Call for Participation: Fees Must Fall Re-membering Workshops

In 2015, students at the University of the Witwatersrand rose up in opposition to a planned fee increase that had been approved by the university’s council. The student uprising at Wits followed a sustained campaign by workers demanding their insourcing as members of the university community. As these two struggles came together the Fees Must Fall and End Outsourcing movement was born. In the weeks that followed, these struggles spread across the country to become one of the most significant social movement mobilisations in the post-apartheid era. Despite significant academic research focused on this movement, a comprehensive history has yet to be written. As we approach the tenth anniversary of the Fees Must Fall and End Outsourcing mobilisations, we invite participants to come together to collectively re-member this important mobilisation and chart a portrait of this moment, whilst recognising the important contestations that exist.

To this end, the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) will be hosting a series of participatory workshops where specific moments of the mobilisation will be collectively mapped out. We therefore invite those who participated in the movement to join us for these collective re-membering sessions. These are being structured as open discussions, no prior preparation is required. Potential themes include:

     

      • October 6th and the workers rebellion

      • October 14th and the opposition to the fee increase  

      • The night on the concourse and the birth of Fees Must Fall

      • The black feminist counter-mobilisation

      • The becoming national of Fees Must Fall

      • Fees Must Fall at the Union Buildings

      • The Wits fracture

      • Negotiations, insourcing and the new dispensation

      • The 2016 return

      • Repression and rebellion in 2016

      • The 2016 denouement

      • NSFAS and the persistence of fees

      • Fees Must Fall and the ideologies of resistance

      • Fees Must Fall and the politics of memory, inheritance and generation

      • Afterlives and the contemporary moment

    If you are interested in participating in one or more of these sessions please send an email to swop.wits@gmail.com. The email should include your contact details, and the session/sessions you would like to participate in. We are open to additional sessions being arranged on different themes, if you would like to propose one please email these proposals to swop.wits@gmail.com. At this stage the sessions are limited to experiences at Wits, but we welcome interest from other institutions around this call. 

    In addition to these workshops on Fees Must Fall, there will be a series on re-membering the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF). We invite proposals for the hosting of other movement sessions beyond the APF. The sessions will collectively build towards a colloquium on Re-membering Movements in October 2025. For more information please see here