Dr Andiswa Mfengu

Senior Lecturer and Head of Department

Room 5.23, Level 5, AC Jordan Building

Dr Andiswa Mfengu is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Knowledge and Information Stewardship (DKIS) at the University of Cape Town. She joined the department in 2019 after a career as an academic librarian at UCT Libraries, bringing practitioner expertise into research and teaching. She completed her PhD at UCT in 2022, with a thesis developing a holistic framework for assessing research impact in South African higher education, supervised by Professor Jaya Raju.

Her research is located within Library and Information Science, with a particular focus on equity and social justice in research impact assessment, scholarly communication, open access, and LIS education. She is a committed advocate for responsible research assessment reform that centres African realities and Global South priorities. Her scholarship is grounded in an ubuntu-informed, decolonial orientation and draws on critical approaches to epistemic justice, information literacy, and curriculum transformation.

Dr Mfengu is a sought-after voice in national and international debates on research assessment, open knowledge, and the future of LIS education. She has delivered keynote addresses at venues including the EU High-Level Conference on Reforming Research Assessment (Copenhagen, 2025), the Open Access 2025 celebration, and the Collection Development in Africa Conference (Cape Town, 2026). She is a co-PI in the GAIN (Generative AI Literacy and kNowledge Framework) project, a collaboration between UCT and the University of Sheffield.

Research Interests

Research impact assessment; Socially just and responsible research evaluation; Open access and scholarly communication; LIS education and curriculum transformation; Open Access Publishing; LIS Leadership and Management; AI literacy; Bibliometrics and altmetrics

Teaching

Dr Mfengu's pedagogy is learner-centred and draws explicitly on ubuntu, equity, and the South African decolonising context. She convenes the following:

  • LIS1000S – Introduction to Social Informatics (undergraduate, servicing course)
  • LIS4050W – Research Methods and User Studies (Postgraduate Diploma, 4th-year level)
  • DKIS Research Seminar Series – targeting master's and PhD students

She supervises students at master's (minor dissertation and full research) and doctoral levels, and serves as programme convener for the MPhil (master's by full research) and PhD in LIS programmes.

Selected Publications

Book
Mfengu, A. & Raju, R. (Eds.). 2025. Advancing social justice through curriculum realignment: centering scholarly communication in LIS curricula. Cape Town: UCT Libraries Press. https://doi.org/10.15641/978.0.7992.2561.7

Journal Articles

  • Mfengu, A. 2025. Socially just research impact assessment as a foundation for the advancement of open access and open science: a case of a research-intensive African university. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. 12(2): eP18248.
  • Hipangwa, M. & Mfengu, A. 2025. Professionals' digital information literacy skills: a case of geoscientists in Namibia. African Journal of Library, Archives and Information Science. 35(1): e35110.
  • Mfengu, A. & Raju, J. 2024. Challenges with measures used for assessing research impact in higher education institutions. South African Journal of Science. 120(7/8): 1–6.
  • Mfengu, A. & Raju, J. 2022. Research impact assessment in Africa and the evolving role of academic libraries. Library Trends. 71(2): 151–168.

Public Writing

  • Mfengu, A. 2024. South African universities need to rethink how they evaluate research: social impact counts too. The Conversation – Africa. 16 September.