2011-NMMU-Research-Report - Research Management - Nelson ...

esearchers gaining expertise and confidence in research and
publishing.
I would like to take this opportunity to encourage all academic staff
in the Faculty of Arts to continuously intensify activities in research
and publication. We should seize whatever opportunity is available
in applying for new grants and explore research collaboration with
local and international partners. We should strive for a more creative
and innovative research.
We are convinced that humanities and social sciences have a
significant role to play in the development of human resources of
our country and we can do it by capitalising on our strategies in
research capabilities.
I would like to take this opportunity
to encourage all academic staff in the
Faculty of Arts to continuously intensify
activities in research and publications.
Publications and research will ensure that the knowledge created
through research is well disseminated for the benefit of society at
large.
Prof Velile Notshulwana
Executive Dean: Faculty of Arts
Faculty Researcher
of the Year
Prof Bert Olivier
63
As an undergraduate student, Prof Bert Olivier discovered philosophy
more or less by accident, but has never regretted it. As he knew
very little, philosophy turned out to be just up his street, as it were,
because of Socrates’ teaching that the only thing we know with
certainty is how little we know.
Prof Olivier says if he had to identify the common element in all of
his research it would probably be to say that it is the desire or wish to
understand people’s actions or behaviour, not only as it may be more
or less directly observed, but also through the artefacts that they
produce (such as artworks, architecture, cinema, literature, etc.)
and the sometimes self-defeating, ecologically harmful economic
practices they engage in. His current research involves:
• What motivates human behaviour/actions?
• What is the relationship between reason and irrational or unconscious
motives?
• Why has the history of the world - particularly Western society - been
characterised by the predominance of the drive for rational/scientific
control of nature and society (which has resulted in social aberrations
such as fascism, including apartheid, as well as an apparently
ineradicable economic system that has created enormous wealth on
the one hand, and equally enormous poverty on the other, let alone
immeasurable ecological destruction)?
• What does the common root of technology and art (techné
and poiesis) tell us about the prospects of initiating a process of
rehabilitating nature-destructive technology and turn it into
nature enhancing technology - that is, how can we transform the
"cradle to grave" model into a "cradle to cradle" model? What do
we learn from the arts about subliminal human fears and desires,
refracted through the images and figures encountered there?