University press publishing, while often associated with the promotion of academic freedom, may be situated between the poles of resistance and complicity when considering intellectual responses to apartheid. Yet the history of this form of scholarly publishing has largely been ignored thus far, due to a perception that it had little to tell us about either apartheid or the struggle against it. However, the social history of South Africa’s university presses – at Wits, Natal and Unisa, in particular – provides a new angle for examining academic freedom and knowledge production during the apartheid era. Using a hybrid methodology including archival research, historical bibliography, and political sociology, this study aims to examine the origins, publishing lists and philosophies of the university presses through the lens of a continuum of intellectual responses: ranging from collaboration and complicity, to opposition and dissidence. Results show that, over time, the positions and publishing strategies adopted by the South African university presses shifted, becoming more liberal. It is argued, however, that the university presses should not be considered oppositional or anti-apartheid publishers, in part because they did not resist the censorship regime of the government, and in part because they operated within the constraints of publicly funded, bureaucratic institutions of higher education. They nonetheless produced an important, if under-valued, body of work and provided a platform for a variety of academic opinions. Moreover, the university presses faced a variety of challenges in their struggle to survive over the years, including financial pressures, international competition, and wavering institutional support. But perhaps the greatest challenge was a delicate balancing act: an attempt to promote academic freedom within a climate of political repression, censorship and ideology. The study demonstrates the significance of publishing history for an examination of broader issues of social history, as well as the applicability of a wide range of methodological tools for the field of Book History. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Information Science / unrestricted

While progressive coalitions continue to oppose neoliberal restructuring around the world, organizing on the left remains fragmented and the underlying unity of diverse working class struggles undertheorized. Overcoming these theoretical and practical obstacles is an urgent task in the face of both renewed attempts by states and capital to ensure stability and deepen market penetration into the remaining untouched corners of working-class life, and threats to unity generated within the left by narrow understandings of class and identity. Post-apartheid South Africa is no exception to this ongoing neoliberal restructuring of contemporary capitalism nor to the fragmentation of working-class struggle. In opposition to the maintenance of a neoliberal macroeconomic trajectory following apartheid South Africans have almost continuously organized in their workplaces and communities to realize the better life for all promised to them after 1994. While community protest has intensified over the last decade—with a parallel upturn in labour organizing—it has taken on a less focused and fragmented form relative to earlier mobilizations. Moreover, despite the deep solidarities and alliances formed between unions and communities in the struggle against apartheid, organizing around production and reproduction has remained relatively distinct since its end. There remain, however, concerted efforts to draw together and articulate protests around access to the basic necessities of life with labour and student movements with the explicit goal of uniting the working class to struggle against capitalism. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2019, this dissertation analyzes one instance of this organizing work through a case study of the Housing Assembly, an organization struggling around housing and related services in Cape Town. It asks what role understandings of capitalism and class and their relationship to social relations of oppression play in organizing the working class today. My research explores how the Housing Assembly uses a strategic learning process of organizing to raise critical consciousness and build genuine solidarities and grassroots organization to engage and contest the state and capital around access to housing and water. This learning process starts from the daily lived experience of the working class to build a concrete critique of the political economy of housing and services restructuring which conceives of these struggles around social reproduction as class struggles within a capitalist totality rather than as discrete, bounded, or local. The production and utilization of knowledge by the Housing Assembly plays a key role in this organizing process, linking the subjective experience of everyday working-class life with the relational construction of political, economic and social relations which lie beyond it.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study critically examines the political, social and institutional settings in which archaeology was introduced in Namibia. I re-examine the idea of archaeology as a scientific and objective discipline that could be practiced without input from the knowledge systems of local communities. Archaeology developed alongside colonialism in Africa. Archaeology became an apparatus for knowing about the strategic resources that could be found in Namibia. Through the processes of recording sites and artefacts archaeology provided information that was useful to the colonial administration.

Though it is often taken for granted with an assumed naturalness, settler colonial sovereignty relies on the settler state’s realization of Indigenous territorial dispossession, and the erasure of indigeneity. More than singular or historical events, dispossession and erasure are ongoing, and are best understood as contemporary, and structural, features of settler governance because of the continued existence of Indigenous nations. As a result, seemingly stable settler states (such as Canada) are in a constant state of insecurity, due to Indigenous nations’ competing claims of authority. As such, settler states are continually working to (re)produce their own sovereign authority, and legitimacy. This text argues that knowledge is central to the (re)production of settler sovereignty, and hence, settler colonialism. Understood this way, knowledge is both produced and also productive. What we ‘know’ is not only framed by the cosmologies and ontologies through which we make meaning of the world, but it also serves as an organizing tool, structuring what interventions we imagine to be possible. Focusing on government policymaking, this text documents the erasure of Indigenous knowledges, cosmologies, and imaginaries from settler colonial governance practices. It does so through an analysis of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Survey, the settlement of, and territorial allotment in, British Columbia and provincial land management policies such as the Forest and Range Evaluation Program. Using this empirical work, it argues that this erasure enables the reification of settler imaginaries over Indigenous territory, which in turn creates the conditions within which settler colonial authority is legitimized and sovereignty continually remade through policy interventions. While the text largely centres on territory in what is today Canada, it also offers a view into the way in which (settler) coloniality more broadly is continually upheld and remade. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of a global colonial order, the continual remaking of settler sovereignty enables the constitution of international and global politics. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / For many, Canada as a multicultural and inclusive country stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, and north to the Arctic circle is taken for granted. However, what we recognize as Canada in 2020 has only existed since the 1999 formation of the Territory of Nunavut, and even the territory that comprises Canada only came into formation with Newfoundland and Labrador’s 1949 entry into Confederation. This is to say that Canada in its current form is not natural. Rather, it was constructed over time through the incorporation and colonization of Indigenous lands and territories. This dissertation argues that despite an official discourse of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and the need to renew settler Canada’s ‘most important’ relationship, colonization remains ongoing. Looking to federal demographic statistics and provincial land use and management policy, it argues that settler authority being continually re-made through the government knowing Indigenous peoples and their territories in ways that legitimize colonization as the normal pursuit of “peace, order and good government.”

Doctor of Philosophy / Today there is scientific consensus that human activity has significantly altered our planet, a condition often referred to as the Anthropocene. The effects of these changes can be hard to understand or predict, however, due to the size and complexity of Earth's biological, chemical, and geological systems. This dissertation argues that one way to better grasp the complex and uncertain effects of the Anthropocene is through a careful comparison with the outcomes of a smaller-scale human-built environment that was meant to mimic Earth's ecosystems: Biosphere 2 [B2]. B2 was an ambitious "Human Experiment" designed to create a self-sufficient 'mini-Earth' inside a glass dome in Arizona. From 1991 to 1993, eight humans and 3,800 other species inhabited this recreation of Earth's biosphere, where the Biospherians grew all their food, recycled their water, and oversaw the production of their atmosphere, as well as conducting scientific research on this novel ecosystem. While the mission ran into unexpected difficulties that led many to label it a failure, this dissertation argues that the project actually succeeded in many ways, and that even its failures can be instructive for understanding today's environmental challenges. Two aspects of the B2 experiment can help us understand analogous aspects of the Anthropocene. First, B2's attempt to create and maintain an ecosystem that could provide everything needed to support life within a tightly enclosed structure reveals how enclosed environments have their own unique characteristics that can lead to unexpected and even disastrous results. I call these characteristics "Logics of Enclosure," and I argue that these same logics apply to the Anthropocene, as we begin to recognize that we, too, live in a world with limited resources and increasingly tight connections between its ecosystems. The dissertation describes various types of Logics of Enclosure and how they can be used to explain the outcomes of B2 and potentially alert us to similar outcomes within our increasingly 'enclosed' Anthropocene. The second unusual feature of B2 is that the Biospherians combined a number of roles that are normally separate within the fields of science, engineering and architecture. The same group of people helped develop the scientific field of Biospherics, designed B2's structural, technological, and biological contents, and then inhabited the world they had created. I refer to this as the knowledge–design–inhabitation trajectory, and I argue that in the Anthropocene we, too, are living in a world that is increasingly the result of our own design, based on our own imperfect scientific knowledge. These two forms of analysis work together: Logics of Enclosure explain how the hybrid built/natural environment has agency to affect human life, while the knowledge–design–inhabitation trajectory explains how we, the human inhabitants of Earth, have agency to better align our actions and technologies with our planet's life-supporting ecosystems. Ultimately, using these lenses to understand B2's outcomes may inform more successful longduration approaches for living within the Anthropocene.

<p>One of the problems challenging the knowledge society is to understand the chang-ing prerequisites for publicly governed knowledge production. Several attempts have been made amongst which perhaps the most debated is the concept of changing mo-des of knowledge production proposed by Gibbons et al. The aim of this thesis is to empirically explore whether this concept can be used to identify and explain research policy developments during the period 1980–2000. A two-layered comparative study was undertaken, in which Swedish research poli-cy developments were studied in depth. The main result from the in-depth study was that there is insufficient evidence to fully support Gibbons et al.’s claims. In analysing this result from a comparative perspective the main conclusion was that neither the changing modes of knowledge production nor the two-track concept that was deri-ved from the in-depth study could explain the developments in research policy. The research policy developments in Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland were re-examined from an institutional perspective, in which the major ide-as that had influenced the policy process during the period 1980–2000 were used to identify and explain developments in these countries. The main conclusion of this thesis is that all the countries studied are using the public research system as a source of strategic opportunity. However, the analysis also shows that both embedded ideas of how public knowledge should be produced, and the nature of the policy process contribute to explaining the different strategies employed the governments of these countries to make publicly funded research a tool for economic and societal development.</p>

One of the problems challenging the knowledge society is to understand the chang-ing prerequisites for publicly governed knowledge production. Several attempts have been made amongst which perhaps the most debated is the concept of changing mo-des of knowledge production proposed by Gibbons et al. The aim of this thesis is to empirically explore whether this concept can be used to identify and explain research policy developments during the period 1980–2000. A two-layered comparative study was undertaken, in which Swedish research poli-cy developments were studied in depth. The main result from the in-depth study was that there is insufficient evidence to fully support Gibbons et al.’s claims. In analysing this result from a comparative perspective the main conclusion was that neither the changing modes of knowledge production nor the two-track concept that was deri-ved from the in-depth study could explain the developments in research policy. The research policy developments in Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland were re-examined from an institutional perspective, in which the major ide-as that had influenced the policy process during the period 1980–2000 were used to identify and explain developments in these countries. The main conclusion of this thesis is that all the countries studied are using the public research system as a source of strategic opportunity. However, the analysis also shows that both embedded ideas of how public knowledge should be produced, and the nature of the policy process contribute to explaining the different strategies employed the governments of these countries to make publicly funded research a tool for economic and societal development.

This dissertation project explored the privileging of knowledge production in science and technology as a Canadian national economic, political and social strategy. The project incorporated the relationship between nation-state knowledge production and how that knowledge is then systematically evaluated, prioritized and validated by systems of health technology assessment (HTA). The entry point into the analysis and this dissertation project was the Scientific Research and Experimental Design (SR&ED) federal tax incentive program as the cornerstone of science and technology knowledge production in Canada. The method of inquiry and analysis examined the submission documents submitted by key stakeholders across the country, representing public, private and academic standpoints, during the public consultation process conducted from 2007 to 2008 and how each of these standpoints is hooked into the public policy interests and institutional structures that produce knowledge in science and technology. Key public meetings, including the public information sessions facilitated by the Canada Revenue Agency and private industry conferences, provided context and guidance regarding the current pervasive public and policy interests that direct and drive the policy debates. Finally, the “Innovation Canada: A Call to Action Review of Federal Support to Research and Development: Expert Panel Report,” commonly referred to as “The Jenkins Report” (Jenkins et al., 2011), was critically evaluated as the expected predictor of future public policy changes associated with the SR&ED program and the future implications for the production of knowledge in science and technology. The method of inquiry and analytical lens was a materialist approach that drew on the inspiring frameworks of such scholars as Dorothy Smith, Michel Foucault, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Melinda Cooper, and, Gilles Deleuze. Ultimately, I strove to illuminate the normalizing force and power of knowledge production in science and technology, and the disciplines and structures that encompass it and are hooked into it where the privileging of such knowledge becomes hegemonic within and by the regimes of knowledge production that created them.

This dissertation project explored the privileging of knowledge production in science and technology as a Canadian national economic, political and social strategy. The project incorporated the relationship between nation-state knowledge production and how that knowledge is then systematically evaluated, prioritized and validated by systems of health technology assessment (HTA). The entry point into the analysis and this dissertation project was the Scientific Research and Experimental Design (SR&ED) federal tax incentive program as the cornerstone of science and technology knowledge production in Canada. The method of inquiry and analysis examined the submission documents submitted by key stakeholders across the country, representing public, private and academic standpoints, during the public consultation process conducted from 2007 to 2008 and how each of these standpoints is hooked into the public policy interests and institutional structures that produce knowledge in science and technology. Key public meetings, including the public information sessions facilitated by the Canada Revenue Agency and private industry conferences, provided context and guidance regarding the current pervasive public and policy interests that direct and drive the policy debates. Finally, the “Innovation Canada: A Call to Action Review of Federal Support to Research and Development: Expert Panel Report,” commonly referred to as “The Jenkins Report” (Jenkins et al., 2011), was critically evaluated as the expected predictor of future public policy changes associated with the SR&ED program and the future implications for the production of knowledge in science and technology. The method of inquiry and analytical lens was a materialist approach that drew on the inspiring frameworks of such scholars as Dorothy Smith, Michel Foucault, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Melinda Cooper, and, Gilles Deleuze. Ultimately, I strove to illuminate the normalizing force and power of knowledge production in science and technology, and the disciplines and structures that encompass it and are hooked into it where the privileging of such knowledge becomes hegemonic within and by the regimes of knowledge production that created them.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how the Swedish welfare state formulated a question of shorter work hours, 1919—2002. During the 1900s, several official reports were published in order to produce knowledge about this issue and construct a manageable inquiry about shorter work hours. The aim of this thesis is to examine what were formulated as problems and solutions and which arguments and beliefs emerged from these formulations. Official state reports are regarded as instruments of knowledge production by the state. This intelligence was required to justify the possibility and desirability of the reform that shaped the question of shorter work hours in the welfare state.   The aim of the official reports was to create knowledge, which determined the value of working time reduction. Leisure as welfare meant that the state interpreted the citizens’ needs and formulated working-time reduction as either a possible or impossible reform. Working hours have never been justified as a reform that simply gives more leisure and less time for work. The reform was instead considered possible and desirable because it was interpreted as helping to reproduce the labour force or capitalism as a whole. It was thought impossible and undesirable when considered to be a threat to this reproduction.   However, there were two major reformulations of the question of shorter work. In the middle of the selected period, the matter moved from the sphere of production to a consumption sphere, meaning that the issue became less conflicted. The state’s responsibility to push the reform was deemphasized. Another reformulation is when flexibility was formulated as a solution, and thus made regulation of working time undesirable and unnecessary. This study shows how the conception of a question of shorter work hours was a process requiring formulations and reformulations and how these expressions fundamentally changed over time, although the basic premises remained.