In the national universities of South Africa, various events during the past years indicate that students suffer tremendously under different kinds of oppression. It is widely acknowledged that students from poor, rural geographical areas find the university space as alienating and not speaking to their life worlds. In this qualitative paper, I respond to Fataar’s (2019) idea of the “misrecognised” university student in the South African context. Fataar’s (2019) focus of student agency in the context of Africa is on the students’ movement, space, scale and the body in trying to account for how students transact their educational lives. I attempt to add on the historical, structural, affective and post-human complexity of students in the context of South African universities.

The university sphere is rapidly changing and adapting to the demands and challenges of the current era. At present, while we are gradually moving out of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, students and academics at universities must respond to these rapid changing environments. Fataar & Norodien-Fataar (2021) concurred with the work of Cope and Kalantzis (2017), which provides a productive schema for developing a digital learning ecology in universities. This learning ecosystem refers to a “complex interaction of human, textual, discursive, and spatial dynamics … which take on a coherent, systemic form” (Fataar and Norodien-Fataar, 2021: 162). Academics must rethink pedagogical approaches to accommodate changes in learning spaces and relations, and in how they will engage with learning mediation and assessment practices (Fataar and Norodien-Fataar, 2021) to stimulate knowledge acquisition and critical engagement with the knowledge possessed by students. The concern of this paper is on students who are gaining access to universities after imperatives of democratization in the country.

In post-apartheid South Africa, youth in Black communities were often described in terms of their marginalization and labels of being disadvantaged. Previous research, such as the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 2003), has shown consensus in that student´ socio-economic family background significantly influences academic success. On the contrary, recent post‑structuralist theorists engage in the complex interplay of structure and agency (Kapp et al., 2014) in determining students’ academic success. In this regard, Thomson (2009) claimed that the lives of individuals are both constrained and agentic. In this sense, the concept of agency is comprehended as an individual’s capacity to make conscious choices and to act and improvise in response to particular situations (Holland et al., 1998). Individuals will act and interact within their context to gain the needed resources in their attempts at self-formation.

My focus on students coming from historically disadvantaged communities aims to contribute to ongoing debates about social justice for humans/students in the university sector. I argue that if institutional practices recognize, embrace and align with students´ agency, resilience and adaption, an institutional platform could possibly engage students in their intellectual becoming. In this paper, I am guided by two questions: 1) How can students from historically disadvantaged communities use their critical horizontal knowledges to connect with disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge of the university to enhance critical specialized consciousness in the becoming of ethical humans? and: 2) How can an African theorization of student agency form the basis to consciously reframe the core institutional function of the university? In responding to these questions, I locate my arguments in African-student agency, using literature by African scholars to gain an understanding of the African concept of student agency.

The study used fifteen participants chosen through purposeful sampling and snowballing from two universities and one university of technology. All the selected participants come from historically disadvantaged areas from different provinces in South Africa. I used the analysis of two survey instruments: an autobiographical reflection/writing and a semi-structured interview. The autobiographical writing was used to provide recollections of the memory of who the students are, but also to give a sense and meaning of their university experiences. The semi-structured interview provided an inter-subjective relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee to effect these students´ possibilities of agency. The paper employed these methods to gain an understanding of how university students navigate their way through university and how they foresee their future in a country such as South Africa. Of particular importance is the critical horizontal knowledges of students coming from historically disadvantaged communities and the critical specialized consciousness or African-student agency which enable students to mediate educational pathways in order to achieve university success. Through employing the concepts of the social theory of Bourdieu and work from mainly African scholars, I aim to contribute to an African theorization of student agency in reframing the core institutional function of the university. The data collected were analysed through the model suggested by Henning (2004). As suggested by the latter author, I identified the constructs, thematic ideas and coded schemes, and captured the recurring or common themes in order to offer a comprehensive understanding of the critical specialized consciousness or African-student agency of the participants. In the study rigour was obtained through different participant sources coming from different places in the country to attain an in-depth understanding of African student agency.

The student’s transversal or empowering practices fill the gap between horizontal engagement and the formal academic structures of the university. In this way, students use their critical horizontal knowledges as a steppingstone to access the cultural capital embodied in the formal structures of the university. Universities where students live and learn thus become spaces of understanding resistance as a site of possibility and human agency. Students from historically disadvantaged communities bring accumulated transversal practices with them into the university space, redefine it and use it in various forms. When universities opt to acknowledge the misrecognised student as an ethical human being who is self-determined, full of aspirations and actively grow their learning pursuits and capacities, then the university could be in a better position to reframe their core institutional function. Reframing the core function of the university to better align with student bodies, their knowledges, competencies and contacts possessed could support students from historically disadvantaged communities to accomplish individual and communal, and present and future strives.

Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2003). Systems of education and systems of thought. International Social Science Journal, 21(3), 338–358. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2017). E-learning ecologies: Principles of new learning and assessment. Routledge. Fataar, A. (2019). Academic conversation: From the shadows of the university’s epistemic centre – Engaging the (mis)recognition struggles of students at the post-apartheid university. Southern African Review of Education, 25(2), 22–23. https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-sare-v25-n2-a3 Fataar, A., & Norodien-Fataar, N. (2021). Towards an e-learning ecologies approach to pedagogy in a post-Covid world. Journal of Education, (84). http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2520-9868/i84a08 Henning, E. (2004). Finding your way in qualitative research. Van Schaik. Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-06660-000 Kapp, R., Badenhorst, E., Bangeni, B., Craig, T. S., Janse van Rensburg, V., Le Roux, K., Prince, R., Pym, J., & Van Pletzen, E. (2014). Successful students’ negotiation of township schooling in contemporary South Africa. Perspectives in Education, 32(3), 50−61. Thomson, R. (2009). Unfolding lives: Youth, gender and change. Polity Press.