The University of the Western Cape (UWC) is justifiably proud of the number of globally recognised women heading up research at the institution. As part of its 50-year celebrations, UWC is honouring its women in research and their contribution to building a better and more inclusive society for all South Africans
PROFESSOR CHARLYN DYERS obtained her doctoral degree in Linguistics from the University of the Western Cape in 2001. She also obtained an M.Sc. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1980. She has taught English as a Foreign/Second Language at the University of Edinburgh and the Free University of Berlin. She joined the University of the Western Cape in 1994, and is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics. As part of her most recent research, Professor Dyers is working in communities close to UWC, studying the discourses and literacy of women in Wesbank — an RDP housing settlement open to all races.
Initial findings from the studies have shown that women are particularly resourceful at passing on information and literacy mediation and the team are working closely with women in the townships to gather data. Dyers and her team are also particularly interested in post-modern language development and evolution in a multicultural environment. Her most recent paper based on research in Wesbank township was published in the Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication (2009) and was titled From ibharu to amajoin: translocation and language in a new South African township.
PROFESSOR JULIA SLOTH-NIELSEN has a long history with UWC. Her passion for the law and how it affects children has shaped an illustrious international academic career. Professor Sloth-Nielsen obtained her LLD degree from the University of the Western Cape on South Africa’s juvenile justice system under the new constitution. She played a major role in drafting legislation for the new Child Justice Act, 2008, and has subsequently contributed major chapters to the Children’s Act 2005. She has consulted on children’s law and policy in many African countries, including Southern Sudan, Kenya, Mozambique, Zanzibar, Namibia, and Lesotho. She has a worldwide reputation as a scholar on African children’s rights. Her other interest is prisons law and policy, an area in which she also enjoys an international reputation.
As a result of South Africa’s ground breaking Constitution and its strong children’s rights advocacy, Professor Sloth-Nielsen is working closely with other African countries, many of whom are revising their constitutions to include children’s rights at the core. Her expertise at the regional level was confirmed in January 2011 when she was appointed a member of the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, a structure of the African Union. Despite her work, Professor Sloth-Nielson still believes that the legal system is not adequately geared for children and she works tirelessly with other advocacy groups to ensure the legal systems is sensitised to children’s needs. Professor Sloth-Nielsen is the Dean of the Faculty of Law.
Internationally renowned poet, writer and journalist PROFESSOR ANTJIE KROG, is currently Extraordinary Professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape. She has published twelve volumes of poetry in Afrikaans, two volumes translated into English, a short novel, a play, and three non-fiction books in English: Country of my Skull, on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; A Change of Tongue about the transformation among Afrikaners in South Africa after ten years and Begging to be Black about “becoming” towards a black majority. Her works have been translated into English, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, Swedish, Serbian and Arabic and had been awarded most of the prestigious awards available in South Africa for non-fiction, journalism and poetry in both Afrikaans and English.
Krog held a Research fellowship at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 2007/2008 and was invited by Giyatri Spivak to teach a seminar during April 2009 at her Institute for Comparative Literature and Society Columbia University in New York. Krog has been internationally recognised with many awards including the Open Society Prize (2006) from the Central European University. Krog obtained an MA degree from the University of Pretoria in the eighties and joined the University of the Western Cape in 2004.
For a number of years PROFESSOR UMA DHUPELIA-MESTHRIE’S research interest has been on forced removals in Cape Town. The idea was to focus on local communities that had been neglected in the history of removals. She has produced a substantial body of research on Black River in Rondebosch a community forgotten by Cape Town and erased from the landscape. With the advent of democracy, her research shifted to land restitution and its meaning for local people. Her research has assisted those claiming land and she has been an expert witness in the Land Claims Court. The Cape Flats to which people were relocated has always been seen in negative ways but decades have elapsed since people were relocated and Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s current research project is focussed on documenting these histories since relocation. Her own work focuses on Rylands a group area for Indians (about whom very little has been written) while her postgraduate students have been undertaking research in Manenberg, Lavender Hill and Joe Slovo. Oral histories form the basis of much this work.These seek to challenge representations of the Cape Flats and explore what it means to live in these parts of Cape Town.
Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s work seeks to challenge stereotypes of the Indian who is seen as just a wealthy trader. Attracted by Indian Ocean studies she has sought to understand connected histories between India and South Africa. Her work has drawn attention to little known and humiliating documents of identity that Indians had to carry to gain entry into the Cape and she has participated in a forum of international scholars working on documents of identity.
Professor Dhupelia-Mesthrie completed her doctorate from the University of Natal in 1988. She lectured at the former University of Durban-Westville and was a research fellow at the Southern African Research Programme at Yale University as well as with the Sociology Department of the University of Cape Town. She joined the History Department at the University of the Western Cape in 1993 and has been a professor since 2007. She has also served as deputy dean of research in the arts faculty between 2006 and 2008. Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s books include the widely acclaimed From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian Life in South Africa (2000), SIta: The Memoirs of Sita Gandhi (2003) and Gandhi’s Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal (Kwela Books. Cape Town, 2004). This won her the Via Afrika award for best non-fiction and it has been also published by Permanent Black, a leading Indian academic publisher in hardback and paperback.
Obesity is a growing public health problem in South Africa. It is a leading contributor to cardio vascular disease and is receiving attention globally. The school of public health under the leadership of PROFESSOR THANDI PUOANE and her team have been working in a black township focusing on action research to identify community related factors that contribute to the increase in the prevalence of chronic diseases. This work includes identification and analysis of the causes, planning and implementation of interventions to reduce the risk for chronic diseases.
Puoane believes that the modern township lifestyle has fundamentally affected the health of inhabitants. Cheap, low-quality, fatty meats and refined sugars/starches make up the bulk of food consumed by township dwellers. While a lack of knowledge about the dangers of poor nutrition is a key challenge, Puoane says even those who know better are often unable to change their diet due to a number of factors including high prices of healthy food. To better understand factors that perpetuate the development of chronic disease in populations, the team is currently conducting a prospective urban rural epidemiological (PURE), a multi-country study aimed at identifying societal risk factors for chronic diseases.
PROFESSOR TAMARA SHEFER was awarded the 2009 UWC Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Researcher Award in the Human and Social Sciences in 2010. With three years of acknowledgement in the Mail & Guardian’s Book of South Africa, she is also well known for her work on gender, sexuality and critical psychology. Her most recent edited books, From boys to men: Social constructions of masculinity in contemporary society (2007) and The Gender of Psychology (2006) are both valuable contributions to the broader terrain of gender studies and psychology in South Africa, read by students, researchers and the interested public more broadly.
Tamara Shefer is Director and professor of the Women’s and Gender Studies Programme in the Faculty of Arts at UWC where she has taught since 1994. Prior to her appointment in Women’s and Gender Studies, she lectured in the Psychology Department at UWC and has also taught at UCT’s Psychology Department. She has also been active in adult education, working for some years with a large educational NGO, and is still well-known as an expert in gender and anti-racist training. Shefer’s research and publications are primarily in the areas of (hetero)sexual relationships, HIV/AIDS, gender and sexual identities, masculinities, gender and authorship, and feminist and critical psychology.
She has published widely internationally and locally, and also published four co-edited books and authored/co-authored two others, all of which have had the goal of challenging traditional thinking and practices in her area of focus, as well as addressing the imperative to produce locally relevant and accessible texts for the pubic, students and academics. Shefer has a long commitment to transformation in higher education. As an academic, her primary research outputs range across a number of different, interdisciplinary research fields that straddle critical/feminist psychology and women’s and gender studies. Most of her research centred on the exploration of gender and power in the negotiation of heterosexual relations, particularly in the light of HIV/AIDS.
“More recently, I have begun to reflect more critically on this broad body of work,” said Shefer. ‘I presented and wrote a number of critiques on the way in which researchers and practitioners in the area of HIV/AIDS and sexualities have inadvertently reproduced and legitimised problematic gendered discourses in the work they have done.” Publications like From boys to men: Social constructions of masculinity in contemporary society (2008) many earned her an NRF-rated incentive award from 2008 to 2010. Her national and international collaborative projects developed into an e-learning module on women’s health that has been taught at five universities across the globe and was taught again at UWC in 2009. At the moment, Shefer hopes to complete a book in 2010 that is a study of young, school-going parents in Durban and Cape Town. “The book will contain rich descriptive material of young parents, teachers and principals,” said Shefer.
The University of the Western Cape is one of five Schools of Dentistry in South Africa. However, it graduates 47% of the country’s dentists. This is, in no small part, due to the groundbreaking international research overseen by PROFESSOR SUDESHNI NAIDOO. She is present ly the Deputy Dean for Postgraduate Studies and Research, Director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Oral Health and an NRF-rated scientist. Naidoo is a Professor and Principal Specialist in the Department of Community Oral Health, Faculty of Dentistry at the University of the Western Cape, having previously held the posts of Principal Dentist, Dental Researcher at the Medical Research Council and Senior Registrar in Community Dentistry.
Professor Naidoo has been instrumental in shifting the perception of the importance of dentistry as an integral part of holistic health. She has been involved in innovative research in Fetal Alcohol Syndrome investigating the cranio-facial, oral and dental manifestations. This was a collaborative project with the Foundation for Alcohol Related Research (FAAR), University of Cape Town, NIAAA from the National Institute of Health, USA and the Centre on Alcoholism, Substance Abuse and Addiction, University of New Mexico. Her areas of research highlight how injuries to the head, mouth and teeth can often be the first sign of abuse –especially amongst children. Traumatic dental injuries are receiving growing international attention and, under the guidance of Professor Naidoo, South Africa is adding significant and important findings to the global school of learning.
Naidoo explains that in incidents of child abuse, between 50 to 75% of injuries involve damage to the head, face and mouth. The responsibility of dentists in recognising these injuries and reporting them has now been recognised by the profession. Other areas of international collaboration include those of tooth erosion (especially due to over-consumption of sports drinks) and infectious diseases and infection control in dentistry. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has had serious implications for dentistry. Naidoo has initiated and is involved in multi-disciplinary efforts to document the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS in the African context. Research is ongoing regarding analytic strategies from within a large prevalence/epidemiological data set to investigate predictors of oral HIV.
Numerous scientific papers have been published documenting the Southern African scenario in both adults and children. Much of the baseline research was utilised in the development of oral HIV educational material and innovative training programmes, to train health care workers in the diagnosis and management of oral HIV lesions. Professor Naidoo has presented numerous scientific papers of her research findings at national and international conferences and has
been an invited and keynote speaker, nationally and internationally on several occasions.
PROFESSOR WENDY WOODWARD
Professor Wendy Woodward was the 2009 recipient of the first University of the Western Cape Vice Chancellor’s Annual Book Award. This award is designed to encourage scholarly research publications by staff in the form of books, both as authors and as editors. Woodward received the award for the book, The Animal Gaze in the category, author of a book based purely on research undertaken by the author during her academic career and published by a recognised publishing house. Professor Woodward graduated with a PhD from UCT in 1987 and joined the English Department at UWC in the same year. She served as the first Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and is currently Deputy Dean of Teaching and Learning in the Arts Faculty.
Woodward’s The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives was published in 2008 by Wits University Press and is the first South African monograph within the new transdisciplinary field of Human-Animal Studies. The book is concerned with ethics and animal philosophy and with lived relationships to nonhuman animals in Southern Africa. It interrogates Northern philosophers, suggesting that certain African knowledges have much to teach us about kinship with nonhuman animals. Many humans do not regard animals as complex beings. Instead, they objectify animals, relate to them as ‘pets’. Or see them simply as spectacles of beauty or wildness.
By contrast, the Southern African writers whose work is explored in The Animal Gaze, including Olive Schreiner, Zakes Mda, Yvonne Vera, Eugene N. Marais and J.M. Coetzee represent animals as richly individual subjects. The animals — including cattle, horses, birds, lions, leopards, baboons, dogs, cats and a whale — experience complex emotions and have agency, intentionality and morality, as well as an ability to recognise and fear death. This volume goes beyond Jacques Derrida’s notion of the animal gaze which still has animals as the ‘absolute other’, and suggests a re-conceptualising of animals and ‘anothers’. The Animal Gaze engages with the writings of other authors and brings together Literary Studies, Ethics, Animal Studies and African traditional thought, including shamanism, in a way that compels the reader to think differently about non-human animals and human relationships with them. Currently, Woodward’s research engages with African, North American and Indian authors as well as the work of local photographers.