Research Day - Decolonial and Postcolonial Knowledge Production in the Era of DIGITech and Artificial Intelligence

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A PhD is a challenging but rewarding research degree that allows for the advancement of one’s field of study.

It requires the careful generation of research questions, the requisite data, and the development of applicable solution-driven answers to the main research problem.

UKZN’s annual scholars’ research day showcased research characterised by conceptual excellence and contextual relevance for decolonial and postcolonial knowledge production in the era of DIGITech and Artificial Intelligence.

Emphasis was on how conceptual excellence and contextually relevant research are transformatively engaged, with, by, and for our people, as well as how to utilise digital technologies and emerging artificial intelligence tools. The knowledge produced needs to optimally serve not only our knowledge fraternities and constituencies - nationally, continentally and internationally - but also be relevant and useful for how we organise ourselves according to our humanising Ubuntu systems and values, socially, politically, economically, and aesthetically speaking.

In decolonial epistemic frameworks, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Head of College, Professor Nhlanhla Mkhize pointed out that Southern Theories open a space for the development of curricula that serve the educational aspirations of our people and also develop and deploy humanising pedagogies that affirm the people’s being and knowing. Decolonial and Southern theories make the current epistemics both critically and constructively relevant and significant.

The Dean and Head of the School of Arts, Professor Nobuhle Ndimande-Hlongwa showed how acknowledging the importance and relevance of African universities operates hand-in-hand with the intellectualising of indigenous languages. This is a seminal part of the United Nations Division for Inclusive Development in its initiation and steering of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022 - 2032).

The event also highlighted the importance of comprehending what meeting the main objective of the PhD thesis as well as subsequent scholarship and research entails, viz to make an “original contribution to knowledge”, and “an original contribution to the frontiers of knowledge”. Through its conceptual excellence and contextual relevance, the PhD thesis provides the springboard for the upscaling and continuing transformative epistemic contributions of future scholars and researchers in their respective contextually-relevant Africa as well as internationally-focused humanities and social sciences knowledge frontiers contributions.

According to Professor Johannes A Smit, the Chair of the Humanities Institute and Professor of Religion and Social Transformation in SRPC, conceptually and contextually relevant scholarship raises the bar of research excellence, as practiced in empirical content, discourse, thematising, and keyword research. Similar to the natural sciences, the question becomes much more pointedly, about the nature of empirical or textual data required and generated to address research questions and insights optimally, and comprehensively. Optimal data generation serves as evidence or facts, for research analyses, data interpretation, and arguments that address research questions satisfactorily. Conceptual excellence needs to match the quality of scholarly insight, deriving from the data, or data patterns, and may also lead to valid and evidence-based foundational theory building.

He said, ‘If conceptual relevance generates and engages relevant data, then, inductively, the data and how data patterns are conceptualised, derive from relevant context. And, if we think linguistically, then context comprises the assumptions or clusters of assumptions we have or may generate about the human and social phenomena and their aspects, we study, within our specific African urban and rural contexts.’

If decolonial epistemic scholarship mainly focuses on the critical analysis and evaluation of past-present epistemics in Africa, then postdecolonial scholarship produces present- and future-facing knowledge opportunities for Africa, and the global South. It primarily asks the question, ‘What knowledge do we want?’ It is an important question, since how we answer it in the present, will then serve as the enabling and positive capstone and foundational building blocks for the continuous intergenerational curricula and affirming humanising pedagogies of the future. As such, it is not de novo, because it continues, upscales and builds on the numerous conceptually innovative relevant humanising discourses for freedom, equity and social justice, of the past-present.

African epistemics of colonial resistances, critique, and visions of epistemic hope, provide the wide discursive pools of thought for scholarly innovations through research and knowledge building for future human and societal wellbeing and prosperity.

Smit also shed light on the enabling thematics of “knowledge-power”, from Foucault’s 1982 “The Subject and Power”. In terms of the current African epistemic and epistemological opportunities, the subject’s commitment to build and develop aptitudes, or capabilities and capacity, ‘directly, inherent in the body, or relayed by [and through] external instruments’ are helpful, because it covers our own human improvement of our capabilities, and also constructively uses the recently and currently emerging digital and AI tools. To subjective, bodily capabilities, we may also then add enabling ‘laws, structures, ideologies, and institutions’ and processes, that use and ‘transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium.’

These, positively and affirmatively, together, serve humanising knowledge-power development, in so far as knowledge not only circulates in the social body in enabling ways, but also provides ideas of how it may be exerted collectively and interactively, in the interest of the kinds of global humanising effects it has on how it may yet “conducts”, bodies, minds, institutions, structures as well as communication systems and institutions of our world.

Words: Sinoyolo Mahlasela

Image: Shutterstock