A critical race theoretic analysis of vulnerability among teaching assistants in a South African Department of English

Critical race theory interrogates how systemic inequities in higher education are reproduced through institutional cultures and everyday practices, which interact with material disparities in broader society. Actors positioned within these institutions can collude with or resist unjust systems, within their means. The discourse analysis that anchors this article explores how contractually-employed teaching assistants (henceforth simply Assistants) contribute to, or resist, injustice while working with students in the context of tutorials that directly topicalise systemic racism. Based on individual interviews with Assistants serving in a Department of English and Cultural Studies at a historically-white South African university where the contemporary student body predominantly identifies as black, I unpack the discursive practices through which Assistants implicate their own institutional embeddedness in students’ learning experiences. I hone this article on Assistants’ openness to vulnerability as they interrogate their own systemic embeddedness, and how they experience themselves as becoming vulnerable to expectations from students.