Abstract
Author(s): Ndhlovu, Finex J.; Kelly, Stephen John | Abstract: Scholars speaking from Southern perspectives have long argued in favor of recognizing diverse ways of knowing and against the hegemony of Euro-modernist epistemologies that have crystallized into orthodoxy within the academy. Euro-modernist epistemologies proceed from positivist “scientific” principles that turn a blind eye to the diversity of ways of reading and interpreting social experience. They reflect and represent subjective perceptions about what constitutes valid and legitimate knowledge. In this paper, we address the question: How do we prepare higher degree research students for the opportunities that flow and strategic challenges that arise from a diverse global network of knowledge societies? We suggest “ecology of knowledges paradigm” and “multilingual habitus” as the linchpin of higher degree research student training. This approach brings together diverse linguistic and cultural traditions to mediate pathways for producing interconnected forms of knowledge that transcend the limits of monolingual and mono-epistemic ways of seeing. The argument is that the struggle for cognitive justice in education and training is inseparable from the broader struggle for global social justice.
Highlights
Framing the Problem At the heart of higher degree research student training must be the desire to nurture a cohort of globally networked future academic and research leaders
We address the key questions posed in this paper by proposing a framework that draws on de Sousa Santos’s notion of ecology of knowledges paradigm as explicated in Another Knowledge is Possible; and the multilingual habitus approach pioneered by Ingrid Gogolin in “The Monolingual Habitus”
It is here that notions of ecology of knowledges, multilingual habitus and ontologies of incompleteness that form the conceptual architecture of the model we propose are quite relevant
Summary
This paper has addressed a number of conceptual and pedagogical questions in the context of higher degree research student training to chart alternative trajectories that accord with realities of our present globalizing and interconnected world. This paper is a first attempt that opens a fruitful pathway for future empirical projects that will answer these complex questions in more concrete ways through practical application of the model in specific higher education settings. For this reason, the responses provided in the paper are not intended to be doctrinaire – some are tentative; others partial. The paper is essentially an invitation to all of us – academics, educators, HDR program administrators, research students, policy makers, and all – to engage in dialectical conversations about how best to re-design research training programs such that they align with the ongoing anti-colonial, anti-foundational and transformative agenda currently being pushed by scholars speaking from decolonial and Southern perspectives
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