaceted and fluid, and when informed by human development and capabilities, is able to strengthen values like tolerance and accommodation of the “other” on the basis of recognition, respect and equality. I focus on the freedoms, opportunities and choices available for individuals to deliberate on the type of identities or African identities that they value on the assumption that identity is an object of reasoned choice, even though subject to constraints, and that more than oneidentity choice is possible.

The paper builds on and contributes to literature in citizenship education studies in higher education. Many studies in this field have explored the history, development and implementation of various forms of citizenship formation as an advancement of social justice. However, little has been written on how the formation of critical democratic citizens 2 links with the notion of sustainable learning environments and how it relates to social justice. Studies by McKinney (2007);Waghid (2007;), Lange (2012; and Leibowitz, Swartz, Bozalek, Carolissen, Nicholls &Rohleder(2012) are among those on citizen formation in the South African higher education context. Thisconceptual paper argues that the formation of critical democratic citizens through higher education relates not only to social justice, but also to the advancement of sustainable learning environments (SLEs) beyond physical spaces. The paper explores the normative value of a democratic education theory, Marion Young's (1990) theory of justice and the politics of difference, and human development principles in advancing citizenship education. These foster both sustainable learning environments and social justice. A democratic education theory lays the foundation for an inclusive and deliberative form of education, while a theory of justice and politics of difference advances better justice and an environment that is non-oppressive. Human development principles set the tone for a sustainable human development, which becomes a framework through which asustainable learning environment is built in pursuit of social justice. Drawing on a Capabilities Approach framework and the philosophy of Ubuntu, with emphasis on substantive freedoms, opportunities, and the thriving of the common good, the paper illustrates how citizenship education advances a conception of sustainable learning environments and social justices not necessarily limited to physical spaces, distributive justice or economic motives, but inclusive of institutional arrangements, policy issues and relational justice.