Approaching and Crossing Boundaries Towards Solidarity

Within diversifying educational institutions characterised by legacies of exclusionary practices, how do individuals and groups encounter each other? How and where do they establish points of solidarity? This chapter, working autoethnographically, reflects on constraints and possibilities towards solidarity while working with diverse undergraduate classes at a historically White-only and demographically diversifying South African university. It focuses on what it sees as foundational ingredients that are part of socialisation processes preceding expressions of solidarity to point to the day-to-day negotiations, discomforts, disruptions, and missteps inherent in approaching and crossing boundaries towards solidarity. In lecture halls, in the various campus spaces into which teaching and learning processes flow, and in the everyday questions, it sees fertile ground for the development of collective action. The chapter argues that those who teach in critical traditions can open spaces and facilitate encounters where it is possible to identify and facilitate moments through which individuals, especially students, approach and cross boundaries of difference. This is the work critical to building durable forms of solidarity.