| David Michael Cooper |
Biography |
Abstract |
- Associate Professor
- Department of Sociology
- University of Cape Town
- South Africa
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I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1970 at the University of Cape Town, but proceeded in 1972 to Birmingham University (UK) to complete a postgraduate diploma in the social sciences (Sociology specialism). This was followed by a Sociology PhD (Birmingham) on the ‘making of the working class’ in Botswana with fieldwork in the mining town of Selebi-Phikwe. After participating in a two-year national migration study in Botswana in the late 1970s, I joined the Sociology department at UCT in 1981 where I have been based ever since. In the 1980s, during a time of immense social conflict in South Africa, I lectured at UCT in Industrial Sociology with a focus on labour and trade union studies in Africa and Latin America. I directed a university-community engagement group based in the Sociology department, ILRIG (International Labour Research and Information Group), which produced research, publications and education workshops for trade union and community organisations involved in the anti-apartheid struggles in the Western Cape at this time. Following the transition to democracy in the early 1990s in South Africa, I shifted my research interests back to a connection with my engineering background, undertaking a study with focus on Science and Technology in relation to student enrolment patterns and deracialisation at the Technikons (now Universities of Technology). I became a research associate at the neighbouring university (University of the Western Cape, UWC) in its Education Policy Unit (now Centre for the Study of Higher Education, CSHE), established in 1992 by returning exiles and local researchers, whose main work during this period was policy research on higher education for the new ANC (African National Congress) government. My publications included a study of issues of research enhancement at the HBUs (‘Historically Black Universities’), leading thereafter to a co-authored book in 2001 entitled ‘The Skewed Revolution: trends in South African higher education 1988-98’, a mainly quantitative study focusing on student enrolment trends around variables of race, gender, level and field of study. During 2001-2004 I was also seconded part-time by UCT to direct a joint UCT-UWC new masters programme ‘Policy Analysis, Leadership and Management’ in higher education studies, based at the CSHE. In 2005 I returned to do duty as head of department of Sociology, which position I have held until the present. My research has over the past few years concentrated on a study I began in 2000, involving case studies of 11 research centres/units at universities of the Western Cape (the 3 universities and 2 universities of technology). The latter study of these research groupings over seven years – on factors enhancing/blocking the research linkages of universities with industry and the broader civil society – fits extremely well with the topic of the New Century Scholar programme on the university as ‘innovation driver and knowledge-centre’.
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