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Knowledge in the blood

Knowledge in the blood

Invitation to College Lecture by Professor Jonathan Jansen

The Durban University of Technology, in association with the National Research Foundation, invites you to attend a College Lecture by Professor Jonathan Jansen: Knowledge in the blood
Confronting race and the apartheid past

Date: Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Time: 12h00 – 13h00
Venue: The DUT Art Gallery – Durban University of Technology’s Steve Biko Campus

About the book
How is it that young Afrikaners, born at the time of Mandela’s release from prison, hold firm views about a past they never lived, rigid ideas about black people and fatalistic thoughts about the future? This book describes how white South African students remember and enact an apartheid past of which they were never part. Jonathan Jansen, the first black Dean of Education at the historically white University of Pretoria (and now the first black Vice Chancellor at University of the Free State), was dogged by this question during his tenure at Tukkies, and Knowledge in the Blood seeks to answer it.

Jansen offers an intimate look at the effects of social and political change after apartheid, as white students first experienced learning and living alongside black students. He reveals the novel role pedagogical interventions played in confronting the past, as well as critical theory’s limits in dealing with conflict in a world where formerly clear-cut notions of victims and perpetrators are blurred.

While Jansen originally set out simply to convey a story of how white students change under the leadership of a diverse group of senior academics, Knowledge in the Blood ultimately became an unexpected account of how these students in turn changed him.

This book will appeal to educationists but also general readers interested in South African society. It is recommended for students and practitioners in education and sociology as well as the educated lay reader.

About the author
Jonathan D. Jansen is Rector and Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Free State, as well as a regular columnist and Vice-President of the South African Academy of Science He was a recent Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University and is former Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria. His most recent book, with Saloshna Vandeyar, is Diversity High: Class, Colour, Character and Culture in a South African High School (2008).

For more information contact Bhekani Dlamini on 031 373 2845.