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Awards

Symposium honours award-winning work

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:26

Dr Ralph Hamann of the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB) received the UCT Distinguished Social Responsiveness Award on behalf of the Southern Africa Food Lab, an initiative linking researchers, business, government and civil society in the pursuit of enhanced food security.

The Award is part of a new mechanism at UCT to recognise and reward socially responsive research at the university – part of the university’s growing concern for relevance and social impact.

Speaking at the award giving symposium at UCT recently, Hamann commended the university for its commitment to social responsiveness: “Social responsiveness is not just about what we do to better apply the knowledge we generate – it is something that informs the kind of knowledge we seek and the way we go about our research.”

His work with the Food Lab has shown him that bringing key stakeholders together in a carefully facilitated way can contribute to innovation and creativity while identifying new options or solutions to problems. He argued that universities can play an important role in such processes, highlighting what he calls the ‘three capabilities for change processes’: sharing credible knowledge, creating an inclusive platform for debate, and making a clear commitment to social justice as the anchor for such debate.

“One really needs to make sure that there is a neutral space in which to discuss different ideas and perceptions and their possible impacts and applications,” he says. “When you have different people getting together to address a certain issue, whether its scientists or community leaders or entrepreneurs, there is a need to suspend judgement of ideas before they’re thoroughly considered and discussed.”

He says that discussions around possible solutions to social and environmental issues happen within a framework of conflicting values. “What one stakeholder considers a value, another might not, and so there is this constant tension - but with careful facilitation this can be a creative tension.”

“If social justice is made the anchor of these interactions, then there is a common ground, a common value that allows people from different backgrounds the opportunity to rally around a central drive that motivates while also providing a yardstick for measuring impact, viability and so on,” he says.

The other award went to the UCT Law, Race, and Gender Research Unit for their work in the Rural Women’s Action Research Project.