Reimagining Belonging: To Whom Does the University Belong?

Abstract

This article investigates the phenomenon of belonging and the lived precarity of postdoctoral research fellows (hereafter postdocs) in the South African academy. It particularly references the author's lived experience of precarity as a postdoc in two South African historically white universities (WHUs) between 2023 and 2025 using a combination of mixed methods from critical autoethnography, multiple storytelling and case studies to highlight the effects of racial oppression and challenges of belonging among postdocs in modern university educational system in the Global South. The article is framed through the theoretical lens of decolonial theory and Black existentialism. Postdoc precarity, facultyless, immaturity and postdoc invisibility are some of the common themes that are linked to the shared dimensions of the struggles of postdocs in the South African neoliberal university. As a Black postdoc, the author engages the intersection between neoliberal precarity and Black-specific experiences of postdocs and how forces of neoliberalism and colonialism combine to shape Black postdocs’ sense of belonging, identity and academic trajectories. The findings suggest that although Black postdocs experience precarity compared to postdocs of other racial backgrounds, however, their situation is distinct owing to legacies of racial oppression and colonialism.

Keywords

belonging South African universities postdoc precarity postdoc invisibility lived experience black existentialism decolonial thought

Introduction

This article calls for a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of the concept of belonging among Black postdoctoral research fellows (hereafter postdocs) in the South African academy within the context of the South African struggle for liberation in which higher education is still considered an important societal issue (Cini, 2019). Universities in South Africa, particularly historically white universities (WHUs), have been undergoing transformation and decolonisation processes in post-apartheid South Africa since the early 1990s (Hlatshwayo, 2023; Walker, 2005). The South African higher education sector has been grappling with issues of transforming itself (Badat, 1994, 2009) ranging from reconfiguring the sector, transforming the curriculum and pedagogy and introducing inclusive labour practices. One of the national priorities underpinning this transformation agenda in the South African higher education sector is the change the qualifications profile of staff in universities from the 34 percent who hold doctorates to 75 percent by 2030. The South African government deemed PhD graduates, either as staff or post-doctoral fellows, “[to] be the dominant drivers of new knowledge production within the higher education and science innovation system” (South Africa, 2011, p. 267). During the #FeesMust moment in 2015, the quest for the decolonisation of the sector gained momentum (Hlatshwayo, 2024; Le Grange, 2016; Matthews, 2019; Zondi, 2018). The calls for decolonisation included the decolonisation of knowledges and the introduction of the alternate ways of being, thinking and doing things in the academy. It was during this period that there were also targeted interventions of recruiting as many postdocs across South African universities in order to attract the next generation of scholars, in particular Black academics, deemed as central to the transformation agenda (Hlatshwayo, 2023). However, the breadth and width of the apartheid phenomenon “makes it literally impossible to attempt a comprehensive articulation of its varied and complex manifestations” (More, 2017, p. 129) in post-apartheid South African landscape. In settler societies such as South Africa, race and class converge such that “what parcels the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species” (Fanon, 1967, p. 37). Indeed, what parcels out the neoliberal South African academy is not only the question of belonging but also other added dimensions such as postdoc precarity, postdoc invisibility, immaturity and the facultyless of many postdocs. Protests have been the enduring characteristic of a South African university in post-apartheid South Africa due to the unfinished project of transforming and decolonising the higher education sector. The recent example is the #FeesMustFall movement in 2015 which engulfed universities across the country and called a free and decolonised university education system in South Africa (Chery, 2023; Chikane, 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2017; Ngcaweni & Ngcaweni, 2018). The Black-led student protests also raised a question around to whom does the university belong in the most unequal society such as South Africa given that the majority of students who cannot afford to pay high university fees come from poor black families.

Belonging in a Modern University

Black British geographer Noxolo (2017) raised her anxieties and fears about the concept of belonging in a modern university and its links to colonial exploitation and present forms of discrimination and dehumanisation. By extension, Noxolo (2017) offered an opportunity to outline whether belonging was possible from a point of view of those who were oppressed in a Euromodern hegemonic university. Her inquiry led her to the question of precisely “to whom educational institutions belong, when they were built on money gained through colonial exploitation, and crucially, whether knowledges and curricula accessed actually challenge, or in fact continue to justify, that exploitation” (Noxolo, 2017, p. 34). This article takes as its starting point the question posed by Noxolo. Belonging is a vital cog of the human condition. To “belong” largely depends on the “sociogenic conditions” (Fanon, 1967) that enable and disable social relationships. For Almarode et al. (2024), “the human condition thrives on the opportunity to bond, attach, engage, connect, and be part of a community” (p. 1). In this sense, relationships are an essential part of belonging because first and foremost, human beings are relational beings (Gordon, 2006 While belonging can be defined in geographical terms, it is much more profound than just feeling an affinity for a place, situation, or group. It also extends to whether one is valued in particular environment (Covarrubias, 2024). However, a problem with the concept of “value” emanates when attached to human beings in that it market commodifies them. It is contended here that the modern university market commodifies postdocs through requirements such as publishing in peer-reviewed publications for the university to attain high rankings and research subsidies from government (Munyaradzi, 2025). This form of value attached to postdoc fellowship contracts is not only exploitation but it also undermines the dignity and humanity of postdocs who get lowly-paid stipends as neither students or employees of the modern university (CHE, 2022). Instead of value derived from the market commodification of postdocs, what is preferred here is educator, sociologist and Black liberation activist Anna Julia Cooper's (1988) notion of “human worth”. In recent times, it is perhaps Hall (2016) who best captures the implications of neoliberal policies on postdocs in the higher education sector and what it means to be devalued through the “marketising all of social life, so that life becomes predicated upon the extraction of value” (Hall, 2016: 1004). In the study on women postdocs in a neoliberal higher education in South Africa, Hlatshwayo (2024) contends that women postdocs, in particular, have to constantly prove their worth and value to the academia (see also Magoqwana et al., 2019). In what follows, this article will first map out the theoretical and conceptual frameworks that underpin this work. Second, it will outline the methods and concepts that have been deployed in the interpretation of empirical data. Third and finally, it will engage in a discussion of the Black existential articulations of belonging and precarity and other subthemes that are added dimensions to the concept of belonging in a modern university.

Theoretical Framing: Black Existentialism and Decoloniality

The discussion in the foregoing section situates postdoc precarity on decolonial and indigenous axis. In other words, postdoc precarity in a modern university expands beyond contemporary labour practices of exploitation. This article seeks to give the reader an intimate view of the lived experiences of postdocs in the South African academy in the never-ending quest to recapture and reassert Black humanity. For Gordon (2023), Black existential philosophy “asks us to reflect on what it means to be human, to be free, and to justify thought in historical contexts of dehumanisation, colonisation and enslavement, and crises of hypocritical thought” (p. 140). It is contended here that postdocs in the neoliberal South African universities are grappling with issues of humanity and freedom in the context of the modern education system that systemically oppresses and exploits them through research fellowships predicated upon extraction of postdocs value (Hall, 2016). This work deploys Black existential philosophy coupled with decolonial thought and indigeneity as appropriate philosophical discourses that critique the oppression and exploitation of postdocs and affirms the empowerment of postdocs in the neoliberal university. These theories share similar concerns predicated on the liberation of all Black people in the world (Gordon, 2023). In the writings of W.E.B. du Bois and Frantz Fanon, there is a thoroughgoing articulation of the lived experiences of Black people and the racial and pedagogical dimensions of their discrimination, oppression and exploitation. It is posited here that Black existentialist philosophy, decolonial thought and indigeneity aim to dismantle the “Euromodern age's attempts to erect a racial pyramid from which the locus of lived experience [of postdocs] is weighed” (Chevannes, 2018, p. 14) (addition my own). Decolonial theory moves us towards understanding the plight of postdocs in a modern university and provides us with what Mignolo (2009) calls the “decolonial option” insofar as the “regeneration of life shall prevail over primacy of the production and reproduction of goods at the cost of life” (p. 161). The task of decolonial thinking, therefore, is to expose the self-serving interests of a neoliberal university with its focus mainly on the production and reproduction of research outputs at the cost of the livelihoods of the racially devalued Black postdocs. Decolonial theory places human lives of postdocs in general first rather than making claims and demands for the production of research outputs.

Methodology

The methodology applied in this article is partly embedded in the theoretical and conceptual framework; however, standard techniques of qualitative research methods such as critical autoethnography and multiple storytelling have been deployed in the interpretation of empirical data. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2017) decries the fact that “methodology has become the straitjacket that every researcher has to wear if they are to discover knowledge”. Nonetheless, critical autoethnography is applied here to analyse people's lives (Méndez, 2013), in effect, to analyse postdocs’ lived experience of precarity and belonging/nonbelonging in the South African academy. The Black postdocs’ alienation in a modern university is premised upon non-belonging in a space they are supposedly to be indigenous to it. This is not an individual question. As such, the method of multiple storytelling is deployed here to make sense of various postdocs’ lived experiences of belonging/nonbelonging and precarity across South African universities. Writer Adichie (2009) warns us about the pitfalls of telling a single story:

Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanise. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Critical autoethnography and multiple storytelling entail, at the core, the telling of personal stories and “involves a back-and-forth movement between experimenting and examining a vulnerable self and observing and revealing the broader context of that experience” (Ellis, 2007, p. 14). Both methods are central in telling the lived experiences of postdocs’ own sense of belonging/unbelonging and precarity in a neoliberal university. They are also central in doing Black existential and decolonial work because “to tell a story is to take arms against the threat of time, to resist time, or to harness time. The telling of a story preserves the teller from oblivion; the story builds the identity of the teller and the legacy which she or he leaves for the future” (Portelli, 1990, p. 59). Multiple storytelling and critical autoethnography share a ‘reciprocal, inter-animating relationship’ (Holman Jones, 2016) with what performance studies scholar Pollock describes as “living bodies of thought’ (2006). Telling one's lived experience and bringing theory to the fore is tantamount to submitting to “radical openness”

(Pathak, 2010, p. 8).

Towards Black Existential and Decolonial Articulations of Precarity and Belonging

In the neoliberal university, the postdoc lived experience continues to come under assault. Emerging from exploitation and oppression imposed on postdocs comes Black existential philosophy and decolonial thought. The works of Du Bois and Fanon are foundational texts of Black existentialism that offer us a look into the lived experiences of postdocs in a neoliberal university and their quest to assert their Black humanity. Both Black existential philosophy and decolonial thought are deployed in this article as they raise questions – in relation to Black postdocs - of the Black subject existence, precarity, oppression, human predicament, agency and empowerment (Bassey, 2007). Gordon (1997) defines Black existentialism as a set of “philosophical questions premised upon concerns of freedom, anguish, responsibility, embodied agency, sociality, and liberation” (p. 3). The Afro-Caribbean philosopher draws a distinction between Black existential philosophy and existentialism. Similarly, this article makes a distinction between the lived experiences of Black postdocs and other postdocs. Gordon (1997) posits that existentialism is historically a European phenomenon whereas Black existential philosophy is “the existential demand for recognising the situation or lived-context of Africana people's being-in-the-world” (pp. 3, 4). Being Black in the world (Manganyi, 2019) fundamentally raises questions of belonging. In what follows, five core challenges constitutive of the struggles for postdocs in the modern university are highlighted and it is hoped that they bring added dimensions to the concept of belonging.

Neurotic Contact with Whiteness, Precarity and the Struggle to Belong

My early formative years as a postdoc were nurtured in a historically white university (HWU) in Cape Town, South Africa, where there are glaring continuities of the apartheid past and the post-apartheid present. I struggled with the sense of belonging in this unfamiliar white space as my black body and my blackness became the subject of the white gaze and came directly with a neurotic contact with whiteness. Perhaps, is it because the university is located in Cape Town, a place “often referred to as the last colonial outpost in Africa”? (Chaturvedi et al., 2023, p. 1). Affinity to a place is fundamental to the concept of belonging. I deeply wondered what it is about some places and spaces that increase forms of unbelonging and precarity in a modern university. In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, where Black people are in the majority, I could not understand why whiteness continues to morph itself into “forms of habituation that masquerade as common sense, as intelligibility itself” (Yancy, 2021, p. 218). Reaching out to the postdoctoral world, I soon found myself, to borrow from Fanon, “abnormal from the slightest contact with the white world” (cited in Gordon, 2015, p. 59). It was extremely difficult for me to belong in this HWU which was contaminated with the scent of whiteness. I felt depressed and alienated. I made a radical decision to take a break from postdoctoral research. There is a way in which dwelling on liminality and living precarity produces extreme forms of unbelonging in a modern university. How can you belong in a modern university that retroactively exploits postdocs through PDRFs that diminishes their worth and human dignity? Higher education scholar Hlatshwayo has observed that Black academics in the South African academy continue to face alienation due to marginality and marginalising PDRFs that designates postdocs as “native of nowhere” (Kumalo, 2018 cited in Hlatshwayo, 2020, p. 163). Furthermore, Hlatshwayo (2025a) has described postdocs in South Africa as “ice boys” and “ice girls” of the South African academy due to their “tightrope-like nature of precarity” (Banki, 2016, p. 5). This may appear insulting; however, it is argued here that precarity and contemporary enslavement of postdocs are not ‘aberrations or radical exceptions’ (Gordon, 2019) but form part of present forms of systemic dehumanisation, oppression, discrimination and exploitation.

Homelessness, non-Belonging and Thoughts on Quitting

As neither students nor employees in South African universities (CHE, 2022), postdocs are effectively facultyless or homeless in a modern university to which they ought to belong. Part of the struggles for postdocs in a modern university concerns ambivalent feelings whether the university can be said to be a “home” for one's thoughts and ideas. These feelings of unbelonging prompt questions such as “precisely to whom educational institutions belong” (Noxolo, 2017, p. 343)? Belonging to a home is a fundamental trait of freedom (Mgibisa, 2025). Treating the university as a home to which postdocs belong might involve “trying to find one's place within a world that has systematically erased their value” (Allen et al., 2021, p. 94). According to Allen et al. (2021), there is a need to seek out positive connections that rely less on problematic contexts for belonging. It is contended here that in order to understand what is stake here, one need to understand that the knowledges and curricula assessed by postdocs in modern universities continue to justify the exploitation that enables their existence of universities through colonial exploitation in the first place (Noxolo, 2017). Without permanent university or faculty affiliation, postdocs are subjected to lowly-paid stipends and offered tax exemptions. Following Kerr (2020) that university managers prefer postdocs not to be faxed because should be taxed “(this keeps them nice and cheap)”, I affirm that the modern university uses tax exemption to justify the exploitation and oppression of postdocs in the South African academy.

To be facultyless without a permanent affiliation is akin to being homeless. However, homelessness is conceptualised here as not only limited to a physical home or physical faculty. A location “need not be a formal domicile. It could also be symbolic and epistemological” (Gordon, 2014, p. 104). Being facultyless or homeless

For myself, the question that is always running through my mind is whether I should quit academia now, or keep holding out in case one of my applications for a permanent job is eventually successful. I know from years of contact with other postdocs that I am by no means alone in facing this dilemma. From this point of view, the endless rhetoric about a postdoc being a career development opportunity sounds empty at best, or at worst deliberately misleading. ( Kerr, 2020 : np).

In time, it would become clearer to me that the problem of facultyless or homelessness that the problem of unbelonging and facultyless is not just affecting Black postdocs only.

Immaturity and the Problem of Belonging

I first registered as a postdoc in 2023 in a Cape Town-based university. At the time, it did not dawn on me that I was required to formally register as a “student”. In my self-imposed impression, I was entering the world of work and would soon enjoy employment benefits similar to those enjoyed by other university employees. After registering, I was allocated a student identification number although, paradoxically, I was neither a student nor a university employee with an employment identification number. In this position, it was impossible for me to make personal plans for the future without stable income and securing of employment, let alone considering quitting given the limited opportunities Black postdocs, in particular, face in the social world. Little did it occur to me that postdocs are treated as students who receive training and stipends from the university rather than employees who work for it? A former postdoc in various South African universities, Kerr (2020) has raised doubts about whether postdoctoral fellowships can be deemed as career development or career delay. She reflects on her postdoctoral journey and it is worth quoting her at length:

But something doesn’t add up here. How can postdoctoral fellows — who are already among the minority of PhD-holding academics, are required to conduct and publish their research, and sometimes supervise postgraduate students — still be considered as students, interns and apprentices? How can it make sense to say that they are being prepared for a future academic career when they already work actively as academics? ( Kerr, 2020 : np.)

It is extremely difficult to have any sense of belonging in a university environment that requires postdocs to conduct and publish their research and sometimes supervise postgraduate students but are still designated as students. In the above quote, Kerr (2020) is signalling the problem human immaturity in a modern university that designates postdocs into perpetual studentship or perpetual childhood. Reading Fanon, Gordon (2005) points out to be Black is never to be a man or a woman. What then it means to be a postdoc in the context of South Africa with a legacy of inequality and understanding? Based on my lived experience as a postdoc in two South African universities, I have come to the thesis that it means subjecting oneself to be collapsed into a “pathogenic reality, locked in underdevelopment, frozen, in other words, in perpetual childhood” (Gordon, 2005, p. 370). It is this kind of permanent state of immaturity that led to Hlatshwayo (2025a) to characterise postdocs as the “ice boys” and “ice girls of the higher education sector in South Africa. In responding to the question posed by Kerr (2020) on whether postdoctoral fellowships can be deemed as career development or career delay, I conclude that career advancement cannot be possible in a neoliberal South African university that denies maturity to postdocs. The problem of maturity presents postdocs with a neurotic situation and Hlatshwayo (2025b) has described it as “confusion”. Although postdocs across races face the problem of immaturity in the South African academy, the problem is particularly acute among Black postdocs who generally face limited options in life. As Macamo (2024) observes that only handful of Black people have “succeeded in freeing themselves from immaturity and continuing boldly on their way because the world built by Europeans seemed to be premised on preventing the majority from emancipating itself” (p. 32). Kerr criticised universities for taking skilled academics such as postdocs and reconstruing them as students: “This justifies exploitation in the present and it also misleads postdocs about the likelihood of that promised career actually materialising” (Kerr, 2020: np). Not-so-young postdocs such as me and many other postdocs, who are already disillusioned and exploited, have garnered a new name of being “permanent postdocs” and continue subscribing to postdoctoral fellowships that are invested in their annihilation because of limited and shrinking opportunity in the academy. The story of Anne, the not-so-young postdoc in a South African university, attests to the permanent nature of the precarious of many postdocs. Her story thus follows:

I think it is quite a challenge for older postdocs because if you look at it as a person and you are above 45 and you don’t have something permanent. In a way, I think it affects the work that you produce. Because most of the challenges that you face as an academic will be in the mind. Remember, inasmuch as you may want to act or think all is well, there are times when you think, but, well, I am 48 years [age of this interviewee] yet I don’t have solid plans for the future. I don’t have something solid that I can rely on. So that alone affects your work. (Anne cited in Hlatshwayo, 2025, p. 8).

Anne's story shows us that persistence - and not a sense belonging – is what drives her to continue as a permanent postdoc because of the limited options available to her as an older postdoc fellow. In a similar study which examined the relationship between sense of belonging and academic persistence among undergraduate students in a South African university, Mtshweni (2024) suggested that efforts to cultivate a sense of belonging among undergraduate students are warranted.

“Look a Postdoc!” Invisibility of Postdocs in the South African Academy

In the two HWU South African universities I have been a postdoc, I experienced the paradox of being visible but made invisible and of being seen but not seen. Perhaps, this is a function of being facultyless or homeless in a modern university that retroactively delegitimises postdocs as outsiders-within. Additionally, “seeing” in colonial settings is always “already mediated by certain reactionary value-creating forces” (Yancy, 2005, p. 429). The level of belonging I enjoyed in these two universities was relative to the position I occupied within the university ecosystem and the kind of value-creation the PDRF offered me. It was difficult for me to thrive in an environment that made me feel that I did not belong to it. As Almarode et al. (2024) allude, “the human condition thrives on the opportunity to bond, attach, engage, connect, and be a part of community” (p.1). It was also challenging to belong to a modern university that treated me as neither a student nor staff and as a result, I became, following Kumalo (2018), a “native from nowhere”. At times, the invisibility I experienced in these two South African universities took on a neurotic turn in the sense that it became “the paradox of invisibility by virtue of being looked at but not seen” (Gordon, 2023, p. 54). It is the kind of paradox brought to the fore by Ellison in his classic novel, Invisible Man (1952). Reflection on our world of flux, Rinne (2022) calls on us to focus on surfacing what is invisible, “what's on the edges and beyond mainstream, where new value and insights are to be found” (p. 57). Rinne's insight is based on the concept of Sawubona, an isiZulu salutary phrase which roughly translates as “I see you”. I suggested elsewhere that Sawubona is not just a mere salutation but a power philosophical anthropological concept located within the Nguni tradition and Black thought (Mgibisa, 2025). Gordon (2018) argues that one of the central problems of Black thought is Euromodernity's “systematic presupposition of legitimate black invisibility and bondage” (p. 30). For Maldonado-Torres (2007), at the core of coloniality, is the function making invisibility and dehumanisation primary expressions of Black people. It is argued here that the neoliberal university needs to recognise and see the invisibility of postdocs situated on the sedges and beyond the mainstream academy and find ways to unlock alternative forms of value in them beyond universities achieving National Research Foundation (NRF) ratings and ranking solely through extractive research outputs.

Concluding Reflections

This article illuminated a fundamental problem at the core of postdoctoral research fellowships in the South African academy: the precarity of postdocs and its added dimensions of immaturity, anonymity, invisibility, homelessness and unbelonging. It contends that the lived experiences of postdocs in a neoliberal university as being necessarily precarious means that the emergence of epistemic injustice produces enormous challenges and consequences for many postdocs. Thus, this article raises important questions such as the exploitation and oppression of postdocs as well as the ongoing relationship between precarity and belonging, and the spectre of their marginality and liminality which is manifest and become intertwined in the postdoc curricula. Ultimately, it proffered a Black existentialist and decolonial critique of the exploitative and oppressive forms of PDRFs. The overall argument put forward in this article is a move towards the decolonisation of oppressive forms of PDRFs and for the reconstituting PDRFs that prizes the worth, human potential, dignity and freedom of postdocs in a neoliberal university. The findings suggest that although Black postdocs experience precarity compared to postdocs of other racial backgrounds, however, their situation is distinct owing to legacies of racial oppression and colonialism.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Mbuyisi Mgibisa

Author Contribution(s)

Mbuyisi Mgibisa: Conceptualization.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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