Rhythms of mobility and transformation: First-generation commuter students’ educational engagement in Cape Town

Abstract

This article examines how first-generation commuter students from two working-class South African towns rhythmically negotiated the uneven spatial and temporal infrastructures shaping their educational engagement at a Cape Town university of technology. Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial and temporal analytics, we used a spatial-rhythmic lens alongside a blended, retrospective, multi-sited ethnographic design, ethnography on the move to trace the complex, nonlinear educational trajectories of these students and show how mobility, space and time converge in shaping educational persistence. Excluded from residence through rigid accommodation policies, these students navigated fragmented transportation systems, unfamiliar university terrains and materially constrained home environments through adaptive bodily, temporal and relational practices. Commuting thus emerged not merely as a logistical constraint but as a central rhythm organising students’ educational life. By repurposing arduous journeys for study, cultivating peer networks and crafting self-directed academic routines, participants became rhythmic actors who developed situated, practical strategies for connection, persistence and academic success.
Contribution: By foregrounding the spatial-temporal negotiations shaping working-class students’ educational trajectories, the article reframes commuting as a productive rhythm of engagement and argues that meaningful institutional transformation requires time-sensitive, mobility-attuned pedagogies that recognise the differentiated rhythms through which students inhabit and reshape the infrastructures of learning.