Acta Academica: Critical views on society, culture and politics

Incompleteness as a framework for convivial scholarship and practice in healing

Francis B. Nyamnjoh — 2024-07-30

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“Philosophical suicide” during the climate crisis: how belief influences the response to climate change

Juan Coetzee — 2024-07-30

When approaching the climate crisis, there appears to be a universal tendency towards philosophical suicide. When faced with the sheer scale of the problem at hand, falling for the façade of easy solutions seems to be an expected response. However, this tendency towards philosophical suicide may complicate the fight against the climate crisis by drawing attention away from the problem at hand. To approach this problem, the overarching purpose of this article is to determine how the change in the philosophical approach to the absurd may assist in framing the fight against climate change. During the investigation into this problem, it was found that philosophical suicide is a real problem that may be chosen when easy solutions are offered for a problem that sufficiently threatens the individual’s state of existence. Furthermore, this philosophical suicide threatens the fight against climate change due to it leading individuals to believe lies perpetrated through strategies like greenwashing. This is of crucial importance since philosophical suicide threatens the fight against the climate crisis by not allowing individuals to consciously approach the problem. However, there does appear to be some hope. If the newer generations are sufficiently educated on the topic, there may be a chance that philosophical suicide, as well as the prevailing sense of dread that appears to be rampant in the younger generations, can be countered. In this way, educating individuals may enable them to consciously approach the absurdity of the climate crisis and, in doing so, revolt against it.

Identity, diversity, and rhizomatic complexity

Bert Olivier — 2024-07-30

This paper addresses the vexing question of identity in relation to diversity and ‘rhizomatic complexity’ – a phrase that signals its Deleuzo-Guattarian orientation. It is argued that, far from being something that can be comprehended in unitary substantialist fashion (that is, as something unified and forever resistant to change), ‘identity’ can instead be articulated as a function of the constantly shifting relations and interrelations between and among the ‘processes’ comprising the ‘subject’. According to this rhizomatic conception, the subject – if indeed it can be called that – comprises an assemblage-in-becoming, whose contours change as it enters into open-ended processual relations of desiring-production. This simply means that Deleuze and Guattari, complexifying Lacan’s already complex subject (stretched between the ‘real’, the imaginary and the symbolic) even further, have theorised a non-substantialist version of it, which accommodates change as well as intermittent, albeit fleeting, stability. This allows for a subject that may be described as identity-in-flux, which means that identity is not cast in stone, but instead that the rhizomatic, open-ended structure of the assemblage subject accommodates reconfigurations of identity, with the caveat that such reconfigurations cannot instantiate a leap over the abyss of nothingness to a point that is rhizomatically untethered to the hitherto temporally evolved assemblage-subject. This conceptualisation of the subject has far-reaching implications for, among other things, cultural and social reorientation on the part of rhizomatic interrelationality of individual subjects. Moreover, it exposes social and cultural ‘diversity’ as being prey to a certain mode of postmodernism, which exacerbates flux and difference to the point where – unlike the poststructuralist models of Lacan and Deleuze/Guattari – it cannot account for difference while retaining a sense of (admittedly changeable) social ‘identity’ – something that undermines the political function of agency, as demonstrated in the conclusion of the paper.

English and/in Africa: reflections on the language question, Afropolitanism, and linguistic orientation six decades after the ‘African Writers Conference’

Luan Staphorst — 2024-07-30

A decolonial reading of Bernstein’s sociology of education in transforming the university in South Africa

Mlamuli Nkosingphile Hlatshwayo — 2024-07-30

In this paper, I reclaim Bernstein’s pedagogic device to think through and theorise higher education transformation and decolonisation in the global South. I am especially persuaded by Bernstein’s work on the pedagogic device and the endless possibilities it provides in re-thinking the public university and what it could be. Using South Africa as a case study, I focus on the decolonial calls sparked by the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall protests in 2015/2016 around the need to critique, evaluate and dismantle the neoliberal university in South Africa. I suggest that Bernstein’s ideas of the field of production, the field of recontextualisation as well as the field of reproduction offer an intersectional, and dialectically useful, lens in making epistemic, ontological and methodological intervention(s) in transforming the university in South Africa. I end the paper with some concluding remarks on the discursive usefulness of Bernstein’s work in transforming the public university in the global South.

Social restitution: tools and actions to rehumanise and transform injustice

Sharlene Swartz — 2024-07-30

Restitution has predominantly been described as a legal rather than a social action in international law, as well as in South Africa’s history of truth, reconciliation and redress policies after the end of apartheid. Introducing the concept of ‘social restitution’ this paper argues for a reimagined and wider understanding of restitution to address the need for social justice in the spaces between the law court and individual acts of charity, and between policies for redress and personal antipathy against these. Social restitution can be defined as intentional voluntary actions and attitudes developed through dialogue based on a sense of moral obligation aimed at addressing the damage done to individuals and communities by unjust actions and legacies of the past. Drawing on international debates about and understandings of the meaning of restitution, social restitution is shown to be both continuous with legal restitution and distinguished from it through its voluntary nature, its potential to be forward-looking rather than punitive, generative rather than accusatory, and offering everyday opportunities to bridge the gap between ‘knowing’ about injustice and ‘acting’ to repair it. Following this discussion, the latter part of the paper outlines the need for new categories of actors in contexts of injustice beyond those of victim, perpetrator and bystander (the Hilberg triangle of actors), introducing the ideas of beneficiaries and resisters; argues for the potential social restitution has as a mechanism for rehumanising all actors; and offers recommendations for how engaged action-oriented dialogues might contribute to achieving this aim, while noting the limits and dangers of dialogue. It draws on an empirical study on the meaning and actions of restitution conducted with black and white adult South Africans in making some of its arguments.

Narratives as a gateway to transitional justice

Chenai Matshaka — 2024-07-30

In many ways transitional justice is a battle of narratives. Both at the conception and implementation stages, it is contested in part by different meanings of what justice is, how harm is understood, and who the victim and perpetrator are. All these determine the trajectory the processes will take. How we reach deeper understanding about these battles and their implications is a result of our choice of research methodology. In this article, I reflect on the use of narrative as a philosophy of understanding the world, as a data source, a lens, and a method of investigation in relation to understanding the trajectory of transitional justice in Zimbabwe between 2000-2013. While the findings of the research have been presented in other outputs, this article gives insight into the research methodology. It argues that using narratives of violence as a gateway to transitional justice research is key to understanding the nuances that determine the trajectories transitional justice processes may take in any context.

Thinking about drugs histories and private purposes in South Africa

Thembisa Waetjen — 2024-07-30

Spectres of reparation in South Africa: an interview with Jaco Barnard-Naudé

Pierre De Vos — 2024-07-30