Rethinking Methodologies in Epistemology: a decolonial approach through the lens of medicinal Cape plants.
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As Khoekhoegowab word in southern Africa and the Cape, Ausi means ‘older sister’; culturally known as the ‘respected’ one ‘with the knowledge’ in communities. Ausi holds invaluable intergenerational and deep-time knowledge of landscape, soil, plant anatomy, and of related cultural ecologies and ‘artefacts’. Ausi knowledge resiliently survived colonial displacement from land, and western extractive collection practices. How could a critical approach to the methodologies embedded in provenance through a ‘deep listening’ to ‘Ausi’ knowledge of landscape and plants help us to rethink the past and present beyond the limitations of the western knowledge-based archive?
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Bio
June Bam PhD is an AfOx 2025 – 2026 Visiting Fellow. A Professor in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg, she has worked for many years in interdisciplinary research. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter, Jacana (2021). Her previous collaborative work on Turning Points in History won the UNESCO (Paris) Peace Prize for South Africa in 2008. June grew up under Apartheid on the Cape Flats in South Africa where she also worked as a schoolteacher for 11 years and has led on several national heritage and history education transformation projects in post-Apartheid South Africa. Previously appointed (amongst others) for a number of years as Research Associate at the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past at University of York, she was also appointed Associate Professor in African Feminist Studies at the University of Cape Town. She has also led on various institutional and curriculum transformation programmes in school and higher education in South Africa such as national special advisor in history education to the former Education Minister Professor Kader Asmal. June has taught for universities globally (including for Stanford University for a number of years) and has been principal investigator on international research projects within her field.