Indigenous Knowledge Systems in South Africa and Australia: transforming doctoral education

Abstract

While there is a great deal of support for the integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) into higher education, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to move beyond tokenism. Intensive dialogue and robust conceptual outlooks are required. In this paper, this international team of South African and Australian scholars engage in a transcultural and transdisciplinary dialogue in order to chart how discourses and debates about IKS are understood in the different historical and cultural contexts of South Africa and Australia. They combine the theoretical approaches of de Sousa Santos (2014; 2018a and b) about epistemic justice with the theories of Odora Hoppers (2021), Visvanathan (2009), and First Nations Australian scholars Williams, Bunda, Claxton, and McKinnon (2018) about an Indigenous knowledges global decolonisation praxis framework. This dialogue is deliberately jarring and polyvocal because of our desire to go beyond tokenism. The South African team have chosen to apply Bacchi’s (2009) approach of problem formulation and policy as change proposal to discourses about IKS in South African policy documents. The Australian First Nations team have demonstrated how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems work through the power of stories. Purposely adopting a polyvocal, multimodal approach, the Australian section includes ethnographic policy analysis and narratives that illustrate how IKS might operate in higher education.