Women Academics From South Africa

"It then suggests that the equality-centred, democratic Constitution represented an important anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal achievement, but that the plasticity of equality meant that it would always be open to different interpretations by the executive and parliament, as well as by courts tasked with enforcing the Constitution."

"My first degree was in Journalism and English Literature so I have always had a strong interest in media. In my postgraduate work, I was soon drawn into archival research and working with old newspapers and magazines."

"My early research focused on questions of orality and literacy, an area that inevitably lead to scholarship on the early modern world and from there to the field of book history and print culture. I then began teaching a course on South African book history, edited a special issue of the South African Historical Journal on this theme and also began supervising graduates working on these themes."

"The Internet has created both possibilities and problems. There is now much more archival material online and an astonishing array of digital books. In my generation, part of one’s training was in how to locate material in obscure archives. That now seems a bit comical, given the easy access one can have to troves and troves of material. These developments do however mean that the materiality of the objects is often obscured. One can’t see the actual document so some of the key methods of book history can’t be deployed."

"I write furiously, admonishing myself when I seem about to fall into the old habit of editing sentences as they appear. I want to discover what it is I am going to be writing about, who is in the story and what they are doing there."

"Since I am a slow writer and a compulsive editor, I try not to stop too often"

"At the start of a new fiction project, there is always a piece written quickly, assuredly, with little hesitation, and with the euphoric feeling that comes with knowing one has found somewhere to begin"

"What are we to make of the growing chorus of fears about the possible collapse of the dollar? Is it a case of crying wolf again? Those fears link four elements: Iran’s stated intention soon to open its own electronic International Oil Bourse; its resolve to sell oil there in euros, not dollars; the expectation that the price of oil will rise to over $100 a barrel, triggering world recession; and the demand for gold, rather than dollars, as a store of value."

"Since the US is deep in debt, nationally and internationally, the dollar’s value depends entirely on the fact that it is a reserve currency for other nations. We all have to keep reserves in dollars for two reasons. First, by an agreement made in the 1940’s, the oil producing countries of OPEC agreed to sell oil only in dollars. That meant everyone had to hold dollars if they wanted to buy oil, resulting in two-thirds of all central bank reserves being in dollars. That in turn means that the Americans have the privilege of producing the international currency. Creating money is nice work if you can get it. It is the equivalent of having a mint in your backyard. You can buy what you want with the new money, without having to supply the equivalent value of goods. America has been financing its annual deficit with the rest of the world – it borrows over $2 trillion a day - by simply making new money and spending it into circulation."

"They will not be able to do that if we no longer have to buy our oil in dollars. Its value would fall as nations switch to other currencies to buy oil or to gold as a reliable store of value. The creation of dollars would not be available as a mechanism to cover the huge international debt. If that process began, there could be the kind of flight from the currency that has wrecked the economy of many nations within the past decade. Even more alarming are suggestions that to avoid this possibility the American government is planning to invade Iran. The fact that the invasion of Iraq was preceded by unwarranted accusations of weapons of mass destruction, and that Hussein had threatened to switch sales of oil from dollars to euros, gives credence to such fears. The fact that Iraq’s current chaos makes it a net importer of oil seems not to deflect American resolve."

"What is the evidence for the possible imminence of this scenario? Associated Press on May 5 quoted top Wall Street analyst Bill O’Grady of A.G. Commodities: ‘If one day the world’s largest oil producers allowed, or worse demanded, euros for their barrels, it would be the financial equivalent of a nuclear strike."

"Gold is now at a 20-year high against the dollar, and the dollar at a one-year low against the euro. The Financial Times of May 16th, under the headline: “Fears for Dollar as Central Banks Sell US assets” reported that ‘central banks sold a net $14.4 billion during the month, the largest sale since August 1998."

"At the opening of the IMF meeting on April 21, Russia’s Finance Minister said his country ‘could not consider the dollar a reliable reserve currency because of its instability’. The same day the Swedish Riksbank halved its dollar holdings to buy euro."

"At that IMF meeting the 2006 World Economic Outlook was launched, warning of a dollar collapse – due to global trade imbalances, spiraling US debt and the demise of the petro-dollar reserve standard. In the language beloved of obfuscating economists who hope thereby to soften the truth, it stated: ‘Global current account imbalances are likely to remain at elevated levels for longer than would otherwise have been the case, heightening the risk of sudden disorderly adjustment. Sudden disorderly adjustment’ is the current bankers’ euphemism for the consequences of a dollar collapse. Others, including Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach, as well as financiers Soros and Warren Buffet, refer to it as ‘economic Armageddon’. How close are we to that?"

"I didn’t expect that the funding lines would be as slim as they were, and that they were cobbling together."

"Just the focus on trauma and healing … is not something you see much in the criminal justice system,’ said Mullins. However, this is seen now through TRCs. I think it really has become very central to communities as a place of safety, where you can go and get what you need .… I think they really are a shining example of the direction we should be moving."

"On Parole, Staying Free Means Staying Clean and Sober."

"You’ve got to make modifications based on what works for your culture."

"There are many who find it hard to embrace the idea of forgiveness. And it is easy to see why. In order to maintain some sort of moral compass, to hold on to some sort of clear distinction between what is depraved but conceivable and what is simply off the scale of human acceptability, we feel an inward emotional and mental pressure not to forgive, since forgiveness can signal acceptability, and acceptability signals some amount, however small, of condoning. There is a desire to draw a line and say, "Where you have been, I cannot follow you, Your actions can never be regarded as part of what it means to be human." Yet not to forgive means closing the door to the possibility of transformation."

"A genuine apology focuses on the feelings of the other rather than on how the one who is apologizing is going to benefit in the end. It seeks to acknowledge full responsibility for an act, and does not use self-serving language to justify the behavior of the person asking forgiveness. A sincere apology does not seek to erase what was done. No amount of words can undo past wrongs. Nothing can ever reverse injustices committed against others. But an apology pronounced in the context of horrible acts has the potential for transformation. It clears or ‘settles’ the air in order to begin reconstructing the broken connections between two human beings."

"Perpetrators of human rights violations redefine morality and start believing that they can commit systematic murder and other atrocities "for the greater good." The distance between evil and sickness is not that great. The evil component of crimes against humanity is the moral failing. The sickness aspect is the defect in perspective, the distortion in mental processing that both precedes the evil and is intensified by it."

"It is a new discipline in medicine which focuses on access to surgery and improving quality of care and outcomes. I like to describe it as the interface between surgical services and surgical systems."

"My research is working on improving perinatal outcomes and stillbirth auditing across Africa. In many countries, we don’t know what the real numbers are at the end of the day, so we have to start counting."

"More importantly though, the role of women in their societies can tell us a lot. Communities that protect their women seem to have better health outcomes."

"t's always the elephant in the room. When you walk into a room, and you don't see anyone that looks like you, sometimes you don't know if you are welcome or not. Luckily, i am comfortable with situations where I am minority."

"But I am very clear about what my expertise is. It is also a sense of pressure and responsibility because I often feel that if a wrong decision is made, I am not speaking just for me, but for many."

"I especially enjoy doing research that provides the opportunity for collaboration. Research and writing can be a lonely endeavour, so the opportunity to engage with others in your field can be hugely enriching and my experience suggests that it advances innovative, creative and novel scholarship. I especially enjoy opening collaborative spaces through supervision of master’s and doctoral students and have often learned more from the students I supervise rather than the other way around."

"Ending men’s violence toward women is a key concern, not only for women’s well-being, but for the well-being of society as a whole. South Africa is notorious for its excessively high levels of gendered violence. My work has made practical recommendations for ending men’s violence and contributing to gender equity that have been taken up by a number of organisations."

"Pursue research interests that drive and sustain your passions – but also look around you and consider the contexts in which you work and what your work might be doing at the level of ethics, politics and representation."

"It is important to think critically and to reflect on the ethical and political impact of your research – regardless of the ‘kind’ of psychology you end up doing. The contexts in which we work as researchers and psychologists – that involve deepening global and local inequalities, growing legitimised and institutionalised forms of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and increasing poverty and dispossession – demand that we think carefully about how or whether our work advances social justice."

"If these thoughts are on the right track, at least three concepts in the post-Fricker literature on epistemic injustice can help us theorise epistemic decolonisation in good ways, i.e. ways that meet the desiderata for just use of epistemic injustice tools. Moreover, these three concepts aren’t lone outliers in a sea of useless and WPS-prone concepts. On the contrary, they are related to many other concepts in the literature that are equally theoretically fruitful and attuned to the desiderata inspired by the WPS challenge.Footnote22 Instead of pursuing this line, which is bound to turn tedious given the size of the literature, I wish to conclude by addressing a concern that the reader may have had throughout the discussion so far."

"A plausible worry with my argument is that the very fact that I am a white person based at an academic institution automatically means that the epistemic injustice tools I am using are likely to fail at least the second and third desiderata on good use of epistemic injustice concepts. They may be thought to violate the second because given my identity and institution-base, whatever version of the epistemic oppression tool I am using is both institutionalised and bound to serve dominant, white, interests. And given my belonging to the oppressor’s social group, the use of this tool is bound to adopt the perspective of the oppressor."

"Let me start by saying what wouldn’t be a good reply – pointing to the fact that I am based in South Africa, where political power is in the hands of the victims of colonialism. The reason this reply won’t do is that it is a terrible mistake to assume that the event of political decolonisation amounts to epistemic decolonisation. Although the event of political decolonisation is long past, as discussed in section 2, epistemic decolonisation is a dynamic and ongoing process, which has still a long way to go. Hence, individual academic institutions have a long way to go. This means that the larger institution of academia still allows for the bad, un-decolonised institutionalisation of epistemic resources and the systematic favouring of the perspective of the oppressor. The fact that the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement started in South Africa bears witness to this."

"Although this quick reply doesn’t work, I don’t think that the objector’s worry is warranted at least in the context of the argument of this paper. Suppose that it was indeed inevitable that a white academic perpetuates the institutionalisation of these tools in ways that favour dominant interests and privilege the oppressor’s perspective. (I don’t think that this is the case, but let us suppose it is.) This would still not threaten the present argument, because I am not in fact using these tools. Instead, I am setting constraints – developed by non-dominant knowers – for good ways of using such tools. Whether I can use them myself in these ways is a moot point. (If the objector is right, I can’t.) But I hope to have at least persuaded the reader that they can be used in these ways to advance the project of epistemic decolonisation. I take this as a big win in light of increasing WPS-style doubts about some of the epistemic injustice literature."

"Kant's distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. He is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects."

"Kant's idealism can be understood as limiting empirical reality to that with which we can have acquaintance. He thinks that this empirical reality is mind-dependent in the sense that it is not experience-transcendent, rather than holding that it exists literally in our minds. Reading intuition in this way enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. This shows that reading a central part of his argument in the Transcendental Deduction as epistemological is compatible with a metaphysical, idealist reading of transcendental idealism."

"My aim in this chapter is to characterize the change of heart that plays a role in forgiveness—in giving up warranted blaming reactive attitudes. I present this in the context of developing a Kantian account of what forgiveness is and why we need it, drawing on his moral psychology to characterize the relevant change of heart."

"I appeal in particular to Kant’s account of human frailty and its relation to his account of human evil. I argue that it is frail and flawed agents who lack an entirely fixed and stable character for whom forgiveness is a live option and a need. For such agents, there may be space to interpret us in the light of better willing than our wrongdoing indicates."

"It is a summer of songs composed in blood, tuned with guns and arranged in conversations. It is a summer of songs I sing in swelling volumes."

"I write poetry from my personal space, in my personal voice. I say “I am here”. I address women in the world."

"I first encountered your 2019 debut collection Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner (Modjaji Books) at the Rosebank branch of Exclusive Books. I spent so much time trying to read the two words on the cover, the ones in a small black font. After numerous failed attempts I decided I would use my magnifying glass when I got back home. It was in that moment that I realised: Oh, they are using the very cover to give me the visceral experience of what I am about to read! Then I thought: Effective! Smart! I love it! I am buying this book!"

"I was still in the queue at the bookshop when I read the contents page, and I began to smile, because Tongues of their Mothers—my second poetry collection—is also divided into four sections using the names of seasons. In your book, there are eleven poems in Winter, fifteen in Summer, three in Spring and thirteen in Autumn."

"These hands have Moulded monuments, created crafts, healed hearts."

"Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used To Be."

"The central question for whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa can be put simply: how to maintain privilege in a situation in which black people have achieved political power. Many stances to the new dispensation are available to white South Africans, but this article concerns only resistant white discourses, referred to as White Talk."

"Working with the recollections of everyday experiences of apartheid collected by the Apartheid Archives project, and drawing on the emerging theorization of ignorance in the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how an ‘ignorance contract’ – the tacit agreement to entertain ignorance – lies at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy. Unlike the conventional theorization of ignorance that regards ignorance as a matter of faulty individual cognition, or a collective absence of yet-to-be-acquired knowledge, ignorance is understood as a social achievement with strategic value."

"The apartheid narratives illustrate that for ignorance to function as social regulation, subjectivities must be formed that are appropriate performers of ignorance, disciplined in cognition, affect and ethics."

"Both white and black South Africans produced epistemologies of ignorance, although the terms of the contract were set by white society as the group with the dominant power."

"Contemporary post-colonial geopolitics has witnessed the changing nature of the nation state. Initially conceived of as the territorial “home” of an ethnically and racially homogenous group, the notion of the nation state is increasingly characterised by difference and complexity. There are few contexts where people are not confronted by difference in the workplace, in organisations and public spaces, and as an aspect of the general body politic. The challenge therefore is how to value what different groups may bring to the collective while, at the same time, maintaining cohesive societies. In difficult economic times, this includes rejecting policies that approach difference through segregation, expulsion and ethnic cleansing in favour of inclusive political and economic measures and equitable sharing of resources. It also requires public spaces that are characterised by accessibility and safety for all raced, gendered and differently abled bodies. For organisations, the challenges cluster around such issues as how to create environments that can bring into play the strengths of difference to promote organisational goals, while at the same time enabling employees to reach their full potential, to have their contribution valued and to feel recognised and respected."

"Can I touch your hair? Where are you from? I cannot do anything with your hair unless I texturise it!"