Professor Shose Kessi will deliver her inaugural lecture titled: "S#*T HAPPENS - A Decolonial Feminist Psychological Reflection on Institutional Racism in Higher Education" on Wednesday, 19 March 2025.

Abstract:

Institutional racism in higher education is something that we do not pay sufficient attention to. Debates on transformation in universities often focus on demographic change and do not take into account the everyday practices and experiences of staff and students, which often contradict the transformation discourse. How did we at UCT end up with a student throwing feces on the Rhodes statue? In this lecture, I will present the findings from a Photovoice project with black students at UCT that started on the eve of the Rhodes Must Fall movement as an example of decolonial feminist mobilization against institutional racism. I also reflect, in conversation with black womxn scholars, on the role of the UCT Black Academic Caucus. The lecture will highlight the complex ways in which identities are negotiated in oppressive contexts as well as the less visible and ambivalent institutional practices that sustain the status quo. A case is made for universities to interrogate institutional racism, how it influences teaching & learning, research, and management practices, and most importantly how it impacts on people’s wellbeing,

Biography:

Shose Kessi is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at UCT and Professor in the Department of Psychology. Her research centres on social and political psychology and the development of Photovoice methodology for community mobilization. Shose has published on the psychology of racism in higher education and other decolonial and pan-African approaches to psychology. She is co-director of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa at UCT. Shose completed her PhD in Organizational and Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She was a UCT Mandela fellow of the WEB DuBois Research Institute, Hutchins Centre, Harvard University in 2014 and a past recipient of the Erik Erickson Award from the International Society for Political Psychology.

EVENT DETAILS:

Venue: Neville Alexander Building, Auditorium LT1, Lower Campus, University of Cape Town

Date: 19 March 2025

Time: 18:30 for 19:00

Click here to register.