Projects

WiCDS is part of The Cluster of Excellence on Health, Gender, and Sexualities which aims to generate ground-breaking interdisciplinary research to address health disparities among gender and sexual minority populations and to integrate public health and social sciences to understand the complex interplay of social, cultural, and healthcare-related factors affecting health outcomes and access to care. Partners include Addis Ababa University, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Science, University of Mauritius, Uppsala University, King’s College London and Centre for Sexual Health and HIV AIDS Research (CeSHHAR), Zimbabwe.

This long-term project concerns black people’s perceptions on whether and how white people are changing. This is a longitudinal study based in two township areas outside of Cape Town. We have collected focus group and interview data over ten-year intervals (1997, 2007, 2017) and now are completing a final round, so that this project will have spanned 25 years.

The CT Collective is an independent, international community of scholars who engage with issues of post development and decoloniality through research, activism and publications. In 2021, CT and WICDS began a collaborative publication series of short blog articles on aspects of conviviality and critical diversity literacy, published on the CT blog, as well as releasing a podcast [https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-ub9fv-10d843f]. The collaboration will also lead to a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, titled ‘Conversations on Conviviality and Critical Diversity Literacy: Overlaps, Tensions and Grey Areas’, coedited by Kudzaiishe Vanyoro and Sayan Dey.

This project seeks to map out the experiences of and perspectives on of gender-based violence (GBV) of black women living with varying disabilities (BwDs) in selected South African townships. The landscaping analysis includes their accounts of their experiences, how they understand the risks they face that increase the likelihood of violence against them, the causes of violence perpetrated against them, the strategies they engage in to avoid violence when they can, and the interventions they believe might help them.

This project is funded by the Ford Foundation and led by Kudzaiishe Vanyoro.

Based on the concepts of whiteness and colonialities, this postdoctoral research project aims to analyse the social context of contemporary Mozambique, especially the capital Maputo, to deepen our knowledge of ??binarity, distance, hegemony, hypervisibility, black inferiority, norms, privilege and white supremacy in southern Africa. Through a discourse analysis and  participant methodology, it asks whether there a potential presence of whiteness and colonialities in White people’s discourses in contemporary Mozambique, and if so, what this presence is like. It considers the impacts of whiteness and colonialities in Mozambican lives and ask whether the categories of whiteness and colonialities are applicable to White people's discourses when they are born and/or living in Mozambique.

Patterns of Political Self-Education and the Role of Political Emotions Among Indigenous Peoples of Russia Under a Non-Liberal Regime

This research focuses on understanding the political self-education of Indigenous peoples of Russia, who, due to the non-liberal regime and persecution, currently live in exile and engage in political activism. The study aims to analyse how ethnic identity of Indigenous peoples transforms into political identity, and to explore the role of political emotions in this process. This two-year research project is funded by the Spencer Foundation.

FADDOFAF aims at understanding the role of documents and documenting practices in the construction of fathering and fatherhood in Finnish-African families, from the narratives of fathers from 10 different countries of the sub-Saharan Africa living in 8 Finnish metropolitan towns. The study builds a new theory, the ‘Documenting Framework for Migrant Parents’, which shows how migrant parents shape their families, fathering, and fatherhood processes with documents and documenting practices. It also offers a prism through which to interpret the narratives and experiences of documenting practices in family life - illuminating a novel rethinking of how father and representations of family and fatherhood are constructed, lived, and led through documents/documenting practices.

Pan-Africanism was adopted and deployed as a philosophy and or ideology of African unity and liberation that gave impetus to African struggles against colonialism and imperialism. Many decades after African countries achieved political independence, decolonial thinkers and philosophers of liberation are critiquing Pan-Africanism, asking questions about is pitfalls and possible successes. This project brings together that emerging school of critique in a series of edited volumes and roundtable discussions featuring significant thinkers across the continent.