From the Promoter

CATHERINE ODORA HOPPERS

Target 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals demands that all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity. Achieving this calls for a transdisciplinary mode of engagement, which combines different ways of knowing and seeing and is relatively unexplored in public settings as the world is transfixed into western modes of knowing and seeing to the exclusion of Indigenous ways. Preparing our young and old before they go out to “solve problems” calls for a sustained global dialogue which would generate a new innovative and just approach to knowledge production, knowledge sharing, and knowledge utilization. It also demands the recognition, development, promotion and protection of different knowledge systems and epistemologies.

Professor Catherine Odora Hoppers is a scholar and policy specialist on International Development, education, North-South questions, disarmament, peace, and human security. She holds a South African Research Chair in Development Education at the University of South Africa and has provided technical advice and leadership to the South African government in drafting its national policy on Indigenous Knowledge Systems. She is the recipient of many honors including two honorary degrees. In 2015 she received the Nelson Mandela Distinguished Africanist Award for her pursuit of the total liberation for the African continent through the promotion of Indigenous Knowledge Systems of Education, and in the same year she was awarded “Woman of the Year” by the University of South Africa, and was named as a “Leading Educationist”. In 2017 Prof. Odora Hoppers received the distinction from UNESCO as an Honorary Fellow in Lifelong Learning. She holds a PhD in International Education from Stockholm University