When I was teaching first year students the introduction to international relations in July 2023, the coup in Niger took place. Seven coups have happened since August 2020 in west and central Africa. I tell the first years that it is not farfetched to imagine that one day they might come out of class to broadcasts by figures in the South African National Defence Force that they have taken over the country. I deliberately call the course the “personal is the international” to make clear that, for better or worse, the students’ dreams and gifts are defined by “the international”. Making this point is easier standing in front of a group of students whose lives have been radically redefined by a global pandemic that began in another continent.

The deep and entrenched inequality existing in Makhanda is a microcosm of South Africa. The relationship between the community of Makhanda and Rhodes University is interdependent and interconnected. Community engagement has the potential to mitigate the past image of universities as institutions disconnected from the realities of the local context. However, trust becomes an imperative first step towards unravelling the local radical entanglement and for enacting transformative collaborative partnerships between community and university. This paper is based on a qualitative study which examines the conceptualization of an anchor university for the South African context through community engagement using Rhodes University as a case study. The study proposes that the element of trust is imperative to establish transformational community-university partnerships that supports anchoring Rhodes University in Makhanda. The findings reveal community engagement’s role in anchoring the university and the extent to which the element of trust pervades the relationship between the two systems to unravel radical entanglements of the past that impede holistic development.

This paper is written in memory of our friend and colleague, Elmarie Costandius, a visual artist and academic, whose untimely and unexpected death deeply affected us. While we had worked with Elmarie in various research projects, short courses, and workshops, over a period of ten years or so, in this article we refer to a series of encounters, in which we came together to explore a decolonial and post qualitative inquiry practice as part of a South African Swedish Universities Forum (SASUF) project (2020 - 2022). Entitled (Re)configuring Scholarship in Higher Education, the project focused on alternative ways of doing pedagogies and inquiry in the current context of higher education precarities and the consequent imperative for transformation. We wanted to explore how feminist new materialist imaginaries could be put to work with affective embodied practices to expand our thinking and reconfigure our scholarship. Guided by Elmarie’s experimental arts-based approach, we opened ourselves to the affordances of playfulness, creative, serious and experimental thinking-making-doings, and the vulnerabilities of these embodied, relational scholarly praxes. Stopped in the middle, we show how our entangled thinking-making-doings continue Elmarie’s legacy.

Monolingual practices that dominate university spaces can contribute to othering, resulting in the marginalisation and exclusion of students who are less competent in the dominant discourse. These limitations must be addressed to create a more inclusive learning space that accommodates all students regardless of their social, economic, educational, and linguistic backgrounds. This paper explores how peer tutors in writing centre leverage their South African indigenous language repertoire to help students access disciplinary content knowledge and improve their academic writing practices. This paper discusses the findings from two focus group discussions with peer tutors at the Wits School of Education Writing Centre (WSoE WC). We explore how peer tutors' integration of multilingualism during writing consultations can inform a new writing centre pedagogy. We also leveraged the principles of wayfinding to navigate and orient peer tutors within a complex university space, which challenges the university's stated educational transformation with a concrete proposition. Data analysis shows how peer tutors and students collaboratively explore and map out academic writing using familiar languages to navigate the rigid structure of academic writing in a manner that respects and incorporates students' linguistic backgrounds. Through wayfinding, peer tutors disrupt monolingual practices and by doing so, increase student participation and chances of success in higher education. Writing centres, as wayfinding spaces, are instrumental in championing the adoption of multilingual pedagogies, thus disrupting dominant monolingual practices in higher education.

In this paper, we conduct a collaborative autoethnography to guide our reading of text on collaborative, international online projects in higher education and in South Africa. Our reading reveals patterns that speak to critical considerations for those planning projects in the context or from similar positions within the Global South or other developing contexts. As COIL practitioners in South Africa, we reflect on the literature from the unique situatedness of our learning and teaching environments and broader social context.

This December 2025 Issue brings with it a suite of ten papersand three book reviews, entangled in four differentthemes that are so relevant tothe current atmosphere in academia, namelysustainable development, language and linguistics, Artificial Intelligence,and social justice. As such,theissue ignites a positive ambience as it shares innovative pedagogical practices in specific disciplines, whichrange fromthe Arts, Management Sciences, Physics, English assessment at undergraduate levels to structured coursework doctoral programmes.The issue further problematises the dominance of certain discourses in higher education,and also provides an interesting argument on the need for the sector to consider providingmore specialisedmentoring opportunities to middle career academics. So, the image on the cover page of the issue encapsulatesthis positive effect that the authors brought in.

Elmarie Costandius’s experimental pedagogies challenged the stasis and restriction of top-down, monomodal, cerebral notions of learning, and of knowledge as handed down by experts. The shock delivered by her arts-based approaches was not explosive, but rather a set of vibrations that reconfigured what it means to experiment, traverse, reconfigure, and communicate in classroom events. Her pedagogies fostered encounters with doing, making, and intra-acting as embodied modalities of exploration—approaching new forms of knowing. This article unfolds from our attunement to this gesture of reaching outward. The closeness we seek to approximate emerges from our reaching out towards meaning, memory, and our sense of resonance with Elmarie and each other as kindred companions in thinkingdoingbecoming. We compose this article as a “processual monument” that pays homage to Elmarie’s legacy by advocating for art-based and transmodal practices in higher education pedagogy and inquiry.

This paper describes a process of concept development, written in memory of Elmarie Costandius, who I learnt from in a series of workshops to reconfigure scholarship. Elmarie's humble way of working with concepts in art-based inquiry, with a strong commitment to social justice, widened and deepened my interest in the relationship between knowledge-making and writing – a great interest to me after decades of facilitating writers’ circles for postgraduate scholars. Involvement in the writers' circle, and the inspiration of Elmarie and the scholars around her, alert me to the possibilities of more responsive, situated, tentative ways of knowing that honour the traces of knowledge-making. These traces are an alternative to the limitations imposed by omniscient, conquest notions of knowledge and how they are inscribed in conventional genres of research.