Dr Janeke Thumbran
Nominee's Province:
Eastern Cape
Project Name/Description:
Academic
Dr Janeke Thumbran, a history lecturer at Rhodes University in Makhanda, Eastern Cape, would like to see women’s ideas being valued more and their intellectual standing respected. “Too often women’s ideas are undervalued or simply not taken seriously. This often starts in the home, but extends to schools, universities and workplaces. This is something that needs to change if women are going to thrive intellectually,” says Thumbran. Born and raised in Eersterust, Tshwane, Thumbran started off her academic journey with an undergraduate degree in Education at the University of Pretoria. She then obtained a Master’s degree in History at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a doctoral degree in History at the University of Minnesota. Both universities are in the US. Her ground-breaking doctoral thesis shed light on the nefarious research the University of Pretoria conducted in Eersterust, between the 1960s and 1990s, under the guise of social work and sociology. While benign on the surface, this research actually reinforced harmful racial stereotypes about Coloureds “as shiftless alcoholics with no identity. What I hoped to demonstrate in my PhD is that the stereotypes we engage in everyday were produced and legitimised by knowledge of and from universities, hence the enormous need to reconceptualise the very foundations of our university disciplines.” In her Rhodes classes, Thumbran encourages her students, especially women students, to question and challenge the undermining of women’s intellectual capabilities. “Teaching students about the erasure of women from universities and the undermining of their intellectual capacity is one way of telling women’s histories and experiences,” she says. “It’s an opportunity to encourage women students to engage intellectually in the space of the classroom, and to disregard the societal notion that they are only valuable for their bodies. Young women need to know that their thoughts and ideas are valuable.”
