Higher Education and Capacity Building in Africa

This book takes an innovative approach to understanding the development of African universities. It explores what role specific locations have in the making of research and analyses how local experience is addressed in teaching and in research. The first section focuses on capacity building in the university sector. The book uses researching and teaching climate change as examples of how knowledge is negotiated and academic identities built locally. In doing so, the book draws on discussions about knowledge constructions, hybrid knowledges, and the effects of modernity. It also discusses the future role in society of African universities.

1. Why study higher education and capacity building in Africa? An introduction 2. Do 'African' universities exist? Setting the scene Part I: Capacity building of African universities - asymmetrical power relations? 3. Dilemmas of knowledge production in Ugandan Universities 4. Collaborative education across continents: lessons from a partnership on sustainable resource management education 5. The Confucius Institute at the University of Zambia: a new direction in the internationalisation of African higher education? Part II: Researching and teaching climate change in Africa - whose reality counts? 6. Power of knowledge under changing conditions: lessons from a Sahelian village under climate change 7. Producing scientific knowledge in Africa today: auto-ethnographic insights from a climate change researcher 8. Negotiating scientific knowledge about climate change: enhancing research capacity through PhD-students Part III Creating and using academic knowledge in Africa - decolonising research? 9. My knowledge, your knowledge, whose knowledge is it? Reflections from a researcher's journey through universities in North and South 10. Creating an African university: struggling for a transformational curriculum in apartheid South Africa 11. African Universities and rights in African polities, cultures and communities: Africanising universal knowledge? Conclusion 12. Dilemmas and paradoxes of capacity building in African higher education: concluding remarks