Prof Jonathan Jansen, Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University (SU), has been awarded the 2020/21 Medal for Social Sciences and Humanities from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and Universities South Africa (USAf).
The announcement was made public by HSRC, who introduced the award in 2016. The HSRC Medal is awarded on an annual basis to scholars who have made outstanding contributions through their research in the social sciences and humanities.
The 2020/21 awards, the fifth in the series, is a joint venture between HSRC and USAf.
This year, in addition to recognising individual established and emerging scholars, researchers and academics, the adjudication panel will also award teams that have contributed to South Africa's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to HSRC, Jansen, an A-rated scientist with the National Research Foundation, was recognised for his “contributions as an established researcher".
Jansen, who will receive his medal during an official award ceremony on 18 March 2021, said: “As the only medal award for outstanding research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, this is an enormous honour and one that I receive with much joy but also with recognition of my research teams and the generous opportunities at SU that make such scholarship possible in the first place.
“The award is, moreover, an encouragement to do more and better with the kind of research that improves the human condition. Thank you to the Human Sciences Research Council and Universities South Africa for creating this award and for this year recognising the merits of educational research in pandemic times."
Jansen, a former vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, took up the position of Distinguished Professor in the SU Faculty of Education in 2017.
Apart from having served as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2016/17, he is also the president of both the South African Institute of Race Relations and the Academy of Science of South African (ASSAf).
In 2013, he was awarded the Lifetime Achiever Award for Africa at the Education Africa Global Awards in New York, as well as the University of California's Spendlove Award for his contribution to tolerance, democracy and human rights. The next year, he won the Nayef Al Rodhan Prize from the British Academy for the Social Sciences and Humanities for his book Knowledge in the Blood (published by Stanford University Press).
More recent publications by Jansen include Leading for Change (Routledge, 2016), As by Fire: The End of the South African University (Tafelberg, 2017), Interracial Intimacies on Campuses (Bookstorm, 2017) and Song for Sarah (Bookstorm, 2017). Products of his pen to appear in 2018 included Inequality in South African Schools (with Nic Spaull, published by Springer), Politics of Curriculum (as editor) and Now that I know, a book on South African families who were separated by the racial laws of the 1950s.
In 2020, his research study on the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on women academics entitled Gender Inequality in the Shadow of COVID-19 was made public. The study sampled the responses from 2 029 academic women at South African universities.
