In this episode of The Knowledge Hub South Africa, host Professor Ignatius Gous speaks with Professor Thomas Lawson, Professor Emeritus at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and the founding figure of the cognitive science of religion. Lawson completed his PhD in philosophy of religion at the University of Chicago in 1963, following graduate study across theology, philosophy, history of religions, and religion and personality. He spent the bulk of his career at Western Michigan University, with visiting appointments at Queen’s University Belfast and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He co-authored the foundational 1990 text Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture with Robert N. McCauley, followed by Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms in 2002. His 2023 book Imagining the Cognitive Science of Religion charts the field’s future directions. His work drew together cognitive psychology, linguistics, evolutionary biology, and the philosophy of religion into a genuinely new scientific discipline.

In this episode of The Knowledge Hub South Africa, Professor Ignatius Gous speaks with Dr. Chris Heunis, CEO and founder of the Team Building Institute, known as TBI. Dr. Heunis holds a DPhil from the University of Pretoria in organisational development and built his career at the intersection of adventure, learning science, and human connection. He began as a physics teacher, completed doctoral research on adventure-related experiential learning, and in 1994 established TBI from a storeroom in his family home in Pretoria. Over three decades, TBI has grown into an internationally active organisation delivering programmes across Africa, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, often working with groups comprising more than ten nationalities at a time.

In this episode of The Knowledge Hub South Africa, host Professor Ignatius Gous speaks with Dorrithe Labuschagne, a registered educational psychologist in private practice in Pretoria. Labuschagne holds a master’s degree in educational psychology from the University of South Africa (UNISA), where she also completed honours degrees in early childhood development, inclusive education, and guidance and counselling. She began her career as a primary school teacher, then returned to studying while raising her children and teaching at a pre-primary school. She has since worked as a school-based psychologist, completed training in forensic assessment, family mediation, and neuropsychology, and now runs a private practice offering individual therapy, parent seminars, medico-legal assessments, and a structured journaling programme called Journaling: A Laboratory for Life.

In this episode of The Knowledge Hub South Africa, host Professor Ignatius Gous speaks with Teenah Jutton, a Mauritian academic, former parliamentarian, mental health advocate, and social activist. Jutton was recognised by MIPAD as one of the 100 Most Influential People of African Descent under 40. She holds qualifications in management, finance, and financial risk management and began her career in Mauritius’s global financial services sector before joining the Open University of Mauritius as a lecturer. She served as an elected member of parliament, co-founded an NGO focused on youth empowerment, produced a mental health awareness film titled Love Yourself, and is currently one of 50 participants selected from over 8,000 applicants for the UNESCO Youth for Peace Intercultural Leadership Programme. She is a member of OWSD, the Organisation for Women in Science for the Developing World, and a World Economic Forum Global Shaper.

In this episode of The Knowledge Hub South Africa, Professor Ignatius Gous — researcher, academic, and host of the series — speaks with Professor Deon Rossouw. Rossouw is one of Africa's foremost authorities on business ethics and corporate governance. He was the founding president of the Business Ethics Network of Africa, served as CEO of the Ethics Institute, and has been a contributing member of the King Committee on corporate governance for South Africa across multiple editions of the King Reports. His academic work spans nearly four decades, with sabbaticals at the University of Minnesota, Cambridge University, and the Globe Ethics Foundation in Geneva, where he led a global survey of business ethics across nine world regions. He has written and co-authored foundational texts in the field, including the widely used textbook Business Ethics: A Southern African Perspective.

Entrepreneurship as a formal academic discipline began in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. South Africa only introduced its first formal qualification in the field in the mid-1990s. That qualification, the National Diploma in Small Business Management, was developed by Prof Cecile Nieuwenhuizen at a Technikon in 1994. At the time, there were no local textbooks, no established curriculum and no template to follow. The gap had to be built from scratch.

In conversation with Prof Ignatius Gous, Nieuwenhuizen explains that she & her colleagues did not start in a library. They went out and interviewed successful South African entrepreneurs. They asked what those entrepreneurs wished they had known earlier. They listened to what was missing. The textbooks and qualifications that followed came directly from that fieldwork.

That bottom-up approach shaped everything. The material was practical before it was theoretical. And it reached students who had never once considered starting their own business

Professor Erna Oliver of UNISA joins the Knowledge Hub South Africa to trace a career that moves from church historian and pastor to pioneer in educational technology. She shares her research on the four distinct phases of South African colonisation, the layered nature of Afrikaner spirituality, and her double triangle model for open distance learning. She also argues that six simultaneous revolutions are reshaping education and society, and that Toffler's 1970 prediction of mass bewilderment from rapid change has quietly come true.

In this episode of The Knowledge Hub, hosted by Prof Ignatius Gous, the guest is Pieter Geldenhuys, a futurist and technology expert. His approach is restrained. No grand forecasts. No certainty. Instead, structure.

Geldenhuys frames the future through three interacting forces:

• Demographic megatrends
• Exponential technologies
• Complex adaptive systems

Each operates at a different tempo. Demography moves slowly. Technology scales rapidly. Complexity ensures that interactions between the two produce outcomes that are hard to predict.

The result is not chaos. It is unevenness.

The two creators of the show Dr Eugene Botha and Prof Ignatius Gous of South Africa discuss the reasons why they felt compelled to create the podcast.

Every day, researchers in South Africa and worldwide are solving problems that affect millions. They're developing new medical treatments, uncovering historical truths, innovating sustainable technologies, and understanding the complexities of human behavior. Yet their voices rarely reach beyond conference halls and academic journals.

The Knowledge Hub South Africa gives these pioneering minds a global stage. Through expertly crafted episodes, complex research becomes accessible without losing its rigor.

Hosted & presented by Professor Ignatius Gous, Professor Emeritus – University of South Africa. Renowned scholar in the fields of Religion, Metacognition, Lifelong Learning& Biblical studies. ⁠[email protected]⁠

Dr Eugene Botha, Former Professor – University of South Africa, background in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Classics, Linguistics, Religion, History, Social-scientific study of the Bible. Prolific academic author & award-winning television producer and documentary filmmaker. ⁠[email protected]⁠