Academics should consider their position of privilege
- Buhle Zuma
Revisiting South African social science through migration and displacement.
Professor Loren Landau has questioned the prevailing self-censorship among academics and asked them to use their position of privilege wisely.
“Those of us working in South African higher education – particularly those of us working at historically white universities – and even more so for those of us who are white, foreign or all of the above – are increasingly being asked to legitimise our voices and critiques.”
The consequence of this is that scholars have started to fall in line with the ‘positive values’ outlined by the government.
Landau spoke during his inaugural titled Mobility and Metanarrative: Revisiting South African Social Science through Migration and Displacement, which he used to critique the role of scholars, particularly in the social sciences, post-democracy going into the third decade of democracy in South Africa.
Scholars are guilty of sanctioning the censorship by bowing to external pressure and modifying findings of their scholarly enquiries and making safe appointments, he said. Landau drew on incidents during his academic career at Wits to highlight how political ideologies and policy sometimes trump logic.
“In terms of my own research, I have felt the pressure to conform to various domestic and international discourses in how I present my findings and the kind of policy or popular changes for which I call. This kind of pressure may be healthy, but I fear it is not far from overt censorship and, more worryingly, a kind of insidious self-censorship.”
The need to be heard in corridors of influence and access to funding is among the factors driving the trend.
“I see and feel a kind of self-censorship that may also undermine our ability to promote both scholarship and social transformation.” To read his speech, .
Landau is the South African Research Chair in Mobility and the Politics of Difference at the African Centre for Migration and Society, formerly known as the Forced Migration Studies Programme. The Centre has been unequivocal in challenging dominant views about the nature and causes of xenophobic violence in South Africa.
Landau suggested that academics, particularly those in the social sciences, must work to destabilise the language of socio-political formations even where it means isolation from officials, peers and personal profits.
“Doing so can protect social sciences’ autonomy while opening new opportunities for understanding the world in which we live and new tools for challenging those who seek to describe, theorise and change it.”