ABSTRACT

Decolonisation is being embraced as an imperative within Higher Education, yet many institutions have struggled to formulate a coherent response. This article reports on a case study of a research-intensive South African university where the call for decolonisation emerged amidst considerable conflict on campus. The research takes as its departure point the notion that the discourse on decolonisation, thus far dominated by calls to re-examine Western ways of knowing, would nonetheless benefit from perspectives grounded in the paradigm of critical realism and from a social realist analysis. It found that an intellectual and cultural solipsism, as a form of fractured reflexivity, rooted in social and cultural identity, played a causal role in constricting the collective reflexivity of the corporate agents that shape the Western academic environment, resulting in a reproduction of an exclusionary intellectual and cultural environment.

摘要

非殖民化在高等教育中被视为当务之急，但许多机构一直在努力制定连贯的应对措施。本文报告了南非一所研究密集型大学的案例研究，该大学在校园内发生了相当大的冲突时出现了非殖民化的呼声。该研究以这样一种观点为出发点，即迄今为止，关于非殖民化的话语一直被重新审视西方认识方式的呼吁所主导，但仍将从基于批判现实主义范式和社会现实主义分析的观点中受益。它发现，作为一种根植于社会和文化身份的断裂的反思性形式，知识和文化唯我主义在限制塑造西方学术环境的企业代理人的集体反思性方面发挥了因果作用，