Abstract:
This article responds to recent perspectives from the Global South
calling for the decolonisation of universities. Drawing on examples
from two post-independence universities in Southern Africa – Sol
Plaatje University in South Africa, and Great Zimbabwe University in
Zimbabwe – we examine pedagogic innovation in undergraduate
social science teaching. In particular, we examine the use of space
and materiality as teaching tools in social anthropology. We argue for
the promotion of what we call emplacement: such that materiality is
not only used to relativise and deconstruct inherited world views
about the Global South, in order that views from within the Global
South are given centrality, but also such that students can situate
themselves as embodied persons within concrete spaces and commu
nities
which carry particular social, economic and political histories. We
see such a move as a decolonial one, that allows for the creation and
maintenance of students as embodied, knowledge-making persons
situated within communities, rather than as abstracted individuals to
whom academia imparts knowledge created by others.
