I agree with you on this. Philosophy and the strings attached to it is in many cases hard for South Africans to grip. Like you said Pluto is not relevant to SA students. And it's difficult to put knowledge out that will have a wow impact and be recognised by the world. In the past year my colleagues and I have gone through many article rejections and 90% of the reasons came down to "It's SA based". How do we put out research from a SA point of view, how do we as philosophers add to the greater knowledge if we are put down due to the area we philosophy about?
Within my module I tend to focus a lot on Regional Planning Theories, Urban Planning Theories, Economic Theories and concepts that stem from these. While many of these theories and concepts are are straight from UK and Asia, it does influence SA planning. However my students get confused as to how we make use of them if they are not SA based. If started to include examples of real life cases liked to these theories and boy!! They way they have started to think! They come up with new ideas and ways to adapt these theories and concepts to SA. How planners can learn from the negatives of these theories and develop "patches" as they call it. How the positives of more than one theory can be incorporated to improve what we have.... It's wonderful to see these minds come together, work together and think deeper about what they are taught.
Exactly. Kopano Ratele, a psychologist, recently published a book in which he writes the same in a SA context for psychology. We import all these theories and when we from the SA lifeworld want to publish something, it gets rejected because it is strange for theories and so on to emerge from a SA place which is usually reserved for data collection and so on. Such a strange world we live in. Luckily, my work is in African philosophy, so it is a little bit better but not so much!
That is awesome to hear. It is good that they can produce their own, or make their own with that what is given to them. The future will be built on young minds that work together!