Prof Norman Duncan, Vice-Principal: Academic at the University of Pretoria, cordially invites you to a public lecture on transformation presented by Prof Garth Stevens, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand.

 

This paper begins with the assertion that, like so many historical injunctions towards social change, the contemporary decolonial impulse to transform higher education and its associated curricula runs the risk of becoming a floating signifier, if it is not populated with broad consensual understandings of its substantive content. To this end, the paper highlights key tenets associated with a decolonial approach, but selectively suggests six critical applications of such an approach to higher education in the current South African context, that either enable its potentialities or reveal its possible pitfalls. First, the question of historicity is important to engage, in order to appreciate both the continuities and discontinuities of present calls for a decolonial praxis. Second, whilst decolonial theory may have global purchase power in critiquing western modernity, how it is bedded is contextually contingent, and the historical salience of race and its intersectional referents will be central features to contend with in South African higher education. Third, heightened calls towards Afrocentricity in the production and dissemination of knowledge will need to engage critically with epistemic justice debates that foreground either a form of recuperative idealism or a form of archival expansion. Fourth, innovative pedagogic methods will of necessity have to interrogate the relations of power that have come to characterise the teaching and learning environments in contemporary higher education. Fifth, understanding the process of curriculum change as one that is iterative and constantly open to contestation surfaces an obligation to understand current modes of contestation that are frequently phenomenological/experiential, affective and corporeal. Finally, the paper concludes that the selected applications of a decolonial praxis, above, will invariably raise debates about the very nature of the neo-liberal university, especially in a historical moment of global populism.