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

knowledge, and an understanding of how knowledge is generated,
to what purposes, in whose interest and also questions about whose
knowledge is privileged and whose excluded. These engagements
can moreover take place with the very constituencies in which the
university is situated, defined broadly - i.e. beyond the confines of
the "ivory tower". Wider conceptions of scholarship are necessary in
social settings where scientific knowledge is necessary to address the
seemingly intractable issues facing democratic societies. This implies
engagements using "public reasoning" and other mechanisms to
advance social awareness and academic scholarship together with
a wider intellectual and social orientation, which requires academics
to reach beyond the responsibilities of conventional academic work
associated with the production of peer-reviewed articles, teaching
and postgraduate supervision.
These experiences too are deep
reservoirs of understanding and local
ways of knowing and acting, which can
often be relied upon to solve some
of the seemingly intractable
dilemmas facing society.
Academics can amplify their roles by participating in scholarship
through social engagement, making their intellectual outputs
more widely available to the university's "publics", engaging with
its many challenges intellectually and practically; to build on the
relationship between the university and its community and to
relate academic knowledge to its application by producing new
conceptualisations, theories and their associated laws. It can
support the production of scientific knowledge, which is anchored
in a deep and enduring approach to the "public good" even while
it simultaneously interrogates commonly held views and examines
the integrity, diversities and strengths of social and indigenous
ways of knowing by engaging with the wider range of the sources of
knowledge and its epistemologies. This approach would enrich the
university's capacity to engage with the direct experiences of society
since in these experiences too are deep reservoirs of understanding
and local ways of knowing and acting, which can often be relied
upon to solve some of the seemingly intractable dilemmas facing
society. By doing this, the university can avoid the pitfalls of forms
of knowledge that ignore the possibilities of learning from social
experience, relying solely on academic knowledge as the only and
"objective" basis of scientific understanding.
Science without a wider social purpose i.e. in the reductive way that
the idea of the third mission of universities is sometimes conceived
- does not orient itself sufficiently to the broader aims of scientific
enquiry and the production of knowledge as envisaged by many
of the greatest thinkers through the ages who have pronounced
unequivocally on the social (and spiritual purposes) of knowledge;
of knowledge as essentially about the resolution of social and
human issues (even if these relate to the physical and cosmological
environmental inhabited by humans) as inextricable from the purpose
of addressing the lives of humans as conscious beings. Their writings
repudiate any suggestion that scientific knowledge is separable from
knowledge about the human condition, the aspirations, hopes,
loves, tribulations, histories and philosophies of humanity and its
cultural, linguistic, creative and expressive ideas encompassed in the
pantheon of scientific disciplines on which academic knowledge is
grounded.
7