Perspectives from South Africa on GenAI in Higher Education: A Postdigital Dialogue with the Global Context

Abstract Drawn from an interdisciplinary gathering of 51 colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg in March 2025, this collective article shares multiple perspectives from South Africa on our interactions with Generative AI (GenAI) across higher education (HE). Contributors have re-created our dialogue here, in the spirit of Ubuntu and via a postdigital lens, bringing together vital local knowledge and literature to demonstrate why context always matters deeply. Over decades now, HE policy language has inferred that we all experience digital technologies in the same way. With GenAI, this technocratic determinism is accompanied also, by a depressing dystopian fatalism. Rather than confine our diverse positionalities within either of these viewpoints, we favoured a relational approach of reciprocal listening and pedagogical responsiveness to explore the complex interplay between GenAI, learning design, assessment, and social justice. Amid the pressure to integrate GenAI, a deliberate pause is needed, to notice and respond to, the flaws it exposes in our traditional systems. It is therefore timely to also review the social contract that underpins equitable and ethical opportunities in HE. Under four themes, authors provide recommendations towards a new critical, relational GenAI governance, based on diverse lived experiences in this messy postdigital space. From this particular context in South Africa, we now warmly invite continued discussion across the wider global community.