Postgraduate Study

WiCDS offers comprehensive Honours, taught Masters and PhD programmes that draw on expertise from across the School of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Humanities. Postgraduate students at the Centre enjoy a vibrant, challenging and supportive intellectual environment, in which their classes and research work are supplemented by our rich calendar of scholarship development and public events. Our inspiring graduates have gone on to work in business, government, policy, academia, civil society and the arts.

Grounded in a strong commitment to social justice imperatives, the Centre’s research and teaching programmes, as well as its community and civil society engagements, are informed by Melissa Steyn’s 2007 notion of Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL). The Centre has adapted the racial literacy concept developed by sociologist  France Winddance Twine to analyse other axes of oppression, such as gender, sexuality, disability and class, to describe the field of critical diversity studies as that which develops diversity literacy in scholars, researchers, diversity practitioners and community and other workers.

Drawing on cutting edge social theory, the CDL lens opens up challenging research questions which emerge in the interstices of current disciplinary boundaries. These questions have the capacity to shift common sense assumptions about the social, enabling fresh and penetrating analyses of current challenges. While CDL does not rest on a single research methodology or theoretical approach, it involves the recognition of social construction and the constitutive role of discourse in creating difference and hierarchy.