Prof Sam Takavarasha Jr: Research Blogg

As the year 2024 approaches its ending, I am glad to launch this blog. Through it I hope to have myself and subsequent director communicating with the research community at least once a month. I feel honoured and I feel challenged to be first director of research whose opinions are communicated to the WUA research community periodically. Ours is a complex community of practice which consists of communities within communities. Since the community of research is made up of various sub-communities, I urge our research community to enhance our research culture, harness our diverse research paradigms and use the new AI based research tools to build a better country as required by heritage-based learning.

By and large I believe that all researchers share a common pre-occupation to create novelty. At the risk of being misconstrued as harbouring an epistemological position which expects knowledge to be unearthed from somewhere, I must say that our agenda is to search and search again in other words to research about those gems of knowledge that have a positive impact on our lives. By our lives I don’t just mean human life, I include God’s workmanship that must live equitably in harmony with us. These cannot be enumerated easily because the universe is so vast. On earth alone I think we must be concerned about environmental stewardship, animal rights, human life and etc. This must be done from different epistemological lenses. Emmanuel Kant summarised them as ‘the stary heavens above us’ and ‘the moral law with us’.

Kant’s (1781) Critique of pure reason referred to natural sciences as the stary heavens that physics was preoccupied with at the time. He also referred to human sciences as the moral law that philosophy of religion was gazing at. Even as Kannt was one philosopher who was concerned about natural science and human sciences research methods on which our lives depend on, today’s research studies are seeing these categories from different philosophical positions. Qualitative research experts are hardly ever interested in quantitative research. The strength of seeing research from different epistemological and ontological stances is a gem that our academic community embodies. The overriding focus is achieving an outcome that improves the world if not the universe. With the exception of mixed methods and pluralist researchers, today’s researchers operate in silos that often refuse to intersect. This understandably is a challenge that comes from the paradigm war of the 20^th Century which highlighted disagreements on ontology, epistemology and methods.

I hold the conviction that research methods should be discussed together with research philosophy. This is because I have noticed that all the contentious debates on research methods always get resolved by invoking research philosophy.

I strongly believe that generative AI is ushering a copenician revolution in research methods. Just as the age of ideology marked a transition in which mere “theory” divorced from “real life” and practical considerations was likely to be dismissed as irrelevant, obscurantist, and “utopian.” The era of generative AI and Zimbabwe’s heritage-based learning marks an era where research must genuine change lives. Since other experts engineers and architects seek to make a better world with their expertise, I believe that researchers must seek to use their research skills for making a better world as articulated by Geoff Walsham.

A world where we investigate the WHY, the How, the What and the WHEN. Researchers must keep discovering WHY things happen as they do i.e. explanatory, causal research and etc. The HOW could be our definition of a better world will again differ for different researchers in different communities of practice for different reasons. For that reason, the positions we take must be weighed against the philosophical lens through which we gaze at the unit of analysis we are working on. For instance, an interpretivist who shows subjectivity must not be questioned just as much as a positivist cannot be questioned for being objective. Above all the finding that come from these paradigms must be respected by all.

As academics we are required to understand the different research philosophies and methods for us to be able to function as educators of students who pursue different paradigms. Instead of the being the quantitative methods academic that won’t mark a qualitative methods study, we must be multi-skilled academics who can tell a good piece of work from any paradigm. Even is you believe that positivisim is a reductionist approach which overlooks the complexity and subjectivity of human behaviour you must be able to guide a student into a good positivist researcher. Likewise, you may criticise intepretivists for lack of rigor and generalizability or a critical theorist for their inherent bias and lack of objectivity in their research but you must understand how teach and assess their work.

Finally, let us stay true to our paradigms and let us do so to the highest possible standards. Our work must be robust and our results must be unquestionable.  New tools and technologies which enable more interesting research methods are emerging. They enable the production of, and accurate results and findings in a more expeditious way.  These new research tools, however, call upon researchers to constantly navigate a steeper learning curve. Its, therefore, time for us to collaborate with each other and learn from each other’s strengths and experiences. This will help us to climb to the zenith of academic excellence by fighting today’s proverbial wars using today’s research tools.  These intentions are easier envied than acquired. We, therefore, need to roll our sleeves for the tough fight to build a powerful research culture by jumping on to the roller coaster of continuously perfecting our use of what we have adopted and scanning for new research tools that keep emerging.

Maybe the advent of AI based tools will answer Emmanuel Kant’s two questions, ‘Why are modern science and mathematics together so successful at giving us reliable objective knowledge of the physical world?’ And ‘Why do we find it so hard to get similar knowledge and agreement about the great questions of metaphysics or philosophy about God, the soul, free will, and ethics?’

In other words, will today’s AI based research tools bring to human sciences management and social sciences the undisputable agreement we have about the reliability, effectiveness and accuracy of the objective knowledge we experience in the physical world emanating from natural science research methods.

The answer is in continuous learning calls for collaboration in building a research culture. This is because the growth and development of research culture does not happen as fast as we want but it will bend toward fruition and progress if we keep investing hard work and effort.