Abstract
This article expounds how a National Research Foundation (NRF) history project evolved into a transdisciplinary study. The article develops a case in favour of transdisciplinary research as a departure from strict discipline-based inquiry. The project involves collaborative research with Master’s students and researchers located at five South African universities. The aim of this article is to evaluate the project as a transdisciplinary case study, intending to focus on its emergence as a history-based discipline, evolving into a transdisciplinary project. It also explores the epistemological value of transdisciplinary research as a knowledge production methodology in the context of the demand for a decolonised curriculum in South Africa. The article is set in the context of a NRF project with a spatiotemporal focus on the District Six forced removals during the colonial-apartheid period. A qualitative instrumental case study design guided the data collection and analyses. Participants’ project proposal texts were used as data. The results show, firstly, that transdisciplinarity is manifested in a wide range of titles and disciplines; secondly, a myriad of conceptual frameworks emerged from the data; and thirdly, a broad spectrum of research approaches emerged, mainly qualitative. Transdisciplinarity focuses on the ‘subject’ and the ‘hidden middle’ as domain where alternative philosophical research orientations are explored. Transdisciplinarity can be regarded as ‘Ubuntu’ research, given the common concern to bring out the ‘voice’ of the subaltern and a rejection of separation of humans into ‘racial’ classifications. As ‘Ubuntu research’, transdisciplinary research rejects an atomistic understanding of reality that excludes the human subject and a separation between human and nature.
Highlights
Political transformation in South Africa had significant epistemological implications
Six project proposals were received from academics in which they located their disciplinary positions in the context of the project
There seems to be a common concern to excavate the voices of the historically oppressed in the District Six project, which corresponds with the centrality of placing the ‘voice’ of the subject in, as opposed to outside the research in transdisciplinarity (Nicolescu 2010)
Summary
Political transformation in South Africa had significant epistemological implications. The transition from apartheid to democracy implied a political shift in power that created epistemological space to challenge colonial-apartheid historical narratives. According to Foucault, a shift in political power is potentially a transformation in regimens of truth because power and knowledge are inseparable (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982). Notwithstanding the contestations around the terms ‘colonisation’ and ‘decolonisation’, official South African history was written from a colonial-apartheid perspective, which imposed a Eurocentric–Afrikaner nationalist view of the past, rendering the historically oppressed communities invisible or marginalised. After 23 years into democracy, the continuation of a dominant colonial-apartheid curriculum and an infuriating annual university fee increment resulted in the #FeesMustFall Movement: a national student activist movement that demanded a quality, decolonised and free education (Langa 2017). While the demand for free higher education elicited a positive political response from former President Jacob Zuma (Hunter 2017), the demand for quality and a decolonised curriculum remains an inescapable imperative in the educational sector
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