Working Papers

SARiHE Working Paper 1 – Rurality and Education (PDF, 385 kB) 

This working paper is a non-exhaustive survey of research on rurality. It covers key themes in order to arrive at working assumptions for an understanding of rurality to inform the SARiHE research project. It contains a broad focus on rurality and education, as it is discussed in the international literature, as well as a specific focus on South Africa, as this is the setting in which the SARiHE study is located. Although the focus is on education, many of the observations in the literature on rurality and politics, society and social services, influence and in some cases mirror what occurs with regard to education. Thus, it covers a slightly wider ambit. The discussion is on rural general education, i.e. schooling, as well as higher education, partly because much of the theorising on rurality occurs in relation to general education, and partly because a student’s experiences of general education will influence their experience of higher education.

SARiHE Working Paper 2 – Practices, transitions and negotiations to new figured worlds: Southern African rural students in higher education (PDF, 343 kB)

This working paper aims to set out some of the key theoretical concepts that frame the investigations that the SARiHE project is undertaking and to make sense of lived experiences of students at the heart of the study. It is not exhaustive and will develop over time as the project unfolds. At the time of writing (August 2018), this paper is focused on the frameworks that underpinned the research questions and the initial proposal and follows on from Working Paper No 1 (Leibowitz 2017) that expanded on our understanding of rurality.

SARiHE Working Paper 3 – Southern African Rurality in Higher Education: Towards a participatory and decolonising methodology

This paper aims to set out the influences that guided the methodology adopted in the SARiHE research project, its key principles and methods that contributed to our approach. The research has investigated how students from rural areas in Southern Africa negotiate the transition to higher education foregrounding the social and cultural capital they bring, how they are shaped by their home, school and community and what the experience of being at university has involved.