INTRODUCTION
Tariq Toffa and Jabu Makhubu- Elective Leaders
This book is the story of a journey. Richard Sennett, in his book The Craftsman (2008a), argued that true growth—what Victorian English writer John Ruskin called “the lamp of truth”—developed through encountering some sort of “resistance,” when faced with and engaging a condition of difficulty or strangeness that one’s knowledge or skill had not adequately prepared one for. However, more than simply stumbling upon problems and ‘learning from one’s mistakes’, a “probing craftsman” (Sennett 2008b) did more than that; he or she created such conditions precisely in order to know them. For the academy, its educators and students, the national student protests that first emerged in South Africa in 2015 (and concurrently in many other parts of the world) presented precisely and profoundly one such challenge. To some a challenge, to others a wellspring of courage, it brought into focus a range of fundamental questions about education and the university. In giving ‘voice to the voiceless’, in ‘putting the last first’, it would provide sharp ethical, economic, political and discursive critiques of westernized and corporatized universities.
THEORISING PROTEST | protest by other names Voluntarily bringing together our architectural and urban design training, technical and discursive tools and resources, and collaborating between Design and Theory course modules, in 2017 we named our collaborative studio by the somewhat daring name, ‘PROTEST CITY’. First, our starting point sought to understand the causes of protest, their ethics or their theories of social change that they articulated through collective action. As cocreator of Occupy Wall Street, Micah White (2017), put it:
“Sometimes, the people march. Other times we hold general assemblies, tar and feather opponents, occupy pipelines, go on strike, dance in a circle, riot in the streets or pray together. In each case, behind every act of protest is an often unarticulated theory of social change: a story we tell ourselves about why the disobedient behaviour we’ve chosen will usher in the change we desire.” Second, our primary innovation at this stage was to bring this normative social discourse into a dialogue with students’ own value bases and ethical foundations from their own positionality and lived experiences (which have limited spaces for authentic expression within the academic project). The topicality introduced into the studio emerging from such lived experience was extensive and varied; issues ranged from government, the school system, homelessness, race, feminism, class, ‘black tax’, domestic violence, xenophobia, abortion, bullying, hair, spirituality and environmental concerns.
How would the academic community as a whole respond? For university management, would they attempt to make it disappear as quickly and as cheaply as possible? For academics, would it become a new currency of commodified goods? Or would the academic community identify with its concerns and embrace its relevance? We, the authors and our students, chose the latter. It would mean that we would all become both teachers and students. We would become ‘probing craftsman’ of our designerly—but ultimately unscholarly—disciplines, an approach at odds with the primacy of value it places in the representational image and the product.
This twin approach (normative/social and personal/ experiential) brought the concerns and ethics of ‘us over here’ (in the academy) with those ‘others out there’ (on the streets) much closer together. Within such a convergence, what then was ‘protest’? Within the course of the studio, protest came to mean not the ‘violent’ action of ‘others’, but something much broader and more identifiable, as mobilizations of ethics, values and lived experiences that 1
