Abstract
South African higher education institutions have been grappling with the challenges of transformation and decolonisation as a result of the 2015–2016 student protests calling into focus issue of access (both formal and epistemological), belonging, social justice, transformation and others. One of the key sites for this struggle for transformation has been curriculum and the notion of relevance in responding to the development of social reality. Political Science as a discipline has increasingly been confronted with an ‘existential crisis’ with scholars in the field asking critical questions on whether the discipline has reached a point of irrelevance to social reality. Three key critiques of political science as a discipline are discussed in this article – firstly, the critique that political science is obsessed with what has been termed ‘methodological fetishism’ in being unable to embrace new knowledge. Secondly, that political science tends to construct universal theories and concepts that assume global homogeneity and de-emphasise the importance of context and locality in knowledge, knowledge production and its experiences. Thirdly, and the central point of this article, the social disconnection between political science as a field and its [in]ability to make a socio-economic contribution to society. This article suggests that genopolitics allows us to critically reflect on and respond to the above notions of relevance in political science by looking at the role of genes played in political behaviour and genetic dispositions to see and analyses how people, communities and societies behave in the ways that illuminate our understanding of social reality.
Highlights
The emergence of the #MustFall movements in the beginning of 2015 after nearly 21 years of the post-apartheid democratic order has emerged as a critique at the slow pace of higher education (HE) transformation in moving away from being epicentres of white supremacy to more inclusive and socially justice spaces
The findings of this study emphatically show that genetic factors play a role in the formation of political ideology, regardless of how ideology is constructed or measured, the place, era or the population sampled
The study, amongst other things, presents the findings of the first genome-wide association studies on political ideology using data from three samples: a 1990 Australian sample involving 6894 individuals from 3516 families, a 2008 Australian sample of 1160 related individuals from 635 families and a 2010 Swedish sample involving 3334 individuals from 2607 families. These results indicate that political ideology and behaviour constitutes a fundamental aspect of one’s genetically informed psychological disposition
Summary
The emergence of the #MustFall movements in the beginning of 2015 after nearly 21 years of the post-apartheid democratic order has emerged as a critique at the slow pace of higher education (HE) transformation in moving away from being epicentres of white supremacy to more inclusive and socially justice spaces. This article will argue that there is a gap in the South African HE literature on the need of expanding the curriculum in general and the Political Science discipline in particular if transformation is to be achieved in all facets of the society.
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