This narrative explores my journey through music performance and scholarship in the context of apartheid South Africa. It begins with my early music education that led to a crisis while studying Mozart’s A Minor Piano Sonata, highlighting the difference between technical competence and genuine musical understanding. The experience prompted a shift toward a deeper appreciation of musical phrasing, structure, and physical connection to the instrument under the guidance of Marian Friedman, who emphasized the nuances of musical expression and technique. The exploration extends to my academic work in musicology, revealing the performative aspects of scholarship and the dangers of merely imitating academic norms without authentic engagement. The realization catalyzed a pivot toward the study of South African music and the adoption of a decolonial approach, rooted in cultural and geopolitical identity. With new scholarly practices, I emphasize resisting mere performance and prioritizing local culture, risk-taking, and authentic artistic expression. The narrative captures a transition from technical proficiency to holistic and contextually grounded music and scholarship understanding.

The chapter relates to new knowledge created in a specialized area of biotechnology, biocatalysis, where enzymes are used as environmentally benign catalysts for reactions producing valued chemical products or processes. It integrates enzyme discovery with various related fields, including chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, molecular biology, genomics, and engineering. I describe research on various reaction systems and the relevance of new discoveries of novel materials and bioprocesses. New technologies have enabled discovery to take place in an ongoing cycle. Identifying the biological agent, the enzyme, creates new knowledge in biotech processes. Here is where techniques and technologies have evolved through some giant leaps. From an era of sequencing DNA isolated from cultured cells, biocatalyst discovery has moved to current times when next-generation sequencing allows collection and analysis of huge bodies of complex biological data, CRISPR gene editing enables the design and production of novel biological agents, and digital technologies incorporating AI enable creative new ideas; the discovery of new enzymes to use as biocatalysts has even greater scope for progress.

Through a telling of my trajectories as a social historian interested in the histories of whites under apartheid, I assert the value of distance from authorizing effects of major intellectual and historiographic currents and history from the provinces. I draw on theory, methodological, and critical traditions not often employed by South Africanists, Black critical perspectives on racist society, German Alltagsgeschichte, and the historical trend within subaltern studies. This allows notions of ‘the ordinary’ in white society, questioning complicity and addressing these through various methodological and evidentiary entry points. Such historiography can disturb or energize histories of race, specifically whites, helping us to rethink the values, possibilities, and limitations of social history within the broader discipline. While the history of the provinces can be nimble and innovative, it can also become parochial and complacent. To prevent the latter, ‘the provinces’ can neither be a refuge for disengagement nor an excuse for isolation. Rather, they should be seen as a place from which one ventures regularly back to ideally multiple centres, a kind of provincial cosmopolitanism.

This chapter is a reflection on three intellectual moves that tend to be revealing and influential in English-speaking philosophy, set in an autobiographical context. One move is to apply a new method to an issue that has been treated for a long time in other ways. A second is to look for data that are not entailed or adequately explained by existing theories and then to develop a theory that accounts for them while also making sense of data for which existing theories can account. The third is to find an assumption common to two long-standing disputants and advance an alternative to them both that does not rely on it. This essay includes strategic advice for budding philosophers who might want to take such approaches to their work.

This article is based on personal experience in the discipline of architecture that argues for imagination as a driver of new knowledge production, hopefully by describing my academic and practice journey. It is about the practical realization of outcomes rooted in a creative imagination; the tension between reality and fantasy, and synthesizing multiple concerns of a place, creating something meaningful for a place and to the inhabitants. The story of my academic journey is grounded in how I have creatively applied my knowledge of the discipline to explore current social phenomena in the place that has been home for three decades, South Africa. My professional journey driven by a practice that imaginatively, within the particularities of place, has attempted to make visible pathways from which to change beliefs and attitudes that bind me to authoritative knowledge. In the tension between academic and professional journeys, the former biased by what I have learnt and know, and the latter, a creative exploration of imagination, knowledge is not authoritative or alternate. It is a collection of dynamic experiences; collective understandings in different life-worlds. It is new.

This chapter provides the briefest overview of the ‘linguistic method’. It briefly gives an example of a truly ‘Eureka’ moment in the history of linguistics, with the discovery of laryngeals in the ancient Hittite language. The focus is on the pidgin language, Fanakalo of South Africa, a relatively simple means of communication that combined mainly Zulu words with mainly an English-like syntax. Until fairly recently, an oft-repeated claim was that the pidgin was likely to have originated on the plantations of Natal in the mid to late nineteenth century. The hypothesis was that incoming plantation workers from India who spoke a variety of not all mutually intelligible languages had to learn the main languages of the colony, English and Zulu, rapidly and under less-than-ideal conditions. In so doing, they would have – so the hypothesis went – come up with a simple mixture of Zulu and English. I recount how this hypothesis was disproved, first on the grounds of linguistic plausibility and secondly, and more decisively, on the grounds of the archival records, which showed the pidgin to be in existence well before the arrival of indentured Indian workers.

Western approaches to knowledge production in archaeology have primarily been framed on the ‘artefact’ and how the information around it aggregates to the ‘feature’, ‘structure’, ‘site’, and the spatial spread of such evidence in the landscape and its transformation over time. The deep history of Africa shows how this framing of knowledge in non-Western societies has been framed and internalized into ‘prehistory’, seriously impacting the methodology and theory necessary to understand contexts beyond the Global North. I argue here that if approaches to rewriting the African pasts are to effectively challenge this disaggregation and fragmentation of knowledge in archaeology, new knowledge must provide meanings to material culture and contexts that align with the worldviews of Indigenous peoples. Archaeology then becomes a discipline not only focused on the study of the past but also on how the past connects with the present and helps address the contemporary human condition.

In this essay, I will share some of the perspectives that emerged from my recent experience writing a commentary on the book of Jonah (OTL, Westminster John Knox, 2024) that may offer some insight into what knowledge production entails in my field of biblical interpretation. The numerous incongruities, complexities, and uncertainties associated with this enigmatic book have yielded some interesting interpretations, with interpreters returning again and again to these strange aspects of the text to generate new insights into old problems.

Scientific discovery, particularly in disciplines such as physics and biology, often asks if there remains room for truly transformative innovations. But microbiome research faces considerable challenges stemming from the intricacies of microbial communities. These are subject to dynamic processes, such as horizontal gene transfer, and exhibit great variability across different spatial scales. Genomic sequencing and molecular biology removed the constraint of traditional isolation techniques. Microbiome research typically unfolds along two distinct trajectories: exploration and hypothesizing. However, exploratory studies emphasize sequencing entire communities to develop foundational datasets, while hypothesis-driven research adopts a more structured framework aimed at testing specific ecological theories. Merging these approaches, particularly through the integration of emerging technologies such as machine learning, holds significant potential for driving future discoveries. The combination of these methodologies considered may help unravel critical ecosystem services rendered by microbial communities, both within host-associated systems and in broader environmental contexts.

The chapter lays out the motivation for this particular study on discovery through reference to the cross-disciplinary nature of this inquiry and its potential for deepening our understanding of how new knowledge is generated beyond a focus on single or allied disciplines. Classical studies on discovery are acknowledged, and their contributions to the subject are described in appreciation. However, what happens when discovery is pursued across disciplines from the social, natural, and biomedical sciences?

This chapter begins by acknowledging the value of the classical model of scientific discovery with its commitment to isolating variables and cancelling out noise to give us a sense of significance in the numerical results produced. But the 20 chapters in this book amply demonstrate that in the real world of discovery things are messy, unpredictable, and highly differentiated within and across disciplines. Such enduring principles of discovery, emerging from the work of scientists and scholars, are identified not only for their intellectual value but also for their practical guidance for those engaged in advanced research.

To acquire new knowledge of the physical universe, it is necessary to build large research infrastructures that replace the older generation instruments that have exhausted its scientific capabilities. This premise drives the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), an intergovernmental organization constructing two large radio telescopes with complementary science goals in Australia and South Africa. Big science requires the resources of many countries, and the SKAO was established to realize it. Although the corresponding growth in investment enables steady scientific advancement, step increments in knowledge are often serendipitous, and new-generation telescopes are designed to maximize their ‘discovery space’. Big science also needs large, multinational research teams to drive the key science objectives that define the large instruments, but often major discoveries result from the ingenuity of small groups or individuals with unique opportunities and skills. This is a personal account of my involvement in observational radio astronomy that led to the construction of the SKA-mid telescope in South Africa, highlighting the influence of privilege, providence, and lived experience on my career.

What is the nature of discovery? As a human being and a physicist, I can only observe one mind at work first-hand. This mind accepts every new scrap as a discovery, whether it originates in the external world of knowledge or springs from an internal process. To explore the nature of discovery from the point of view of the inner observer, I chose to turn over past experiences, fitting together days on which years of determined and dogged plodding resulted in a finished equation, or finally, a coherent assembly of disparate ideas gave the clue to why storm damage in breakwaters is like a phase change in liquid crystals. Old, unfashionable methods are suddenly useful with new computer architectures. Theory, experiment, observation, and simulation fit together as aids to thinking. The properties of complex systems can provide intuitive insight into the social science of science. We will need every ability to assemble the puzzle pieces in the coming years to discover how to extricate the planet from the difficulties in which we have placed it: as an observer and actor, I suggest that the evolution of human thinking, and of aids to thinking, are critical.