The 3rd Space Symposium, Decolonisation, and the Creative Arts was an interdisciplinary event exploring ideas around the imperative to decolonise the university, the role of the creative arts in provoking change, and the dialectic between the settled nature of academic curricula and the spontaneity of transformation. As a starting point, the title of the symposium drew on Homi Bhabha’s notion of a hybrid 'third space' that 'displaces the histories that constitute it and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom' (Bhabha, 1990). At the core of the #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall movements lay ideas of representation, identity, heritage, symbolism, and artworks. The creative and performing arts do not exist in a vacuum and it was within this context that the ideas central to the 3rd Space Symposium evolved.
