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Global SAP Roundtable

    Students as Partners Roundtable 2025 Part 2, Cape Town, South Africa, Designing for Social Justice Partnership (DSJP) Programme Team

    Advancing Social Justice and Decolonisation in Student-Staff Partnerships: a Global South focus.

    2nd to 3rd October 2025, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa

    Call for submissions - CLOSED

    Please click on the following link to Register for the Global SAP Round Table 2025.

    Register here

    In recent years, student-staff partnerships have gained prominence to promote equity, collaboration, and innovation within higher education institutions worldwide and initially focused on equality, the student-staff partnership literature has, in recent years, been more concerned with social justice and equity issues (de Bie et al., 2021; de Bie, 2022). While this concept emerged from the Global North, it has gained momentum in the Global South as well (Adam et al., 2014; Bidandi et al., 2022; Botha & Steyn, 2022; Cox et al., 2024; Cook-Sather et al., 2024; Ige et al., 2023). Whether it is in response to student protests, demanding a more decolonised curriculum, or highlighting inequities in resource-constrained contexts, this Roundtable event aims to explore the dynamics and potential of student-staff partnerships in the context of the Global South by emphasising African theories and the unique challenges, opportunities and perspectives specific to this region. This Roundtable event will seek to advance and share our unique scholarly understanding and practical applications of student-staff partnerships with the global community.

    The Roundtable discussions will be essential spaces that challenge dominant discourses and disrupt the notion of the global South as ‘other’ or ‘subaltern’ (Spivak, 1988). Our definition of the Global South expands beyond geographical boundaries to include other dimensions as well:

    Geographical Definition: The Global South refers to countries in the southern hemisphere, including regions such as Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia (excluding Japan), Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

    Social Definition: The Global South encompasses societies that face common social issues such as inequality, poverty, lack of access to healthcare and education, and environmental degradation.

    Political Definition: The Global South comprises countries historically colonised or marginalised by colonial powers that share common governance, sovereignty, and international relations challenges.

    Economic definition: The Global South includes countries characterised by emerging or developing economies, often facing structural challenges such as financial dependency, debt, limited industrialisation, and unequal global trade relationships.

    The round table is hosted by the Designing for Social Justice Partnership Programme (DSJP), which is grounded in advancing social justice and decolonisation in higher education in South Africa. We constantly strive to ask critical questions on partnerships and social justice while challenging traditional approaches to knowledge creation.

    We want to invite abstracts from student and staff teams to present a paper as part of a round table discussion of three papers or present a poster as a discussion that centres on social justice, decolonisation and student-staff partnerships.

    We welcome applications in the following formats:

    • Poster Presentation - 10-minute presentation in person (space shared with two other poster presenters, 30 minutes plus 20 minutes discussion and Q&A)
    • Thoroughly online panels of three papers (50 minutes including Q&A) - (10-minute presentations and five slides only - 20 minutes discussion)
    • In-person panels of three papers (same as above)
    Important Dates
    • Registration Closing Date: Monday 15th September 2025
    • Conference dates: 2nd & 3rd October 2025 online and in-person

    Please click on the following link to Register for the Global SAP Round Table 2025.

    Registration and Fees

    To enable as many people as possible to participate in the roundtable event, we will host sessions in person and online, with both plenary sessions broadcast and recorded.

    Please note that the Roundtable is free to attend; however, we do not have funding to cover travel and accommodation costs.

    The registration link for the Round Table will be available on the DSJP website from the week commencing 24 August 2025 until Monday, 15 September 2025.

    Location

    The roundtable will occur at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Granger Bay Campus. Located on Beach Road, Mouille Point, the campus is accessible via the link below. If you have any questions about access, please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

    If you have any questions about your submission or the roundtable in general, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Please see our roundtable webpage below for more information, which will be updated regularly.

    Programme
    Keynote Speaker

    Laura I. Rendón

    Laura I. Rendón Ph.D. is a nationally-recognized student advocate, scholar and contemplative educator. 

    Rendón is professor emerita at the University of Texas-San Antonio, and she has held faculty and administrative appointments at several universities. She earned a doctorate in higher education administration at the University of Michigan.

    Rendón grew up in a low-income, single-parent household along the U.S. Mexico border in Laredo, Texas.  She is a teaching and learning thought leader and developed validation theory as a framework to foster student success.  Rendón is the author of Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation along with eight other books and monographs and an extensive list of scholarly publications.

    Rendón is the 2021 recipient of the Howard Bowen Distinguished Career Award issued by the Association for the Study of Higher Education.  In 2023 Rendón received the Distinguished Alumni Award at the University of Michigan and at San Antonio College.

    Poets

    Blessing Gumbu

    Bulela Limba

    Zoe Bok

    Logan Adams

    Presentations

    Day 1

    Day 2

    Possibility of publication

    Round Table participants will be invited to submit their papers to the Special Section on Student-Staff Partnerships in the Global South in the International Journal for Students as Partners by January 31, 2026. The call will be shared soon.