Reflexive Encountering and Postgraduate Research Training in South Africa

Abstract

This article, based on theoretical reflections and empirical examples, outlines dilemmas in the social positioning of postgraduate research when students are challenged with their locations as insiders and outsiders in terms of the issues they investigate in Development Studies. Encountering the “other” and oneself in, against and beyond the scholarship-activism binary offers fertile ground for engaged research yet is entangled with configurations of power and regulation in academia. This argument is developed by drawing on three recent examples of postgraduate research production and a quantitative rapid appraisal of postgraduate production at a tertiary institution. The analysis of quantitative data and case studies evinces particular issues in outsourcing of knowledge production, researcher reflexivity, possibilities for co-production and tenacious anticipatory-procedural ethics as embedded in institutional practices and orthodoxies that direct, enable and constrain such matters. The author questions the normalisation of knowledge-production power when the imperative to mutual, inclusive learning, coupled with critical self-reflection by researchers in Development Studies is thwarted. Possibilities to overcome these dilemmas in Mode three institutions are suggested.