Doing Research Otherwise

Fees Must Fall brought forward ways of framing change in the university centred around questions of decommodification and decolonisation. This was tied to a critique of practices of knowledge production. In reflecting on ten years since the 2015-2016 student and worker movement, in a collaborative conversation hosted by the Department of Sociology and SWOP, we ask the question; what does it mean to do research otherwise?

 

To research otherwise is to embrace otherness and difference, to cultivate forms of being-with that respond to community, and to imagine futures that exceed disciplinary bounds. It is to frame questions from the margins, to resist the coloniality of research, and to take seriously the demands of solidarity, alterity, and collective becoming. We do not approach this discussion as a case study of past events, but as a reflection on how struggles against the neoliberal and colonial university have always been entangled in wider local and global processes of change. 

 

By the 2000s, debates at Wits had already turned to the neoliberal restructuring of the university and questions of transformation. Within this context, sociological research foregrounded the Black worker as an agent of change. With Fees Must Fall, a new language of community was forged—one that recognised workers not only as employees but also through familial relations. This register opened a vision of community that stretched beyond contractual ties and institutional boundaries, offering glimpses of what it might mean to research, imagine, and become otherwise.