Reimagining Community University Partnerships

By: David Monk, Alice Veronica Lamwaka, Catherine Odora Hoppers
Gulu University

There is a growing call for universities to shift their practices to become more relevant to the communities in which they are embedded and to produce graduates with relevant knowledge and skills to become conscientious leaders in both local and global efforts to address the wicked problems of the world. As a result of this, universities are beginning to participate in their communities in a more democratic manner, both to understand the issues in the communities and to learn from the knowledges present there — sending in their students to learn practically.

Gulu University, through the Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Traditional Medicine Center of Excellence, has established a Cultural Science Center with a vision of becoming an established center for transdisciplinarity and an institution for knowledge systems reintegration. This will enhance the program’s relevance and engage learners and practitioners in intellectual discourse to help their mindseither to diverge or meet on issues of human concern. Dr. Lamwaka Alice Veronica and her team innovated the Wang OO Speaker series that incorporates all stakeholders. This is seen as a tool for producing enough contradictions that enables participants to innovate new theories and suggestions for the way forward.

There is a growing call for cognitive justice and the decolonization and coproduction of knowledges, so that non-university knowledges and research processes are validated, respected, and included without duress (i.e. Odora Hoppers 2009, Visvanathan 1997). This is built upon the  lifelong work of critically engaged scholars such as Julius Nyerere, Fals Bolda, Paulo Freire, Budd Hall and Rajesh Tandon, Catherine Odora-Hoppers, bell hooks, Kimberle Krenshaw, Achille Mbembe, George Openjuru, and many more. To grow this movement, Gulu University has recently launched the UNESCO Knowledge for Change (K4C) African Centre for training in community based participatory action research. An initiative of the UNESCO Chairs in Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education (Budd Hall and Rajesh Tandon), The K4C has more than 27 “hubs” of Community Based Participatory Action Research around the world with the goal for championing knowledge democracy and community engaged universities. The Gulu University Centre now coordinates the African region networks and training.                .

It is in this space that the Gulu University Wang Oo Speaker series is firmly located. The Wang Oo is the traditional Acholi place of learning —  where practice meets theory. After experiential learning all day, clans would gather around the fireplace to reflect, plan, and learn together across generations. This process has been revitalized and introduced through the Herbal Medicine Program developed by Dr. Lamwaka — a certificate program in the Faculty of Medicine for traditional healers at Gulu University which seeks to integrate traditional knowledges in medicine with      Western European “modernity aged” knowledges found in universities. As a component of the program, a living laboratory has been created using a traditional village setting within the university grounds to preserve biodiversity and knowledge cultures while (re)imagining and (re)storying the past and the future.

Building on this work, a small but growing band of knowledge democrats led by Gulu University’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Openjuru, has initiated a series of Wang Oo gatherings in order to bridge knowledge cultures, generate dialogue among knowledge cultures, and decolonize knowledge. Gulu University is proud to host Professor Catherine Odora Hoppers in the Faculty of Education and Humanities.  A transdisciplinary scholar and a pioneer in the study and policy of Indigenous knowledge systems, Professor Hoppers led the National project to recognize, affirm, develop and protect Indigenous Knowledge Systems in South Africa, and headed the Task Team to draft the Policy on Indigenous Knowledge Systems and to Redraft the Legislation on African Knowledge Systems. She was the keynote speaker in the Talloires Network Leaders Conference  in Cape Town in 2014 and in Mexico in 2017. She is working as a member of the Gulu University Team in an advisory role to support the initiative of the Wang Oo.

The Wang Oo initiative engages with different faculties to seek out radical researchers doing courageous work— work that engages the gut, and which can make people sit upright with a tingling feeling in their neck.

These sessions boldly address pressing community issues including political topics, and strategically engage community members and university personnel. Community members present their perspectives, while university researchers share their work and participate in discussions. The dialogue aims to understand community research needs, improve university-community      relationships, and identify how universities can contribute to tackling local challenges. This is in recognition that we must incorporate other knowledge systems to identify and address problems, rather than rely on the traditional university academic system.

Knowledge development and mobilization in this program is a professional responsibility meant to put people in touch with one another, linking minds and bodies to the overall knowledge-     building process. It allows communities to extend their personal networks quickly and efficiently outside their cocoons of knowledge. This is a process of liberalizing and liberating knowledges through knowledge democracy, a new Community Engagement Model that Gulu University is pursuing through this speaker series.

This program is set to transcend knowledge systems and dissolve walls of knowledge cocoons to allow the emergence of new      integrative cultures of knowledge in transdisciplinarity —      integrating knowledge and methods from different disciplines using a synthesis of approaches. “Transdisciplinarity” involves creating a unity of intellectual frameworks beyond one discipline where we bring together speakers from all faculties to present their ideas and research with the community. In reference to non-disciplinary as a knowledge discourse which doesn’t evoke recourse to disciplines of knowledge, we bring on board the Traditional Knowledge Holders irrespective of age and gender to join the Gulu University Wang OO Speaker Series. This is the most advanced extra disciplinary knowledge integration culture that is empowering and free from limitations, yet acting as a bridge bringing academia closer to the communities in which they live and work.

Culture and traditions throughout the world remain essentially non-disciplinary but are becoming increasingly polluted due to colonization as products of disciplinary knowledge and their practices. There is a need for opening and introducing curriculum at all levels of education. It is now time for decolonization of knowledges and for diverse knowledge systems to take center stage.

The question that should be put forward to Gulu University and other higher education institutions that have imitated colonial knowledge practices is: can universities through their focus on Community Transformation uplift non-colonial cultures of knowledge?

Disciplines are prisons that simultaneously violate the freedom and democracy rights of knowledge workers and learners. The program of the Wang Oo Speaker Series of Gulu University has developed a working relationship between knowledge workers in different disciplines, striving towards a boundary-less, non-discplinary approach to knowledge creation and sharing.

The Wang Oo series is a site that brings the university and the community together to tackle pertinent issues together, presenting a new model of community engagement that embraces, validates, and recognizes the knowledge of the community around us, on their terms and without duress. During this process, we hope to extend the living museum concept across the entire university in an act of epistemic activism to transcend knowledge boundaries and, through non–disciplinary transdisciplinarity, understand and address the complex problems facing our futures.