Yanda Bango is a PhD candidate in the field of social and cultural anthropology. Her research project uses a decolonial lens to analyse the transformation agenda of higher education in post-apartheid South Africa. In this analysis, she focuses primarily on institutional culture and the impact that it has on the access, experiences, and outcomes of those who enter the university space as either students or staff members. She also looks at areas and programmes that (have) affect(ed) and influence(ed) the process of transformation in her study site, and ultimately how far all this information can tell us about transformation insofar as the redress of colonial-apartheid legacies is concerned. 

Yanda holds an MA in Development and Governance from University Duisburg-Essen and another one in Sociology from Rhodes University. Her first MA project focused on local governance and public participation in South Africa, while her second looked at the role of education, guided by critical pedagogy, in the lives of young South African graduates from the township of Ngangelizwe, Mthatha, in the Eastern Cape. Overall, her research interests are centred around issues of social justice and the facilitating role that formal learning and governing structures, critical consciousness, purpose, civic mobilization, and public participation ought to play in this process.