Place and pedagogy: using space and materiality in teaching social science in Southern Africa

ABSTRACT This article responds to recent perspectives from the Global South calling for the decolonisation of universities. Drawing on examples from two post-independence universities in Southern Africa – Sol Plaatje University in South Africa, and Great Zimbabwe University in Zimbabwe – we examine pedagogic innovation in undergraduate social science teaching. In particular, we examine the use of space and materiality as teaching tools in social anthropology. We argue for the promotion of what we call emplacement: such that materiality is not only used to relativise and deconstruct inherited world views about the Global South, in order that views from within the Global South are given centrality, but also such that students can situate themselves as embodied persons within concrete spaces and communities which carry particular social, economic and political histories. We see such a move as a decolonial one, that allows for the creation and maintenance of students as embodied, knowledge-making persons situated within communities, rather than as abstracted individuals to whom academia imparts knowledge created by others.