Professor Norman Duncan, Vice-Principal: Academic at the University of Pretoria, cordially invites you to a public lecture on Curriculum Transformation presented by Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Professor and Research Chair in Historical Trauma and Transformation, Stellenbosch University.

Title: In Search of a New Archive: Reclaiming Agency, Voice and Knowledge Production beyond the Post-apartheid

Persons with disabilities are kindly requested to contact Neo Maseko on 012 420 2631 if assistance is required.

Current debates on decolonization at universities are an important opportunity to reimagine the goals of education and to develop a new archive of creative pedagogy in ways that might advance new knowledge production and contribute to transformation of the curriculum in higher education. This paper argues that expanding these debate requires that we reimagine the goals of higher education with a vision of social justice in mind. Focusing on historical, theoretical, artistic and other forms of knowledge that draw from a (post)conflict African archive, the paper explores new terrains of investigation opened up by this archive, and demonstrates what research practice might look like if the goal is to develop a curriculum that will contribute to global knowledge from the perspective of local experience.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is Professor and Research Chair in Historical Trauma and Transformation at Stellenbosch University. Her interests focus is on mainly two strands of research; the first is exploring ways in which the impact of the dehumanising experiences of oppression and violent abuse continues to play out in the next generation in the aftermath of historical trauma and in the second research area, she expands her earlier work on remorse and forgiveness and probes the role of empathy more deeply, by engaging in a perspective that makes transparent the interconnected relationship among empathy, Ubuntu and the embodied African phenomenon of inimba—a Xhosa word that loosely translated means “umbilical cord”—and integrating these with the relational and psychoanalytic concept of intersubjectivity. The goal is to find a richer, deeper and more complex understanding of empathy that takes into account an African knowledge archive. Her critically acclaimed book, A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness won the Christopher Award in the United States in 2003, and the Alan Paton Award in South Africa in 2004. The book has been published seven times, including translations in Dutch, German, Italian and Korean. Her other books include as co-author, Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Healing Trauma; as co-editor, Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past and Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory as editor. She was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, from Holy Cross College in Massachusetts (2002), and an honorary Doctor of Theology from the Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena, Germany (2017). In 2017 she was offered a three-year position as Research Advisor and Global Scholar at Queen’s University, Belfast, affiliated with the Senator George Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice.