Teaching disruption: reflections from a Johannesburg classroom

Abstract

This article discusses the author's experience of planning and teaching a course titled ‘Cultural Citizenship’ to undergraduate students at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The course was designed in the anti-capitalist spirit of Naomi Klein's No logo (2001), asking students to think about their socialisation into systems of commodification in global Johannesburg – advertising, mass media, malls, disappearing public spaces – and to begin to identify strategies for disrupting, refusing and resisting the commodity form and the structures of privacy it produces and informs. The course required students to plan and implement a collectively-chosen and collectively-organised piece of direct action in the city as their final class project, and the article discusses two of these projects at length: a protest action against electricity cut-offs in a poor neighbourhood of Johannesburg, and a contestation over public spending on the FIFA Soccer World Cup. The article also addresses the theory of critical pedagogy underpinning the course, and the complexities of anti-capitalist, activist-oriented teaching in university settings.

Keywords:

• anti-capitalism
• commodification
• critical pedagogy
• Johannesburg
• university activism