ROELA: This is, of course, where I heard the word “yellow bone” for the first time. I was shocked. What we are talking about reminds me of the late Professor Sonja Verwey and the SACOMM 2017 conference, where I presented a paper about the honours’ projects. The conference paper title was Students as conversations: using purpose as an engagement strategy for applied pedagogy in a post-colonial and post-truth context. When discussing the paper with Prof Sonja, she introduced me to the writing of Garuba (2015) about decolonising the African curriculum, and the notion of “contrapuntal reading”, a construct named by Edward Said (1994) depicting an awareness of the “intertwined histories” of both the coloniser and colonised. Said (2012) used music’s ability for plurality of voices to analogously travel across and through disciplines, intellectual boundaries and politics, and formulates his conception of contrapuntal reading, which encourages critical dialogue between art and texts, and their political and social contexts (Bartine, 2015). Hence, we consider intertwined histories and perspectives by looking at texts/concepts/ images/stories or strategies contrapuntally. We are charged to look at others without labels, because “[n]o one today is purely one thing […] No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival, in fact, is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden” (Said, 2012:336). The aspect of contrapuntal reading that moved me has to do with the unwritten stories that are not acknowledged in a novel but are still present, like a perspective in a book that relates to colonialism. For instance, the main characters in a novel set in England are wealthy, and their wealth derives from income from tea plantations that they own in India. There is a story about them from the perspective of someone working in the tea plantation. So, when critiquing the book, one can critique it from a postcolonial point of view and illustrate that only part of the story has been told in the novel. Similarly, in strategic communication, students also need to tease out the perspectives of stakeholders that are not mainstream, the ones that are ignored or silenced. I included an image I used in class related to eating meat. Here, I explain to students that one needs to leave one’s perspective and get into the perspectives of others when researching an issue, brand, or social event. Figure 1: Introducing the concept of contrapuntal thinking Source: Conceptualised by R Hattingh In my lecturing practice, I endeavour to draw out the silenced or marginalised voices and experiences of our students and their histories. For instance, luring the narratives about key capabilities that strategic communicators deem important in times of complexity was one of the processes I used for my PhD. I think there is much to learn from Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Tell me how you use this in the digital storytelling module? A Journey of Innovation 52
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