Musara Lubombo is a doctoral graduate of CCMS (2015), where he also in 2012 received his MA (summa cum laude), completed his postdoctoral research fellowship (2016 – 2019), and continues to hold an appointment as an Honorary Lecturer (2020 – 2022).
Before joining NWU, he held a lectureship position at Bindura University of Science Education’s Robert Gabriel Mugabe School of Intelligence in Zimbabwe, where he gave lectures on Public Relations in Government and Politics as well as Social Media Intelligence.
While at CCMS between 2010 and 2019, Musara was involved in postgraduate research advising, a role that he continues to do. He has singularly and collaboratively successfully supervised numerous CCMS Honours, four Masters and a single PhD. He also gave seminars to postgraduate students in the School of Applied Human Sciences on research topics that include developing a research topic, academic writing, and thematic analysis. He collaboratively developed an Honours research module African Education Research Methodology for the Afrikolgy Research and Teaching Unit in the College of Humanities.
Musara is an avant-gardist who prides himself in being the first student to introduce in CCMS stakeholder theory in the analysis of communication for social change programs, and ubuntu philosophy in participatory communication for HIV/AIDS involving PLHIV. He is a transformative African thinker whose work focuses on how ubuntu philosophical perspectives can be meaningfully deployed to address Africa’s social development challenges in communication, health and politics. His PhD thesis Transcending GIPA: Towards an Ubuntu framework for mainstreaming participation of South African people living with HIV in social change communication for HIV prevention, completed under the supervision of Prof Lauren Dyll.
Musara perceives Africa’s social-development challenges as epistemological. Accordingly, his teaching philosophy – which he owes to his mentors Prof Lauren Dyll and Prof Emeritus Keyan Tomaselli – challenges normative thinking in knowledge construction. He urges his students to creatively and collaboratively work with methodological tools that enable them to not only challenge the edges of their potential, but to also re-interpret the world in ways other than those developed through the dominant Western-centric conservative thinking.
Musara’s singular and collaborative work at CCMS has appeared on the pages of prestigious journals such as Crtical Arts and African Journal for AIDS Research among others. He also represented CCMS at various international conferences in Africa, Asia and USA where he presented papers and chaired parallel sessions.
Musara’s experience at CCMS opened frontiers and earned him positions as a reviewer for a number of journals which include Communicatio: Journal of Communication Theory and Research; Communitas: Journal of Communication in South Africa; Bulletin of the World Health Organisation as well as African Journal of Development Studies (formerly AFFRIKA Journal of Politics, Economics and Society) among others, and an examiner and external supervisor for different Universities in Southern Africa.
Recent Publications
Boateng, K, Lubombo, M & McCraken, D. (2020). “Social media and internal party politics in Ghana”. In M Ndlela (Ed.) Social Media & Elections in Africa. London: Palgrave.
Lubombo, M. (2018). Perfidious ubuntisation of ZANU-PF succession politics: a discursive analysis of Grace Mugabe’s campaign against Joice Mujuru and Emmerson Mnangagwa. Ubuntu: Journal of Conflict Transformation, 7(1), 117-133.
Lubombo, M. (2018). Re-thinking HIV disclosure as ubuntu: towards a social theory of communicative responses to the sub-Saharan epidemic. African Renaissance, 15(3), 9-28.
Lubombo, M & Dyll, L.E. (2018). A Dialectic Analysis of views on participation in HIV/AIDS communication of selected South African people living with HIV/AIDS: Beyond GIPA, Critical Arts, 32(2), 100-118.
Contact: Lubombom1@ukzn.ac.za
