Decolonising Journalism Education in South Africa

Ylva Rodny-Gumede is Head of the Division for Internationalisation and a Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Johannesburg. Professor Rodny-Gumede has worked in journalism, marketing and PR and has consulted for several government, private and academic institutions in Europe and Southern Africa including the UNDP, the UNESCO, and the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education. She has held fellowships at Universities in South Africa and abroad, and she is actively involved in teaching and learning development including broader curriculum development initiatives at institutional, national and international level, most recently through the Teaching Advancement at Universities (TAU) fellowship. Colin Chasi is Professor in the Department of Communication Science at the University of the Free State. His work covers various aspects of the philosophy of communication. He is currently occupied in the development of what has been called participation studies – an attempt at presenting a quintessentially African approach to the field. His latest research is focused on the transformation of higher education, in view of the contemporary decolonisation debate. He is rated as a nationally recognised researcher (C3) by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. Zubeida Jaffer is Research Fellow at the University of the Free State. She holds an MSc in Journalism from Columbia University in New York. She is a graduate of both the University of Cape Town and Rhodes University in Grahamstown. Until June 2018, she was based at the University of Free State where she held the unusual position of Writer-in-Residence for five years. She is one of South Africa’s veteran journalists and has written three books and two pocket books (www.zubeidajaffer.co.za). She is one of the founders of the website The Journalist (www.thejournalist.org.za), a multi-media site that tells the stories of pioneer journalists who were largely written out of history under colonialism and apartheid. Mvuzo Ponono holds PhD degree in Journalism from Rhodes. He is based at the University of the Free State, where he is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication Science. His research interests include audience and postcolonial studies. His MA examined the influence of a township family context on the interpretation of a health education television programme. His PhD research is an ethnographic study on the interpretation of mainstream news by township youth.