Ubuntu Dialogues

UBUNTU – Interdisciplinary Conversations Across Continents

26/02/2024

Marietjie Oelofsen, Upenyu Majee, Bongani Mgijima, Jamie Monson (Eds)

UBUNTU: Interdisciplinary Conversations Across Continents, is a collection of work by 17 scholars emerging from the Ubuntu Dialogues Seminar Exchange Fellowship hosted by Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Michigan State University in the US between 2019 and 2022. The authors presented their work in seminars /webinars designed to deepen their understanding of Ubuntu through robust and critical conversations with discussants and seminar/webinar attendees. These interdisciplinary and transcontinental engagements provided spaces to (re)consider the meaning of Ubuntu through the conceptual, epistemological, and methodological paradigms of their own and other fields. This collaborative work brings new voices and new ways of interrogating a concept that holds possibilities for living together differently as we face persistent and interlocking challenges linked to the legacies of colonization and slavery, problems of injustice, inequality, and complex forms of marginalisation across the world. The collection contains contributions from the fields of philosophy, theology, music, the environment, gender and race relations, the law, the arts, social work, and education. The collection infuses Ubuntu scholarship with fresh perspectives that problematize the concept in provocative and surprising ways. Most importantly, the contributions disrupt narrow and superficial interpretations of Ubuntu – interpretations that threaten to undermine the radical potential of Ubuntu to cultivate a sense of collective humanity and interdependence.

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