Abstract
The supervision and production of a PhD thesis often presents a potentially interesting tension between PhDs as conforming to disciplinary epistemologies and PhDs as breaking epistemological boundaries. No academic discipline has been left untouched by decolonial thinking in the South African university space since the eruption of radicalized student protest movements in 2015. The Rhodes Must Fall student protest movement, which quickly morphed into Fees Must Fall, precipitated a new urgency to decolonize the university curriculum in post-apartheid South Africa. A new interdisciplinary conversation in the humanities and social sciences began to emerge which challenged established orthodoxies in favour of de-Westernizing, decolonizing and re-mooring epistemological and pedagogic practices away from Eurocentrism. Whether and how that theoretical ferment filtered into postgraduate students’ theses, however, remains to be established. This article deploys a decolonial theoretical framework to explore the tension between epistemic conformity and boundary transgressing in journalism studies by analysing reference lists of PhD theses submitted at three South African Universities three years after the protest movement Rhodes Must Fall. With specific focus on media and journalism studies as a discipline, this article argues that the PhD process represents a site for potential epistemic disobedience and disciplinary border-jumping, and for challenging the canonical insularity of Western theory in journalism studies. The findings appear to disconfirm the thesis that decolonial rhetoric has had a material influence so far on the media studies curriculum, as reflected in reference lists of cited works in their dissertations.
Highlights
The Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall student protest movements that began in 2015 precipitated a new urgency to decolonize the university curriculum in postapartheid South Africa (Le Grange, 2018; Mheta et al, 2018)
The student protest movement set in motion a lively conversation about decolonizing the
I use the term ‘Eurocentric curriculum’ in the sense in which Patel (2014), cited in Chambers (2020), uses it, to describe the systemic dominance of knowledge production, distribution, consumption and reproduction by institutions based in the Euro-American region
Summary
The Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall student protest movements that began in 2015 precipitated a new urgency to decolonize the university curriculum in postapartheid South Africa (Le Grange, 2018; Mheta et al, 2018). As Bastalich (2015: 7) points out, the theoretical framework and extant scholarly literature of a given discipline exercise: the reiterative power of discipline discourse to illuminate the phenomenon that it names and regulates, ‘becoming academic’ is not so much about discovering the new, but learning the history, language, concepts, tropes and communication styles of a field area. This fact is at the heart of academic practice, perhaps most evident in the centrality of the literature review and of research citations more broadly, which work to delineate accepted knowledge from what is judged to be a disciplinary innovation
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
