CMEI Colloquium
Gutman Library, Harvard Graduate School of Education
December 6, 2016
Sharlene Swartz, in her book Another Country: Everyday Social Restitution calls for a renewed conversation in South Africa (and globally) about restitution in both its legal and social forms. In the book she relates Black South Africans' experiences of dehumanising racism alongside White South African's shame for the past and anxiety for the future. In this context, she introduces the concept of 'social restitution' -- understood as the actions and attitudes that everyday people can undertake in dialogue with each other to address past injustice. In this seminar, she and respondent Deevia Bhana, along with a panel of South African graduate students, will reflect on the notion of restitution and its salience for current debates on decolonisation, BlackLivesMatter, xenophobia, reparations for enslavement, and global immigration policy and attitudes.
Speaker Biographies:
Sharlene Swartz, PhD is a Research Director at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa and an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town. She is a HGSE alum (’03) and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her expertise centres on youth in adverse contexts, the effects of race on educational outcomes, and emancipatory qualitative research methods. Before embarking on an academic career Sharlene was a youth worker; she is the current chair of the Restitution Foundation. Her other books include: Ikasi: The moral ecology of South Africa’s township youth (2009); Teenage Tata: Voices of young fathers in South Africa (2009); Moral Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (2011) and Youth Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging (2013).
Deevia Bhana, PhD is a DST/NRF South African Research Chair and Professor in Gender and Childhood Sexuality: violence, inequalities and schooling at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She is the author of Childhood Sexuality and AIDS Education: The Price of Innocence (Routledge), Under Pressure: The Regulation of Sexualities in South African Secondary Schools (MaThoko/Modjaji Books). Gender and childhood sexuality in the primary school (Springer). Her fourth sole authored book titled Love, Sex and Teenage Sexual Cultures in South Africa is forthcoming and will be published by Routledge.
