Students as Producers, Not Consumers?

• Published date: 23 September 2022
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intecritdivestud.4.2.0081
• Pages: 81-95
• Date: 23 September 2022
• Author: Jess Auerbach
• Subject Matter: digital capabilities,higher education,transformation,learning futures,literacies

Students as Producers, Not Consumers?

Digital Capabilities, Higher Education Transformation

and the Futures of Learning in Southern Africa

Jess Auerbach

Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town

ABSTRACT

This paper reects on lessons learned about contemporary teaching at two very

different universities located in Mauritius and South Africa. Thinking with digital

capabilities as a crucial dimension of transformation, it traces the evolution of a

series of commitments to pedagogy rst written up in a Conversation article in 2017,

which emphasised the need for undergraduate students to actively contribute to

global discourses through both academic and non-academic knowledge production.

This paper reects on insights gained through assignments based on knowledge

production, which included social media interactions, academic writing practice and

contributions to an ongoing project entitled the Archive of Kindness. These insights

call for the development of new curricula-based interventions pertaining to digital

capabilities. The paper elaborates upon these digital literacies in light of Sushona

Zuboff’s work on the paradigm of surveillance capitalism, expanding this to explore

its implications for students located in the global south. It develops the notion of

“digital capabilities” as a missing component of transformational discourse and

practice, arguing that, without the conscious development of digital capabilities,

ontological

transformation will be critically stymied.

KEYWORDS

digital capabilities, higher education, transformation, learning futures, literacies

Introduction: How Do We Know?

In Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code (Benjamin, 2019) digital

sociologist Ruha Benjamin describes a learning, thinking, monitoring and living landscape

that is increasingly shaped by technologies that are neither well-understood by the vast

majority of people, nor appropriately regulated either domestically or globally. These tech-

nologies, Benjamin demonstrates, layer upon existing paradigms of power and control to

increase, not lessen, the surveillance of bodies in differentiated ways that protect the eco-

nomic interests of traditional (largely white, largely global-north) minorities at the expense

DOI:10.13169/INTECRIT DIVESTUD.4.2.0081