Research Seminar with Josh Platzky Miller

Research Seminar with Transdisciplinary Philosophy Research Group visiting researcher Josh Platzky Miller (University of Witwatersrand).

‘Mapping Decolonisation Debates in the Humanities and Social Sciences: From South Africa to the UK’

The Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and Fees Must Fall (FMF) student movements of 2015–2016 foregrounded the demand for “free decolonised education,” repositioning decolonisation at the heart of a radical vocabulary for critiquing South African universities and political life more generally. Central to this demand was the claim that universities were colonial in institutional form and function, a critique that went beyond prior discourses of “transformation” and “diversity” by indicting the symbolic, material, and epistemic architectures of post-apartheid higher education. This discussion explores the trajectory of debates around decolonisation in the South African Fallist movement, mapping its contestations over the past decade. In the process, we explore points of connection to the UK’s context, hopefully offering avenues for mutual learning, and suggest ways thinking about the Humanities and Social Sciences, in particular, as sites for exploring decolonising practices in education.

(Dr Josh Platzky Miller, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; initial paper coauthored with Dr Anye Nyamnjoh, University of Cape Town)

Dr Josh Platzky Miller is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits, South Africa). Josh works with social movements, African and Latin American politics and political thought, critical pedagogy, and the global history and historiography of philosophy, and has written The Idea of ‘Western Philosophy’: A Critique (with Lea Cantor, KCL; forthcoming with Cambridge University Press); and co-edited #FeesMustFall Ten Years On (Mandela University Press, 2026).