The institutionalization of comparative education discourses in South Africa in the 20th century - Anne-Marie Bergh and Crain Soudien

This paper describes the processes of insertion of Comparative Education as a 'discipline' in higher education institutions in South Africa. It describes the embeddedness and representations of knowledge within the different South African academic traditions and how these processes mediated different trajectories of institutionalization of Comparative Education. The epistemic alliances and discourse coalitions coinciding with the historical division between historically white Afrikaans and English universities and historically black universities are presented. Discourse coalitions with church, state and industry are analysed, as well as the epistemic alliances with continental European and Anglo-Saxon intellectual traditions and the emerging African tradition. The diversification within each epistemic alliance is also discussed, namely the liberal-Marxist debate at historically white English universities and the heterodoxy of pedagogics, Christian scholarship and structural functionalism at historically white Afrikaans universities.
From: SARE with EWP, Vol. 12 no. 2 (2006), pp. 35-59