Extremist Mythologies - 11th annual WiCDS conference

The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies is pleased to annouce its 11th annual conference, 'Extremist Mythologies'

Please join us at the Humanities Graduate Centre from 14-16 October 2025, alongside featured speakers Achille Mbembe, Ryan Bishop, Atiqa Hachimi and Haley McEwen. 

Much contemporary scholarship and public conversation are concerned with the rise of populism and extremism, their causes as well as their consequences. Less attention has been paid to the particular ways in which extremist political positions support and mainstream themselves, and how they activate sameness and difference as part of their symbolic arsenal. Even those extremisms which appear more rational or humane, or more in line with our personal belief systems, utilise a conceptual scaffolding to maintain their appeal. This interdisciplinary conference is interested in the narratives, discourses, symbols, myths and images that are pervasive throughout contemporary cultural and political polarisation. It aims to ask not just why but also, from a granular perspective, how extremism is formed, marketed and transmitted, how it attains virality, how it uses myth to foster emotion.

Drawing on the concerns of Diversity Studies, which critically interrogates difference and power, this conference will discuss issues including, but not limited to:

• War, dictatorship and violence
• Scapegoating processes, from poverty to migration
• Racialisation and race talk
• Identity politics at extremes
• The demystification of liberation movements
• Desirable/undesirable disability
• Tradwives, slay queens and ‘new’ femininities
• The incelisation of big politics
• Polygamy, homophobia and conservative family values in Africa
• Extremist religion, from settler Zionism to prosperity gospels
• AI, algorithms and the rise of predatory media
• Dystopian and utopian visions of post/extremist futures

Partners in this event include the Innovation Foundation for Democracy, the Wits Research Office and the DST-NRF Bilateral Chair in Digital Humanities. 

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Generational activisms: Women and social justice in South Africa

Generational activisms: Women and social justice in South Africa. The role of women in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid has been well documented and much praised. In the years since then, female leaders, workers, intellectuals, artists and practitioners have remained essential drivers in the fight for social justice, although their roles and ideas have not always been acknowledged in public consciousness. In this Women’s Month edition of WiCDS Wednesday, we are joined by a panel of female activists to reflect on the intersectional complexities, challenges and joys of women’s activism.

Thato Mphuthi, Enabled Enlightenment: Thato is a disability justice advocate, writer, and founder of Enabled Enlightenment NPC, an organisation working to dismantle barriers, challenge stigma, and advance inclusion for persons with disabilities. Her work spans policy advocacy, psychosocial support, inclusive education, and community-driven initiatives that empower disabled people to claim their rights and dignity. As a new mother, she also writes candidly about parenting, disabled joy, and the intersections of gender, care, and accessibility through her blog My Crutches and I. Thato’s activism embodies in her organisation’s bold slogan, “disabling norms,” by transforming personal experiences into collective action for equity.

Wendy Isaack, MADRE Global Women’s Rights: An Expert Member of the Gender Persecution Observatory, Wendy is an international human rights lawyer with more than 20 years professional experience in policy and legal advocacy interventions in Southern and West Africa, Palestine, the African human rights system and United Nations HQ. With expertise in developing multi-pronged advocacy strategies for the advancement of human rights in domestic, regional and international fora, Wendy has investigated and reported on women’s human rights and sexual orientation and gender identity issues in several African states, including South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Malawi and Tunisia. An admitted Attorney of the High Court of South Africa, she holds two master’s degrees - in Public Administration from Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government and in International Law, from the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. 

Bridget Munnik, Mashup Community Development: Bridget is more commonly known as Auntie Bree, the Mother Theresa of Westbury. She is a community developer, counselor, paralegal, assessor, moderator, facilitator and trainer, and the manager for the Mashup Community Development youth centre in Westbury. As well as extensive community networking, she appears regularly on Kofifi FM, SAfm, Rainbow FM, UJ FM, Eldos FM and radio stations in Cape Town. She has been interviewed by both Carte Blanche and Kyknet about crimes in the community. She is also Circuit President in the Women's Association at the Methodist Church. As an actor, Bridget is involved in frequent radio and stage productions about gender-based violence (GBV), substance abuse, teenage pregnancy and bullying. Her motto for young people is ‘skill yourself don’t kill yourself’, and for women, ‘speak out against GBV’. 

Laurel Baldwin-Ragaven, Wits: Physician, educator, scholar and social justice advocate, Laurel is full Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits. As the former clinical head of Family Medicine for Southern Gauteng, she oversaw a service-training platform providing comprehensive primary health care to over nine million people. Baldwin-Ragaven researches and writes extensively on dual loyalty of health care workers, medical participation in torture, health sector complicity with apartheid state violence, gender-based violence, feminism and bioethics, migrant health, and training and education in health and human rights. Her undergraduate degree in American Studies is from Smith College, USA; and, she completed medical training at McGill University, Canada.

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The Borders of Transformation: The Continent and the South African University

This colloquium considers competing and complementary approaches to race and nationality in South African higher education, at a moment that marks ten years since the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall protests as well as being characterised by the increasing visibility and weaponisation of national and international xenophobia. It poses this question as a reflection not just on the Fallist movements, but on a three-decade long history of contentious post-Apartheid efforts to align the country’s universities with broader commitments to equity and progressive social change. Current attacks on academic institutions represent them as sites of illicit patronage of apparently unqualified foreigners, while foreign academics themselves navigate bureaucratic mazes and hostile atmospheres. What can these contradictions tell us about the processes of transformation and change that were meant to be invigorated by #RMF? The colloquium also considers future institutional trajectories in an era of resource scarcity, persistent domestic and global inequality, and rampant populist anti-intellectualism. At its heart, it asks how universities, and the scholars and activists housed within them, can respond to stormy political waters and to potentially competing visions of justice and transformation. What might it mean to be an African university in South Africa, and what will it take to realise that vision?

Featuring Ahmed Veriava (Wits), Srila Roy (Wits), Mxolisi Makhubo (UJ), Fikile Masikane (UP), William Mpofu (Wits), Samia Chasi (Wits) and Salim Vally (UJ).

Please RSVP to Lenore.Longwe@wits.ac.za, stating whether you will attend in-person or online

A collaboration between the Internationalization and Strategic Partnerships Office, the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab, the NRF-DST SARChI Chair in Mobility and the Politics of Difference and the NRF-DST SARChI Chair in Critical Diversity Studies

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'The Queer Politics of Pride' book launch

The first book to explore the queer politics of LGBTQ+ Pride in global terms, exploring the impacts, controversies and potential of Pride across the world.

Featuring Dr Daniel Conway, Keval Harie, Professor Srila Roy, Professor Nicky Falkof, Jade Madingwane and Ntsupe Mohapi

Drawing from extensive fieldwork in South Africa, South and East Asia, Cuba and New York, The Queer Politics of Pride explores and conceptualises the contemporary politics of LGBTQ+ Pride and queer activism in global contexts. Building on critical queer scholarship, the book includes the perspectives and critiques of grassroots queer activists and applies contemporary social, political and international theory to conceptualise Pride as part of the global processes of capitalism and the socio-political and spatial dynamics of gentrification.

By exploring the politics and controversies of Pride, Conway addresses broader questions about the contemporary LGBTQ+ advocacy movement including the influence and place of corporate sponsorship and advocacy, relationship with state and international institutions and the rise of an LGBTQ+ global elite.

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Gender Studies Now! Africa panel

A webinar series by the European Journal of Women’s Studies, in collaboration with Wits Centre for Diversity Studies

Join us for a cross-regional conversation on the current state, and future directions of gender studies. This two-part online webinar series brings together scholars to share insights, challenges, and strategies relevant to gender research and teaching today.  

14th of November 2025
12:00–14:00 CET / 13:00–14:00 SAST

Panelists:
Prof Helen Rizzo (American University in Cairo)
Dr Catherine Ngozi Ekwe (Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria)
Dr Mbali Mazibuko (University of Johannesburg, South Africa)

Register here: https://wits-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/dI911Cc1TKulfga_-NF6ZA#/registration

The European Journal of Women’s Studies is a major international forum for publishing origi- nal research, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically grounded in the field of gender studies, with a focus on the complex theoreti- cal and empirical relationship between women and the particular, and diverse, national and transnational contexts of Europe.

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2026 Postgraduate Orientation

Incoming Honours, Masters and PhD students are invited to this important opening event

The WiCDS orientation sessions will help you understand how your degree is structured, what the deadlines and expectations are and the Centre's aims and policies. You will be introduced to staff from WiCDS and from the Faculty of Humanities who will be supporting you in your intellectual journey. Most importantly, this is an opportunity to meet the emerging scholars who will be part of your cohort during your postgraduate degree. 

More information to follow in January. RSVPs are essential.  

Students who have not yet been able to register due to funding constraints are strongly advised to attend orientation so they are aware of what is expected of them.  

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WiCDS Wednesday: The Devil Made Me Do It

Director Nicky Falkof will be discussing her 2025 book The Devil Made Me Do It: Understanding occult crime in South Africa with Dr Dinesh Balliah

For our first WiCDS Wednesday of 2026, our Director Nicky Falkof will be discussing her 2025 book The Devil Made Me Do It: Understanding occult crime in South Africa with Dr Dinesh Balliah, Director of the Wits Centre for Journalism.

Please join us on the 13^th floor of Es’Kia Mphahlele House from 13.30-15.30 on Wednesday 11 February.

Copies of the book will be on sale. RSVP to Ditebogo Kalauba ditebogo.kalauba@wits.ac.za.

South Africa can sometimes appear to be awash with occult crime. From satanist conspiracies and witchcraft accusations to muti murders and demonic possession, a trawl through our national news suggests a society at war with the forces of evil. Why does the occult have such a grasp on our collective imagination? In this vastly unequal country, with its crises of gender-based violence, child abuse, poverty and unemployment, there are more than enough obvious dangers to our social stability. Why, then, are South Africans so quick to blame the supernatural for violence and misfortune? How do beliefs in occult crime intersect with problems of gender, race and class? And is there any truth to these supernatural tales?

The Devil Made Me Do It  examines these and other thorny questions by probing the stories, beliefs and rumours behind the so-called occult crimes that have entranced South Africa’s fractured psyche. They include the murder of a child mistaken for a tokoloshe in the 1920s, the satanic panic that gripped the nation in the 1980s and 1990s, the Krugersdorp cult killings of 2012–16, and the muti murder of a six-year-old girl in 2022. What can these crimes, and the way they are represented by media, police and other institutions, tell us about South Africa today?

Read an article about the book here.

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Weekly Writing Salons

Join us every Tuesday during term time for a quiet two-hour writing session in the WiCDS office. All welcome! 

Join the session online.

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BOOK TALK: Body Problems

WiCDS and GALA invite you to a discussion of this groundbreaking book with author M. Wolff

In  Body Problems, M. Wolff offers groundbreaking insight into Sally Gross, a South African intersex priest and activist whose body was continuously policed and politicized. Gross’s role in founding Intersex South Africa and her involvement with the ANC are celebrated in the Apartheid Museum, but the complex dimensions of her life - from her Jewish heritage to her Christian priesthood and Buddhist practices - remain largely unexplored. Wolff illuminates these lesser-known aspects of Gross’s spirituality and theorizes her resistance to the regulation of intersexuality.

The book urges readers to rethink bodies and belonging, particularly as they relate to formations of gender and religion. Wolff presents Gross’s life as a guide for discerning our commitments to social justice and responsible relations. Body Problems  is a timely and expansive contribution to ongoing discourses on the medical, religious and political construction of bodies.

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Book talk: Environmental Entanglements

WiCDS and WiSER invite you to a book talk featuring author Kirk Sides in conversation with Sarah Nuttall (WiSER) and Jarred Thompson (UP)

Environmental Entanglements: African Literature’s Ecological Imaginary traces a long history of ecological thought in African literature. Reading African literatures as environmental literatures, Environmental Entanglements takes a step back beyond the mid-twentieth century moment of political independence. Using ‘entanglement’ to represent ecological relations, the book traces an ecological imaginary that animates African literary and cultural repertoires. This imaginary gives shape to stories of crossing colonial and apartheid boundaries, of the movement of peoples, and of the cultural and social relations inscribed upon land.

Focusing on literary and filmic texts, from writers such as Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje in the early twentieth century to contemporary science and speculative fiction producers like Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu, Environmental Entanglements argues that cultural archives from the African continent display a history of ecological awareness that predates the moment of mid-twentieth century decolonization. The book is premised on the idea that imagining relations ecologically is not a belated preoccupation in African literatures; rather, these early ecological imaginaries present an opportunity to delink notions such as environmentalism, ecology and ecocriticism from postcoloniality.

Reading ecology as an animating, organizing trope in African literatures from at least the start of the twentieth century, the book offers a genealogy of the present, in which the increasingly popular African futurism and speculative fiction are part of a history of thinking the future through ecological form in African literatures.

 Kirk B. Sides is Assistant Professor of English and Affiliate Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a Research Affiliate of the Wits Center for Diversity Studies (WiCDS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

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Book launch: East African Queer and Trans Displacements

This open-access volume brings together scholarly and creative works to explore the drivers, impacts and meanings of queer and trans displacement in East Africa

Join WiCDS and ACMS to mark the launch of this groundbreaking open access collection. 

Please note this event will be in-person only. Refreshments will be served

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'Sociology Hesitant': Du Bois and the multiple consciousnesses of being Black

Mosa Phadi (Stellenbosch) in conversation with cole meintjies (WiSER)

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SARChI Distinguished Lecture: 'Queering the Archive: Indenture Aesthetics & South African Blackness'

Jordache A. Ellapen in conversation with Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Sarah Nuttall

Queering the Archive: Indenture Aesthetics and South African Blackness

This talk uses Ellapen’s recently published book, Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (DUP, 2025), to explore three aspects of his research that have informed his academic journey over the last 10 years. These three movements are a) indentureship and race in South Africa, b) African Queer Studies, Femininity, and Deviance, and c) creative research and the labour of knowledge production in post-apartheid South Africa. By using the term movement, his intention is to signal the fluidity between these three categories as well as their malleability. This lecture will introduce a few conceptual terms – indenture aesthetics, Afro-normativity, Afro-Indian, Blackening – and invites the audience to think with and alongside South African Black Feminists as well as Steve Biko, Fatima Meer, Simon Nkoli, and Keguro Macharia. This lecture rethinks what an ethical politics of solidarity and coalitional building can look like in post-apartheid South Africa, a society that continues to live in the afterlife of colonial-apartheid. 

Jordache A. Ellapen is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies in Culture and Media at the University of Toronto. He has spent the last two years (2024-2026) as an Associate Professor of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. With graduate training in South Africa and the USA, Ellapen works at the intersections of Global Black Studies, Feminist and Queer Studies, and Visual Culture and Performance Studies. He has a particular interest in the making of race within the Indian Ocean world and genealogies of Blackness outside of the Atlantic World. He is the author of Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (Duke University Press, 2025), and a number of award-winning articles including, “Siyakaka Feminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Performance Art Praxis,” published in Feminist Studies

This lecture is presented by WiCDS and the Innovation Foundation for Democracy on behalf of the SARChI Chair in Critical Diversity Studies 

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