Journal of Student Affairs in Africa | Volume 5(1) 2017, v–vi  |  2307-6267  |  DOI: 10.14426/jsaa.v5i1.2476   v

www.jsaa.ac.za

Editorial

Voices from Around the Globe
Birgit Schreiber,* Thierry M. Luescher** & Teboho Moja*** 

*  Dr Birgit Schreiber is Senior Director: Student Affairs, of Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and a 
member of the Editorial Executive of JSAA. Email: birgitschreiber@sun.ac.za 

**  Dr Thierry M Luescher is Research Director: Education and Skills Development, in the Human Sciences 
Research Council (HSRC), Cape Town, South Africa, and Journal Manager of JSAA. Email: jsaa_editor@
outlook.com

***  Prof. Teboho Moja is Clinical Professor for Higher Education Studies, Steinhardt School of Culture, 
Education and Human Development, New York University, USA. 

JSAA has been seeking to provide an opportunity for Student Affairs professionals and 
higher education scholars from around the globe to share their research and experiences 
of student services and student affairs programmes from their respective regional and 
institutional contexts. This has been given a specific platform with the guest-edited 
issue “Voices from Around the Globe” which is the result of a collaboration with the 
International Association of Student Affairs and Services (IASAS), and particularly with the 
guest editors, Kathleen Callahan and Chinedu Mba. 

In this respect, we are pleased that the present issue highlights the intersection of 
global and local issues in Student Affairs, and of debates around local professionalisation 
and epistemic-discursive communities of practice in Student Affairs. Global and local 
issues are not so much about the spatial but the framework and lens of Student Affairs, 
which simultaneously aim to be locally relevant and embedded, and globally referenced 
to an overarching set of guidelines abstracted from the local and articulated at the 
global. Correspondingly it is instructive to invoke the notion of the Global Gemeinschaft 
(Robertson, 1995) as one community in the world, with many communities inherent 
within it; the notion that new identity is shaped by global-international and global-local 
influences on the epistemic-discursive community of Student Affairs (Castell, 1997). 
Furthermore, the JSAA-IASAS collaborative issue also brings into focus global trends and 
their local expression, including the reorganisation of knowledge in Student Affairs in 
relation to changing local realities. By foregrounding Botswana, China, South Africa and 
the USA, a comparative discourse is set up which is part of the global. 

Callahan and Mba’s guest editorial provides a succinct overview of the guest-edited 
articles in the issue. We are particularly glad that several of them address matters directly 
related to the professionalisation of Student Affairs in their respective contexts: on the 
history, challenges and solution to professionalisation in China, on standard setting and 

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vi   Journal of Student Affairs in Africa | Volume 5(1) 2017, v–vi  |  2307-6267  |  DOI: 10.14426/jsaa.v5i1.2476

quality assurance in Botswana, and on the development of a sister journal to JSAA, the 
Asia-Pacific Journal of Student Affairs in the Philippines. In addition, we add to the guest-
edited collection the article by Arega Bazezew and Mulugeta Neka on incidents of, causes 
for, and the management of interpersonal conflicts among undergraduate students at Bahir 
Dar University in Ethiopia. 

Finally, it is a great achievement to be credited to our authors, reviewers and editors 
that since January 2017, the Journal of Student Affairs in Africa is accredited in South Africa 
by the national Department of Higher Education and Training as a subsidy-earning 
scholarly journal on the SA-list of accredited journals. This means that authors affiliated to 
South African universities can submit their peer-reviewed articles, i.e. research articles and 
reflective practice articles, as recognised research outputs for subsidy purposes. Furthermore, 
JSAA is now also fully indexed and full-text available from the Education Resources 
Information Centre (ERIC) in addition to our co-hosting with African Journals Online 
(AJOL) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). 

References
Castells, M. (1997). The Power of Identity. The Information Age, 2. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell. 

Robertson, R. (1995). Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity. In: 
M. Featherstone, S. Lash & R. Robertson (Eds.), Global Modernities. London: Sage Publications, 
25–45. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446250563.n2

https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446250563.n2