As a teaching and learning cognitive space, the Chair introduces four transdisciplinary focal areas for theoretical, applied and strategic research explorations, i.e.:
- Peace and Human Development: Cultural Resources for Peace Building
The Chair takes up the research subject of peace and human development in Africa as a means of introducing critical perspectives on democracy, values, jurisprudence, human rights and human wrongs and the place of responsibility of different cultures, including peace building from an African perspective The issue of peace, conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and recently, restorative justice is an area-cluster that can consolidate transdisciplinarity as an approach to discourse, practice and thought.
- Science, Culture and Society: Science, Plurality and Other Ways of Seeing
This research area takes the pronouncements contained in the UNESCO Declaration on Science for the Twenty-First Century, which states that all cultures can contribute scientific knowledge of universal value, and therefore that there is a need for a vigorous, informed, and democratic debate on the production and use of scientific knowledge. In order to help find ways of better linking modern science to the broader heritage of humankind, the Chair undertakes deep analyses of the linkages between science in relation to cosmology, constitution, citizenship, community, and syllabi, - thus making propositions for curriculum reform and transformation.
- Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Innovations: The Conditions for their Integration
In the context of this Chair, Indigenous Knowledge is seen as part of the subaltern and heterogeneous forms of knowledge that had no place in the fields of knowledge that grew in compact with colonialism and science. Theoretically, Indigenous Knowledge Systems makes it possible to explore meanings and theories of death, of obsolescence, of resilience, of survival, globalisation, of freedom, and of healing. It enables us to revisit concepts like ‘property’ and the ‘commons’ as well as the systems that govern these concepts. By taking on IKS, the Chair contemplates questions such as: What are the possibilities for alternative globalisations, alternative regimes of intellectual property and of alternative times?
- Universities and Society: Rethinking Community Engagement
A general consensus is forming that universities are failing in the tasks for which they were first created. What then, are the conditions for a new social contract between universities and society? The Chair engages in the articulation of issues lying at the interface between university and society in Africa; and thus invest in cultivating a theory of praxis through linkages with innovative non-formal centres/ indigenous communities in Africa and internationally with the aim of generating new insights and building discourse coalitions on the transformation of universities within South Africa, Africa, and beyond.