Positions on current issues, oped pieces, keynotes, invited contributions and the like are collected together here.

A full list of reports, academic papers, edited collections and other more formal writing can be found here (from 1976 to the present).

A selection of more recent publications (back to 2009):

“Connected Learning:  Innovation in the Face of Conflict”. In Higher Education and Democratic Innovation, edited by Sjur Bergan, Tony Gallagher and Ira Harkavy. Council of Europe Higher Education Series, in partnership with the International Consortium for Higher Education, Civic Responsibility and Democracy and Queen’s University. 2016.
How can the university, as an anchor institution for its communities and for the public good, use new digital technologies to best effect to promote learning in societies riven by conflicts? What can be learned from such limit cases that is beneficial to higher education more generally?
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“Objects, Images and Texts: Archaeology and Violence”.  Journal of Social Archaeology 16 (1): 79-93. 2016.
Today, monuments and archaeological sites are often specific targets for violence. But rather than casting this as either collateral damage or the result of ignorance and incivility, it can be argued that the material world, in all its widely varied forms, is enmeshed in conflict and violence. This can be better understood in terms of the haptic significance of objects caught up in extreme and traumatic circumstances.
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“Mergers in South Africa and Post-Apartheid Reconstruction.  Perceptions After the First Decade”. In “Mergers and Alliances in Higher Education: International Practice and Emerging Opportunities”. Editors: Adrian Curaj, Luke Georghiou, Jennifer Casingena Harper and  Eva Egron-Polak. Springer, 2015.
Faced with the legacy of racial segregation, South Africa’s first democratic government had a formidable task in normalizing all aspects of education. The 2002 merger plan was intended to achieve both equity in provision and a mix of institutional types, and educational outcomes that would be appropriate to the country’s needs. While there has been no systematic assessment of the success of the merger process, a review of quality assurance reports and government responses to institutional-level crises suggests that success has been partial. It is clear that the apartheid era had left behind a deeply dysfunctional set of institutions that required radical reform and that the government’s merger policy broke the mould of racial segregation. It is also apparent that, for a significant sub-set of newly formed universities, it is still too early to evaluate the full merits of the mergers that brought them into being. But, on the other hand, the most recent government policies imply that mergers have done little to address key issues in Higher Education provision and that many problems, that the 2002 merger policy was intended to rectify, still remain.
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(with Andrew Snowden). “Politics as Process: Salford’s Charter of Student Rights. In Manja Klemenčič, Sjur Bergan and Rok Primožič (editors): Student engagement in Europe: society, higher education and student governance  Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing Council of Europe Higher Education Series No. 20.  2015
Students are engaged with Higher Education at scales that range from transnational issues to local concerns. In this chapter we are concerned with the institutional level of engagement – specifically, the development of Student Charter in the context of the changing relationship between a Students’ Union and a University administration. At the same time, we show how positions are shaped by national issues, constraints and opportunities. We are particularly interested in the relationship between “outcomes” (products) and “process” (how outcomes are achieved). In questions of student engagement, as elsewhere, “all politics is local”. Consequently, we will show how institution-specific issues interplay with comparable spheres at the national level.
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“Against inequality: towards a curriculum for social and environmental innovation”.  213-232 In Verena Bitzer, Ralph Hamann, Martin Hall and Eliada Wosu Griffin-EL (eds.), The Business of Social and Environmental Innovation.  New Frontiers in Africa. London, Springer. 2015
The provision of education – at all levels – is widely recognized as one of the key elements in addressing both poverty and inequality. However, now-prevalent market models for the provision of education are inappropriate for this purpose, since they render educational attainment as a positional good that may exacerbate inequality and restrict access to education to elite groups. Amartya Sen’s formative concepts of capabilities and functionings provide a sound and productive basis for an alternative approach, whether for the provision of basic education, or for access to opportunities in further and higher education and training.
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“Milieux de Mémoire”.  355-366 In Alfredo González-Ruibal (editor), Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity (Archaeological Orientations).  New York, Routledge. 2013.
In this chapter, I outline a basis for engagement – for a form of practical action in what González-Ruibal terms the milieux de mémoire. This can be developed around the properties of ‘things’ – the material world that defines the archaeological field. I develop this argument in two stages. First, I tease apart the core concepts of time and place, materiality, the relationship with the object of enquiry, power and the politics and practice. I isolate photography and its resulting images as archaeology’s fellow traveller through high modernism and as a key constituent in progressive, mediated milieux de mémoire. Next, I appropriate the rich detail of some of these cases – in Greece, Spain, the US and Hong Kong – to develop the idea of what I term ‘object enabled mediation’. This can be understood as phronesis – practical action.
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“Inequality, and the Public Good and Private Benefits of Higher Education”. In Brenda Leibowitz (ed), Higher Education for the Public Good; Views from the South. Stoke-on-Trent, Trentham Books. 2012.
Over the last few decades, and in many parts of the world, levels of participation in higher education have risen sharply.  In turn, this has prompted a shift from public funding to an expectation that students and their families should bear a greater proportion of the cost of a university education. As public policies have been shaped accordingly, this often‐ contested shift has come to be characterized as a distinction between the public good and the private benefits of education.  This tussle between advocates of public goods and private benefits engages with the key issue of inequality and its consequences. In many parts of the world, profound socio‐economic inequalities structure educational opportunity from the earliest years of education, whether in the United States, the United Kingdom or South Africa.   
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“Green or Gold?  Open Access after Finch”.  Insights 25(3) November 2012.
The year 2012 was auspicious for open access (OA) publishing. First, the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings reported to the Minister of Universities and Science (the ‘Finch Report’). This was quickly followed by the new policy of Research Councils UK (RCUK), adopting the Finch Group recommendations for the publication of publicly funded research work. Next, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) announced the intention to require that research submitted to future research evaluation exercises – after the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) – be open access.There is now a broad consensus, that includes for-profit publishers, that open access is the way of the future. The debate – and disagreement – is about the policies that are best suited to steering this transition. 
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“Sexuality and materiality: the challenge of method”. In   Barbara Voss and Eleanor Casella (eds), The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects.  Cambridge, University of Cambridge Press, 2012.
Sexuality’s particular quality is to be both intensely private, personal, and sensory and also public and definitive of the structures of social and economic organization, everywhere. As such, sexuality may leave no material trace and may be denied or disguised in written records, persisting only in the ephemera of memory. But at the same time, sexual norms or prohibitions may shape assemblages of artifacts, the organization of domestic space, the design and construction of institutional buildings, and the layout of cities and landscapes. Developing an archaeology of sexuality requires that the particular duality of the private–sensory and the public–material is made explicit and more general. As with all disciplines, archaeology is what archaeologists do. If there is to be an archaeology of sexuality, there needs to be attention to “method,” to the hermeneutical processes that move backward and forward between conceptualization and evidence, progressively building up our understanding of the world.
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“Inequality and Higher Education: Marketplace or Social Justice?” Leading Innovation: Leadership Foundation Series Four, 2012.
There are many determinants of inequality and poverty. Together, they can constitute self-reinforcing syndromes – poverty traps – whether in developing countries or in highly industrialised economies such as Britain’s. Access to appropriate education is key to breaking these cycles or marginalisation, and therefore to social justice, and universities are integral parts of national education systems, whether they are public or private institutions. Providing access to education is a challenge to the leadership of organisations, including the leadership of universities. While national education policies may direct attention to inclusive and transformative priorities, these are notoriously difficult to achieve in the face of the collective reluctance of a university to change. Similarly, the sticks and carrots of policy levers can be overwhelmed by the complex mechanics of admission requirements, student finance arrangements and assessment systems; given the long cycle of student progression through a higher education system, it can take the life of several parliaments to know whether policies have succeeded or failed. 
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“Open Access: beyond the numbers”. Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham. March 2011.
Much of the discussion about the merits of Open Access (OA) publishing has centred on the numbers; on whether, when all costs have been taken into account, it is cheaper to publish on an OA basis than in commercially run, subscription journals. But there are wider considerations than these.In this briefing, I outline the case for OA and the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. The properties of knowledge are key to both scholarly activity and to the efficient and effective workings of the knowledge economy. Seen from this point of view, there is a strong case for OA publishing, irrespective of the balance of publishing costs.
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“The end of the British public university?” International Journal of Law in the Built Environment, 3(1):5-10, 2011.
The public university is one of the great institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Stemming from multiple roots, universities were places of opportunity, the generation of new knowledge and public intellectual life. They were based on a broad, often unarticulated concept of learning and knowledge as a public good. In the wake of the Second World War, universities in Europe and North America opened their gates to the middle classes, driving sustained economic growth. This is being repeated today across India and China, as the epicentre of the world economy shifts to Asia. While the public good has often been sustained by private contributions, whether through endowments, fees or contracted research, British universities have had an ethos of public accountability, and have been widely seen as civic institutions, alongside public libraries, cathedrals, art galleries and concert halls. This will now change. In accepting the principles of Lord Browne’s Review of University Funding and Student Finance, the UK’s coalition government will complete a process of privatization that began in the recommendations of Lord Dearing’s report of 1997. Most students – and all students in the social sciences, arts and humanities – will pay for the full cost of their education through a system of graduate contributions. In addition, the coalition will propose, initially through a White Paper, opening up higher education to privately owned, for-profit corporations.
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“Financing Higher Education Worldwide: Who Pays? Who Should Pay?” (review article).Journal of Economic Literature, XLIX: 26-30, 2011.
Through December 2010 and January 2011, students across Britain protested the decision by government to treble the cost of university tuition. Those demonstrating would not be affected by the new level of charges, which will be phased in for new students entering higher education in September 2012. There will be no upfront fees, no payment until after graduation and subsequent employment, and repayments will be suspended if earnings drop below a minimum threshold. Any balance remaining after thirty years will be written off. So it is not surprising that Britain’s Coalition government was caught off-guard, failing to anticipate the extent and depth of the anger that the increased payments had provoked. Liberal Democrats, the junior partners in the Coalition, were in a particularly tight spot, since almost all of their Members of Parliament had signed a pledge before the May 2010 election that they would abolish tuition fees altogether if they gained power. Finding themselves unexpectedly part of government a few months later, their ratings plunged to an all-time low.
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“Openness: the essential quality of knowledge”.  Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. 6(4):8-11, 2011
Openness is an essential quality of knowledge, enabling academic practice and driving key aspects of the knowledge economy. In contrast, inappropriate restrictions on the distribution of knowledge damage innovation and discovery and have a direct effect on the quality of life. This has been appreciated for a very long time. Thomas Jefferson, for example, famously used the metaphor of the candle, pointing out how many flames could be ignited without extinguishing or diminishing the light from the original. However, the over-commercialization of intellectual property in the early years of the digital revolution has left a legacy that is both inappropriate and dangerous.
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“Varsity’s voices of dissent gagged”.  Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg), January 14 2011.
The Council on Higher Education (CHE) has decided to suppress the report of its own audit of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Why? All reputable higher education systems have independent quality assurance and South Africa’s is set up in terms of the 1997 Higher Education Act. The responsibility rests with the CHE and its standing committee, the higher education quality committee (HEQC). Audits are conducted in terms of 19 formal criteria and by a panel of trained auditors. In October 2008 I chaired the UKZN audit panel, which comprised eight members. We considered a roomful of evidence, conducted five site visits and interviewed more than 400 people over a period of five days. Our final report was submitted to the HEQC in June 2009, but has never been released.
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“Revealing Memories from Darkness”. 177-185  In Memories from Darkness; Archaeology of Repression and Resistance in Latin America. Edited by Pedro P. Funari, Andrés Zarankin and Melisa Salerno. New York, Springer, 2010.
Memories from Darkness is a contribution to an emerging “archaeology of repression.” Focusing on the twentieth century, and on what González-Ruibal (2008) has usefully called “supermodernity,” such approaches show how specialized technologies were developed and deployed to serve the ends of authoritarian regimes and state terror, with a lineage from German and Italian fascism, French colonialism in Algeria, a broad swathe of military governments in Latin America, and to the current “war on terror.” They also show how we can trace and reveal evidence for resistance in the context of an explicitly engaged archaeology that recognizes the valency of political action in shaping our understanding of the past and the implications of research for social justice and human rights.
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“Innovation Africa”.  CODESRIA Bulletin, Dakar, Senegal. 3 and 4, 2010:3-6.
It is now ten years since the Economist newspaper declared Africa to be “the hopeless continent”. Today, the same magazine offers a different prognosis, building on the World Bank’s prediction of growth rates for sub-Saharan African economies that will be twice those of Europe. This is in the context of a severe and prolonged recession in North America and Europe and a growing realization that the epicentres of development are shifting eastwards, and southwards. Here, I will reflect on what this may mean for some aspects of a small part of innovation. The qualifiers are deliberate; predicting the future in our complex, interconnected world is hubris.
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‘Minerva’s owl. A response to John Houghton and Charles Oppenheim’s ‘The economic implications of alternative publishing models’‘, Prometheus, 28: 1, 61 — 71, 2010.
Houghton and Oppenheim’s cost–benefit analysis of different forms of scholarly publishing is a major contribution in considering the case for open access and for open institutional repositories as a standard resource in publicly-funded universities. Understanding these issues through empirically-informed profiles of national systems of research and innovation is a significant advance, but to focus only on this is to be distracted from significant and more general issues about the ways in which knowledge is produced, particularly in universities, and the requirements and opportunities for such work in the contemporary knowledge economy. As with Hegel’s owl of wisdom, the true meaning of major new ways of doing things can only be appreciated later in the day, when both the innovation and its implications are clearer.
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“The social cost of variable tuition fees”.  Guardian (London), 11 October 2010.
The Browne report is expected to offer, for the first time in Britain, the possibility of variable fees across all qualifications and universities. Within a few years, it may be possible to choose between similar qualifications priced at anything up to £10,000. This is unknown territory. When universities strategise about how to price their qualifications in a post-Browne world, the elephant in the room will be the annual league tables. What do the major league tables really measure? At first glance, quite a lot: entry standards, completion rates, student satisfaction, spending per student, research reputation. But the primary determinant of a university’s position in a league table is the class profile of its students. This is demonstrated by adding one factor that none of the major league tables use, but which is readily available from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa): the proportion of students from each of the socioeconomic categories used by the Office of National Statistics to classify all working households in Britain.
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“Stitch Wise: Strategic Knowledge Management for Pro-Poor Enterprise on South Africa’s Goldfields”.  In Ralph Hamann, Stu Woolman and Courtenay Sprague (editors), The Business of Sustainable Development in Africa: Human Rights, Partnerships, Alternative Business Models.  Tokyo, United Nations University, 2009.
Natalie Killassy was born into a mining family working in South Africa’s goldfields, which have some of the world’s deepest mine shafts.Disturbed by the consequences of crippling underground injuries for miners and their families, and by the depressed economy of mining towns such as the one in which she grew up, Killassy persuaded one of South Africa’s largest mining companies, AngloGold Ashanti, to allow her to use a salvage yard and the labour of paraplegic former miners only partially employed in menial work, to start a new venture that would manufacture waterproof clothing. From that simple beginning, Killassy’s company – Stitch Wise – grew to become a producer of specialised underground mine safety equipment to support mine shafts and prevent rock falls, a primary cause of underground injury. Stitch Wise now dominates the South African market in this niche area. The company’s workforce is mostly paraplegic, and workers own shares in it through Stitch Wise’s Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment initiative. 
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“Nothing is different but everything’s changed”. In The Next Twenty Five Years? Affirmative Action and Higher Education in the United States and South Africa.  Edited by Martin Hall, Marvin Krislov and David L. Featherman. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2009.
It may be a paradox of the university as an institution is that little changes with time and yet little is predictable. This is well illustrated by the recent history of the University of Cape Town. If Justice Day O’Connor’s mirror to the future is reversed to reflect UCT in 1980 there is a predominant sense of continuity. Architectural motifs are the same, inspired by Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia and mediated by some controversial modernism and the frame of Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain. Teaching is still in tiered lecture halls and smaller seminar rooms. Some eccentrics persist with blackboard and chalk. Yet if anyone at a graduation ceremony in early December 1980 had predicted the political order of South Africa 25 years later, they would have been regarded as eccentric. If they had made their views publicly known, they could have expected the attentions of the Bureau of State Security. Nelson Mandela was on Robben Island, the ANC in exile, internally weak and regarded as a terrorist organization. Segregation was in full force, as was job reservation, residential segregation and the Immorality Act.
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(with Dorrian Aiken and Nazeema Mohamed) “Institutional Culture and Diversity: Engagement and Dialogue in a South African University”. In The Next Twenty Five Years? Affirmative Action and Higher Education in the United States and South Africa.  Edited by Martin Hall, Marvin Krislov and David L. Featherman. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Universities are complex institutions where people congregate to teach and learn, conduct research, take part in public events and administer the day-to-day processes by which the institution reproduces itself. These activities contribute to a unique culture that shapes the relationships between members of the campus community. Affirmative action is designed to transform such cultures by countering the injustices of discrimination— particularly those based on race, gender and ethnicity—with accelerated and focused policies for change. But such policies can just as readily be undermined by the persistence of those very prejudices that are making life intolerable for the excluded. Very often, success or failure will depend on everyday slights or acceptances, scowls or smiles, greetings or snubs—the actions that James Scott has termed “everyday transcripts” of domination and resistance, or inclusion and acceptance. All of this depends on what is really only a very general definition of “institutional culture.” The pressing question of South African higher education is whether we can define the term more specifically, in order to permit targeted interventions with measurable results? Can we break this broad category up into individual domains—architecture and the physical plant; curriculum; service learning; working conditions and professional development; organizational structure, and others— that can be targeted for interventions?
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“Proclamation 43”. In John Schofield (editor) Defining Moments, dramatic Archaeologies of the Twentieth Century. Oxford, British Archaeological Reports, 2009: 115-122
Proclamation 43, issued by the South African government on 11 February 1966, marked for destruction a community of more than 60,000 people living close to the centre of Cape Town (Hall 2001). Mostly of mixed descent, ‘Coloured’ in apartheid typology, their suburb of District Six had been declared a white ‘group area’. The destruction of District Six would come to stand for the many similar episodes in other parts of South Africa, and would serve as a rallying point for the internal opposition to state repression that would lead to the collapse of the apartheid state some fifteen years later. More widely, systematic discrimination on the grounds of race in South Africa became the mark against which universal principles of justice and human rights came to be set in the second half of the twentieth century, building on the momentum of the US Civil Rights movement and crystallizing in the iconography of Nelson Mandela. As with other ‘defining moments’, the destruction of District Six acquired its meanings through political action, representation and ‘memory work’ in the years that followed. This chapter traces the strands of these meanings through to the recent past, in which some of the issues set in motion by Proclamation 43 remained unresolved.
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“New knowledge and the university”.  Anthropology Southern Africa, 32 (1 and2): 69-86, 2009.
What forms of knowledge have legitimacy in the contemporary university? By using Actor-Network Theory to unravel the strands in a recent dispute about access to skeletons from a burial ground in Cape Town, this paper shows how circulating systems of references connect institutions, historical trajectories and differing sets of interests to form competing knowledge systems. Rather than falling back on a defence of established disciplines and academic authority, it is argued that there are considerable benefits in recognising the importance and validity of knowledge generated ‘in community’, and in the course of political discourse. Rather than undermining truth, such an approach will result in both better science and more informed community action.
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“Examining the concept of identity in peripheral cities and the contribution of universities”. Building New Urban Identities.  European Union/ UrbAct. 2009.
OECD and other studies show that all successful regional economies have significant university and college sectors. Virtually any study on what really drives regional or national growth will come down to the observation that national growth in GDP is driven by regions, instead of the country as a whole. Almost all studies also conclude that there are always universities or higher education institutions at the heart of successful regions. Greater Manchester has five higher education institutions and some 200,000 students in further and higher education. Thereby, Universities, or “knowledge machines”, are at the heart of successful regional growth and therefore, at the heart of successful urban regeneration.
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