Sheehan, Helena
(2007)
Universities, social movements and market forces.
In: All Africa House lecture series, 8 March 2007, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Universities have changed drastically over the past few decades. To understand and articulate what has happened, I make a stab at answering, however sketchily, the following questions: What forces have shaped universities over recent decades? What as been the impact of social movements such as socialism, feminism, africanism on the process of the production of knowledge? Why has it been deemed necessary, not only to demand inclusion of the excluded in the domain of higher knowledge, but to challenge the existing canon and to struggle for radically new approaches to curricula? What has been achieved by history from below, gender studies, african studies, postcolonial studies? What has happened to all the passionate debates between contending paradigms?
Are market forces marginalising all else? Is it desirable and/or possible to resist? How is the project of academic transformation in South Africa unfolding within this global field of forces?
Item Type:
Conference or Workshop Item (Invited Talk)
Event Type:
Other
Refereed:
No
Additional Information:
This paper was an invited lecture at All Africa House at University of Cape Town in 2007.
Uncontrolled Keywords:
africanism; marxism; postmodernism; higher education; history of ideas; production of knowledge; ideology; epistemology; division of labour; gender; sociology of knowledge; liberation movements; neoliberalism; afrocentrism; history from below; feminism; black consciousness; commercialisation; commodification; South Africa;