Navigating the Social Turn

Reimagining Space and Safety in the South African Writing Centre

Abstract

This paper will begin by highlighting how five major social turns in South Africa’s history have impacted issues of space and safety in the South African writing centre. The paper will attempt to define the concepts of space and safety through a social justice lens alongside the philosophy of ubuntu pedagogy. Embracing philosophy’s from the Global South allows us to juxtapose indigenous and western knowledge systems  without privileging one while marginalising the other, thus putting an end to epistemic injustices that devalue indigenous knowledge systems such as Ubuntu (Ngubane & Makua, 2021). Crucial to the interrogation of issues of space and safety is a close reading of the ways in which the writing centre space has been theorised and metaphored, reflecting the evolution of the writing centre. Close interrogation will demonstrates how such metaphors conflict with the space of the South African writing centre. The last part of this paper proposes the reimagining of the writing centre space, allowing us to reinvent the space  of the writing centre, into one that is  vibrant and brave. Importantly, it hopes to propose that such reimagining may allow writing centres to move from margin to centre.