Samuel, Michael Anthony.Horner, Bridget Marian.2025-11-032025-11-0320202020https://hdl.handle.net/10413/24017Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.Twenty-five years into democracy, the space of South African higher education is a contested one, with conflicting meanings for students. In 2015 and 2016, student protests [#Feesmustfall and #Rhodesmustfall] swept the country, calling for equitable access to education and improved material realities and rejecting dominant knowledge production systems. What meanings then, were students deriving from higher education spaces, particularly in a context where increasing welfare expectations and responsibilities were being foisted on the sector? This study contributes to an understanding of students knowings of informal campus spaces related to food, accommodation and transport. This study deliberately focusses on students knowings, thereby giving a diverse group of undergraduate and postgraduate students the opportunity to voice their understanding of the significance of informal campus spaces. It employed spatiality, knowing and spatial justice as the lens with which to view students’ meaning-making of these informal spaces as well as collaborative and creatively inspired art based approach utilising visual methods for both data production and analysis. Co-produced photographs of students in informal spaces on campus that were meaningful were filtered through a focus group to select images that best reflected being a student in higher education in post-apartheid South Africa. These photographs were then displayed to a broader body of students at an exhibition on campus for further meaning-making. The data was analysed using critical discourse analysis, presentational analysis and the metaphor of ‘mobile’. The study suggests that students’ future aspirations for a life outside of campus are very much entangled within their past and present experience of their spatiality of higher education. Furthermore, these spatialities are entangled both within and outside of students and their freedom to act arises from an interplay of relations. Typologies of students and associated actions are proposed as abstracted conceptions of student negotiations of their spatialities on campus. The metaphor of a dandelion is used to illustrate a form of knowings that places the student not as a recipient of external influences, but as an agent of mindful actions. This celebrates students knowings as dialogical, discursive and deliberative. This research document deliberately debunks conventions in terms of layout in order to be true to the methodology, metaphor and the phenomenon. The mobile metaphor, illustrates that the phenomenon of students knowings of spatialities is constantly interacting and continually in flux, conspiring to enable, dismiss or suspend students’ freedom to aspire. This representation emphasises that the form of the thesis should not be divorced from the content, especially when adopting a visual methodological approach which encourages the reader to find new meanings in the data through their own re-readings thereof.enCC0 1.0 Universalhttp://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/Informal campus spaces.Students' knowledge.Spatiality of higher education.Spatialities on campus.Students knowings of spatialities.Thesis