Graduation OU style

My niece Claire and I graduated today. It was a short but interesting ceremony. The doctoral and PhD candidates went first and the person congratulating them (not the Chancellor or Vice Chancellor) spoke to each candidate in turn and they had to point out their supervisors sitting on the stage. The MRes candidates went directly after the MPhil students. Clearly, there is a hierarchy at play at the OU - the more prestigious research focused degrees are given the necessary priority (said with a touch of sarcasm). And because of this hierarchy they read out my dissertation title. Wow! Did I feel special - never happened to me before.

The ceremony proceeded in a very personable manner, almost every candidate who walked the stage was engaged in a small little chat and from time to time the whole audience was told of the special journey the candidate had taken to get their very special OU degree - highlighting the ethos of the OU as a truly open university aimed at recognising these different paths people often take to get a higher education, but emphasising the principle that higher education is open to everyone irrespective who or what you are.

My niece Claire having her little chat.

Just two of the Coleman women of achievement

But then reflecting on the various research titles pronounced today,  I realised that mine was probably one of maybe two, three, that foregrounded the geographical and therefore contextual location of the research. What does that mean? What am I trying to signal very clearly through the South African in the titling of my research (I'm doing it again for my PhD and for most of my conference presentations this year)?
 I have always been clear that I want to make a contribution to South African knowledge building, my work must be recognisable as South African in how it describes the research environment and by its holistic depictions of the South African realities, coming from someone who understands, engages and appreciates the complexities of that context; I don't want to be a researcher that exploits my South African data without being sensitive to the impact and impressions that the data and my interpretations of that data might have on the very real people who are the data.
I am reminded of an almost serendipitous Skype chat I had yesterday where I was made aware, at a more critical and meta-level than I am alluding to above, of the possible double edged sword quality of ethnographic research: While it foregrounds the local contextual realities, it also marks that very localness as something other than normal. So while I might want to clearly distinguish my research for its South Africaness - it might also be marked in ways that aren't necessarily positive or in ways that run counter to what my intentions are. Suggesting quite rightly, that how the contextual realities of my South African research is perceived is completely outside of my control.