Browsing by Author "Luckett, Kathleen"

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    Integrity, Researcher Identity, and Islands: An interpretive approach to exploring individual and disciplinary values through creative metaphors
    (2023) Saner, Paula; Luckett, Kathleen
    This project investigates how emerging researchers engage with Research Integrity (RI) values in the context of their disciplines at a South African higher education institution (HEI). RI is a growing field of study, to which scholars are drawn from a wide range of disciplines, from administrative or management offices in HEIs and even journal editors and publishers. In this context, understanding how researchers engage with RI and choose to enact or contest RI values and normative assumptions within their disciplinary spaces can contribute towards the expanding body of RI scholarship. The project took a creative an interpretive approach to examining themes around researcher identities, disciplinary discourses, and engagement with RI. Participants completed a pre-interview exercise by developing a ‘researcher identity map' and reflective commentary. This was used as a tool for discussion and exploration during a semi-structured interview. Data artefacts were analysed abductively and iteratively using the interpretive tools provided by the domain of specialisation in the Legitimation Code Theory toolkit. This iterative process resulted in a translation device developed specifically for this data. The data were analysed using the translation device which focuses on epistemic relations and social relations in the context of the participants' disciplines. A key finding of this project is that, while disciplines do play an important role in mediating researchers' relations to and with RI, it is the personal attributes of individual researchers that are most likely to drive the nature of their engagement with the field. As RI matures, it is therefore important to adopt a differentiated approach to RI training that emphasises the perspectives and values of individual researchers; engages with the epistemic relations and social relations legitimated by their disciplines and works with how those values impact on RI practice in disciplinary contexts.
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    The necropolitical crisis of racial subjectivity in the South African postcolony: black consciousness as a technology of the self and the limits to transformation
    (2022) Naicker, Veeran; Luckett, Kathleen
    In this thesis, I problematize whether Steve Biko's Black Consciousness Philosophy, reread as an affective and psychic Foucauldian technology of the self can operate as a strategy of psychic repair and transformation for pathological racialised subjects, produced by Necropolitical governmentality in the South African colony and postcolony. Centrally, I argue that Foucault's revolutionary reading of ancient Greek notions of parrhesia and political spirituality can be found in Biko's work on Black Theology and the reconstruction of Black subjectivity through several rational techniques that are performatively embodied in his writings and sacrificial militancy, deploying death as politicizing mechanism via the figure-Frank Talk. The pathologies of the South African postcolony are bequeathed to us via the Atlantic slave trade, colonial and Apartheid governance, engendering intergenerational traumas that have been institutionalised, internalised, and inverted in contemporary postcolonial discourses on African selfhood with detrimental and precarious consequences for political minorities and women. Although I interrogate anticolonial scholarship from a predominantly postcolonial perspective which includes a diagnosis of African political subjectivity in the Black Radical Tradition, the theoretical toolbox that animates my analysis is drawn from a post-structural combination of Michel Foucault's work on governmentality as a combination of technologies, that is, political rationalities of domination or social subjugation and technologies of the self, Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, and several strands of psychoanalysis. Deploying Foucault's toolbox enables me to articulate a historical and nominalist account of African state formations without a relation to a general Weberian model, Marxist political economy, specifically the historical constitution of the body as labour power and psychoanalysis, particularly the desiring subject. Through this approach, I aim to undermine the universality of Eurocentric and essentialist conceptions of modern subjectivity as epistemic or discursive constructs that have become points of identification in symbolic systems. However, I argue that despite being valuable for understanding contemporary Europe, Foucault's conception of biopolitics cannot account for the reciprocal constitution of modernity, colonialism, and capitalism in the rest of world. Therefore, I have employed Achille Mbembe's notion of Necropolitics to account for contemporary, violent death practices in the governance of colony and postcolony, as well as the global precarity that results from the age of the Anthropocene and the becoming black of the world, signalling the limits of Biko's Africanist humanism, metaphysics (Ubuntu) and the racial animus of his followers in the contemporary context.