The Organic Crisis and Epistemic Disobedience in South African Higher Education Curricula:Making Political Science Relevant

Abstract

Post the 2015-2016 student movement calling for higher education transformation and decolonisation, institutions of higher learning in South Africa have continued to grapple with how to respond to these ethical and imperative demands. These challenges include the need to decolonise and Africanise curricula; diversity; foregrounding knowledge as an object of study. Further, responding to what Keet (2014) terms as the 'plastic knowledges' in the transformations and stagnations in the Humanities; challenging and deconstructing alienating institutional culture(s)particularly in historically white higher education institutions; the often forgotten and marginalised experiences of queer, transgendered, students and staff. One of the disciplines that has come under intensive scrutiny has been Political Science, being accused of being 'irrelevant' and teaching 'dead white men' with no epistemic connection to our local context. In this article, I attempt to respond to the above-mentioned critiques. I rely on Gramsci's notion of the organic crisis and Quijano's epistemic disobedience to bring them together in firstly, making sense of the nature of the crisis in South African higher education curriculum in general and Political Science in particular. And secondly, as both theoretical and empirical tools of de-linking the Political Science curriculum from coloniality and making curricula more transformative, socially just and inclusive. I argue that for Political Science to reclaim its relevance in an increasingly transdisciplinary world, it is necessary for us to not only know and understand the disciplinary crisis that confronts the discipline, but it is also necessary for us to begin to propose some of the epistemic solutions that can Mlamuli Nkosingphile Hlatshwayo 66 respond to the crisis that Political Science is facing. I employ epistemic disobedience to reclaim and re-centre African Philosophy, in particular, ethnophilosophy and nationalist-ideological philosophyas an attempt at making Political Science relevant to both the African experience(s) and to the broader global community.

Re-Thinking the Humanities Curriculum in the Time of Covid-19

“…The public university continues to marginalise, colonise, oppress, and depress particularly those who occupy Black ontological subjectivities (Hlatshwayo 2019;Khunou 2019;Mbembe 2016). I argue that the purpose of the public university during this pandemic is to respond to three fundamental crises, namely the epistemic crisis, the cultural crisis, and the economic crisis.…”

“…More recently, Badat (2017b) and Hlatshwayo (2019) have advanced Gramsci's work on the organic crisis as a theoretical lens by means of which to examine the challenges facing South African universities. In this chapter, I contribute to this emerging body of work that looks at the South African academy as not only structurally differentiated and fragmented, but also as an existential organic crisis in responding to the 2015-2016 ethical demands for transformation and decolonisation.…”

Moving from discourse to Praxis: Situating academics at the centre of decolonisation struggle

“…The decolonisation call by students in South African universities, which took place in 2015, was a major turning point in the higher education discourse in South Africa (Chikolo 2021;Hlatshwayo 2019;Mampane and Omidire 2018;Mbembe 2019). It was a turning point as students held the view that the present university designs and settings still emulate and exacerbate the colonial and apartheid designs and structure.…”

“…For Keet (2014), decolonisation is about attending to whatever is left undone by colonialism. Essentially, it is about dealing with colonial legacies in our democratic society, including the prevalence dominance of Eurocentric knowledge and curriculum in higher education institutions, which must be Africanised (Heleta 2016a;Hlatshwayo 2019).…”

“…The students have broadened decolonisation in their context to mean: the total change in syllabus or curriculum content, which according to Hlatshwayo (2019) and Mbembe (2019) is applicable mainly in social sciences, or humanities. In addition, Mbembe (2019) argues, changes concerning student demographics, at the same time recruiting more Africans, changing the academic and administrative support bodies, institutional cultures and spaces, funding deficit for higher education, and high level of dropouts, amongst others.…”