Prof Edith Phaswana, the interim Head of the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, is counted among the winners of the prestigious Humanities and Social Science Awards 2020.
Presented by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) in South Africa on 12 March 2020, which is also celebrating its fifth year of existence, these awards are for books published between January 2018 and June 2019, as well as creative collections and digital contributions produced between January 2018 and June 2019. The awards are open to South African publishers and scholars based in South African universities and independent artists linked to universities. The value of the award is R65 000 per winning entry.
Phaswana and her colleagues collaborated on a project entitled "Higher education transformation in South Africa". They hosted national dialogues with academics in different regions of South Africa. They talked to black academics and students in historically black and white institutions. One of these dialogues was held here at Unisa in 2016.
A story of the triumph of good over evil using innovation in the humanities as a tool.
Black academic voices: The South African experience is edited by Grace Khunou, Edith Phaswana, Katijah Khoza-Shangase and Hugo Canham.
The project produced an edited volume entitled Black academic voices: The South African experience (HSRC Press), which won the best non-fiction edited volume for 2020. The book is a collection of diverse autobiographical chapters by a group of black academics from universities across South Africa. At the award ceremony, one of the attendees said “The book speaks to us, for us and about us”.
The event was hosted at the historic landmark Constitutional Hill in Braamfontein. For Phaswana, “the highlight of the evening was to receive this award at this location where our ancestors were tortured, humiliated, raped, and murdered. This was symbolic in that it speaks to the restoration of dignity for the majority of South Africans. It’s about the rehumanisation of black people who were devalued and dehumanisation in this space under apartheid, and in many ways continue to be in this space—because of their gender, sexual orientation, nationalities, and ethnic groups in this new dispensation”. As the adage would say, it’s a story of the triumph of good over evil using innovation in the humanities as a tool.
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* Submitted by the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute
Publish date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00.0