English

Daisy Pillay,Jenni Karlsson

doi:10.15700/201503070811

English

Daisy Pillay, Jenni Karlsson

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.15700/201503070811

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Abstract

Universities in South Africa during apartheid reflected the racialised politics of the period. This gave rise to divisive descriptors such as ‘historically white/black’; ‘English/Afrikaans-speaking’ institutions and ‘Bantustan’ universities. These descriptors signal a hierarchy of social status and state funding. We start by explaining how these apartheid-era institutional arrangements formed socially unjust ‘silos’ around postgraduate Education researchers and their research. Against this backdrop, we describe a project that surveyed postgraduate Education research at 23 institutions in South Africa between 1995 and 2004 – the first decade of democracy. The products of the survey constitute two spaces. First, there is the physical archive of dissertations and theses from the higher education institutions. This space disrupts the historical differences and physical distances, bringing together the postgraduate Education research of that period. The second space is the electronic bibliographic database of the archive. It is an abstract space that defies traditional shelving arrangements. We argue that this national project broke down the apartheid-era silos that separated the postgraduate Education research of the different higher education institutions in South Africa. In this article we propose that a third space manifests when a researcher works with the project’s archive and/or database. It is a space of lived experience. In the interactive moment and space, when the researcher connects with the archive or database, there is the possibility of the researcher generating new understandings and ideas of/about Education research. Although the project described in this article has ended, we found that in the third space of the interactive experienced moment fresh questions about the knowledge produced by postgraduate Education researchers in South Africa, at the critical historical moment of the first decade of democracy, were made possible. Keywords : archive; database; knowledge production; postgraduate research; spatial theory

Highlights

Postgraduate Education research in South African higher education (HE) institutions since 1994 continues to be shaped by race, gender, institutional specificities, disciplinary field and philosophical approach
In this article we argue that the work of the Project itself broke down the silos that separated postgraduate Education research produced at the different higher education institutions
We argue that the project’s development of the physical archive space, its virtual counterpart in the bibliographic database, as well as the lived space when researchers connect with the archive and/or database, open up possibilities for privileging the critical role that intellectual endeavour plays in the critique of social transformation in South Africa

Summary

Introduction

Postgraduate Education research in South African higher education (HE) institutions since 1994 continues to be shaped by race, gender, institutional specificities, disciplinary field and philosophical approach. A year later, South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF) became involved in the project and this led to the project’s expansion to a national level with 20 out of 23 higher education institutions identified as contributors. For their survey the PPER researchers visited 20 higher education institutions and photocopied and bound key sections of education theses and dissertations found in the libraries and departments of those institutions. In this article we use Lefebvre’s (1991) theory of space to reflect critically on three spaces which emerged over the course of the Project: the archive of physical documents, its virtual counterpart of the database, and the lived space when researchers use either the archive or database, or both

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