Can We Make Spaces for Knowledge Systems to Coexist, Without Duress? - A Conversation Prof. Catherine Odora Hoppers

As you will have heard on many previous episodes of the podcast, with Marie Battiste, Carl Mika, Wakanyi Hoffman, Vanessa Andreotti and others, understanding the ways in which our colonial schooling systems have propogated one particular way of knowing our world, and excluded and often violently suppressed many others is something that I care deeply about. For me, it has to be a key part of any transformative work that we do to, with humility and curiosity, to reorient education systems. But in order to do this, we need people who are able to gather and convene the critical conversations that put these ways of knowing in dialogue with each other. It is therefore the greatest honour to have Professor Catherine Odora Hoppers joining me on the podcast this week. For her entire career Dr Hoppers has been at the forefront of facilitating these vital conversations. In post-Apartheid South Africa, she designed and enabled the process that led to the first national policy on the recognition, development and protection of indigenous knowledge systems.

Professor Catherine Odora Hoppers is a scholar and policy specialist on International Development, education, North-South questions, disarmament, peace, and human security. She is a UNESCO expert in basic education, lifelong learning, information systems and on Science and Society; an expert in disarmament at the UN Department of Disarmament Affairs; an expert to the World Economic Forum on benefit sharing and value addition protocols; and the World Intellectual Property Organisation on traditional knowledge and community intellectual property rights.

She got a Masters and PhD in International Education from Stockholm University, Sweden. In South Africa, Professor Hoppers was awarded Professor Extraordinarius in 2019 at University of South Africa (Pretoria). She held a South African Research Chair in Development Education at the University of South Africa (2008-2018). Prior to that, she was a technical adviser on Indigenous Knowledge Systems to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (South Africa) and led the Task Team to draft the national policy on Indigenous Knowledge Systems. She is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf, 2002), and was a member of the Academy of Science Special Panel on the Future of Humanities (South Africa).

She was the Goodwill Ambassador for Makerere University in Kampala Uganda; and Ambassador for Non-Violence at the Durban Universities’ International Centre for Non-Violence. In July 2015, she received the Nelson Mandela Distinguished Africanist Award from HE Thabo Mbeki for her pursuit of the total liberation for the African continent through the promotion of Indigenous Knowledge Systems of Education and in the same year, Prof Hoppers was awarded “Woman of the Year” by the University of South Africa, and was named as a “Leading Educationist” and was honoured in the Gallery of Leadership as the 63 most influential people who have shaped Unisa since its inception in 1873, in a permanent exhibition in Kgorong Building in UNISA. In 2017, Professor Hoppers received the distinction from UNESCO as an Honorary Fellow in Lifelong learning. She is the Founder and Director, Global Institute for Applied Governance in Science, Knowledge Systems and Innovations (https://www.giagsi-ug.org/the-faculty/). She held a Professorship in Education at Gulu University (Uganda) and is now the Canada Research Chair in Transdisciplinarity, Cognitive Justice and Education as part of the Pluralism Strategy Initiative at the University of Calgary (https://www.ucalgary.ca/pluralism/scholars-educators-researchers).

She is the author of many important works including the book, Rethinking Thinking: Modernity's "other" and the Transformation of the University with the late Prof. Howard Richards.https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=qWEKG-QAAAAJ&hl=en