Melissa Steyn

• PhD
• Chair at University of the Witwatersrand

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 racia...

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. Two weekl...

This paper is part of a longer work on whiteness in post‐apartheid South Africa, which analyzes the discourses resistant to transformation in the country, labeled “white talk.” Based on a discourse analysis of the 2001 letters to the editor of Rapport newspaper, a national Afrikaans Sunday newspaper, this paper focuses on aspects of “white talk” wi...

Racial incorporation of immigrant identities has not been extensively theorized in communication. We theorize immigrant identity formation as translation between the cultural and political expressions of different racial regionalisms. As communication studies have begun to address the global dimensions of whiteness, there is a need to address parti...

Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) is a lens we can use to achieve social justice consciousness among privileged identities in academic spaces. CDL, by Melissa Steyn (2014), consists of ten criteria that reveal how and why specific differences make a difference. Among other things, CDL exposes the workings of power through structures and individual...

Since the period of change from the Apartheid era to black majority government, white South Africans have left the country in great numbers. A white South African diaspora has formed in the United States, one of the preferred destinations for this outmigration. Our research employed in-depth interviews with 25 participants from different regions of...

Several decades after the abolishment of the formal slave trade, the administrative colonisation of Africa by Europe, and the adoption of progressive international human rights laws for equality, there is no doubt that pro-social justice education is facing a massive backlash from the far right globally. As critical diversity studies teaching and l...

We propose the Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) framework for citizenship education in contemporary heterogeneous societies. It encourages an anti-essentialist, power-conscious awareness of difference beyond notions of citizenship that have been constitutive of the nation and tend to normalise masculinity, patriarchy, heterosexuality, able-bodiedn...

This paper argues that postmodernism challenges the way in which intercultural communication competence has traditionally been conceptualized. The very framing of the notion as "competence" reveals its historical contingency and complicity with a particular interest group. Some of the assumptions which underpin the "received" versions of competence...

Die Hochschule gerät dabei als Spiegel und Manifestation gesellschaftlicher Verhältnisse in den Blick und überdies als ein Ort, der unter spezifischen Bedingungen zum Motor notwendiger Veränderungsprozesse werden kann. Aus unterschiedlichen disziplinären, aktivistischen und sozialkritischen Perspektiven wird die Hochschule als eine machtvolle Insti...

Das Konzept der Critical Diversity Literacy geht aus einem bald 20-jährigen Ent-wicklungsprozess hervor. 2 Critical Diversity Literacy lässt sich am ehesten als Diversitäts-Literalität übersetzen und bildet die Grundlage einer kritisch-perfor-mativen Lektürepraxis zu Fragen von Diversität (siehe Klingovsky und Pfruender in diesem Band). Critical Di...

This chapter shows how complicity and privileged irresponsibility sustain power systems through an outline of how the ignorance contract is an important strategy for those who are implicated in oppression. From there, we grapple with the nuances of privilege by way of explaining the concepts of intersectionality, kyriarchy and the abyssal line. Aft...

This handbook provides practical tools and concepts forged from international best practice, and sharpened in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, that can be used to build critical diversity literate organizations. Organizations the world over–from nonprofits to large corporations, and secondary schools to massive intergovernmental institut...

"Decolonising the Human examines the ongoing project of constituting ‘the human’ in light of the durability of coloniality and the persistence of multiple oppressions. The ‘human’ emerges as a deeply political category, historically constructed as a scarce existential resource. Once weaponised, it allows for the social, political and economic eleva...

In today’s world, there is an urgent need for organizations to transform into more equitable and diverse enterprises. For some, the need for change is painfully obvious, especially those who experience exclusion or discrimination on a daily basis. For others, diversity and transformation might feel like an overly daunting or complicated task, which...

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse the discourses of gender empowerment in South African organisations to determine the extent to which they reify or resist the entrenched oppressive gender binaries. Design/methodology/approach – Multiple case studies design and critical discourse analysis were employed to collect and analyse the da...

South Africa today faces both increasingly radical calls for systemic change from various sectors, and apparently intransigent organisational cultures whose performance in delivering racial “transformation” and equality in the workplace has been extremely disappointing. It is argued that a different way of managing organisations is possible, bu...

South Africa today faces both increasingly radical calls for systemic change from various sectors, and apparently intransigent organisational cultures whose performance in delivering racial “transformation” and equality in the workplace has been extremely disappointing. It is argued that a different way of managing organisations is possible, but th...

Dynamics of race in South Africa are deeply entangled within a world system that continues to enable hegemonic white privilege. Prevalent views and behaviours towards “interracial” relationships reveal a rebellion against the non-racial philosophies and policies of the new government and are an indicator of the ongoing salience of race in shaping l...

Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the facticity of the dominant construction of black professionals as job hoppers that derail workforce reforms in corporate South Africa particularly in leadership roles. Design/methodology/approach – Historical literature review was conducted to trace the genesis of the alleged...

The notion of essentialised racial difference was a keystone of apartheid education which served to cement white supremacy in South Africa. More recently there is a need for socially-just education that requires a robust analytical orientation in interrogating power, privilege and difference. Therefore this article engages the following questions:...

We are delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the ACAL 2017 National Conference in Darwin. These speakers bring their collective experience working across many continents and diverse domains. Keynotes will canvas issues as varied as the economics of education, critical engagements with diversity, the informal sector of provision and labor s...

This chapter argues that normative understandings of intercultural communication competence (ICC) may not be adequate to facilitate communication in a context of the enduring legacy of colonial and Apartheid privilege and oppression. It discusses three tenets that need to inform a contextually appropriate understanding of ICC: it needs to be situat...

Less than thirty years ago, South Africa still had laws strictly prohibiting “interracial” intimacy. In this study, participants shared stories of living in Cape Town with a partner of a different “race” and invoked spatial metaphors, of boundaries and border crossing, describing their experiences in cartographical, “landscaped” language. This arti...

Critical Philosophy of Race will examine issues raised by the concept of race, the practices and mechanisms of racialization, and the persistence of various forms of racism across the world. It opposes racism in all forms; it rejects the pseudosciences of old-fashioned biological racialism; it denies that anti-racism and anti-racialism summarily el...

Keynote abstract: The Diversity Literate Organisation: Enabled for the 21 st Century Diversity is integral to how the contemporary world conceptualises society, and increasingly organisations recognise that they need to incorporate diversity thinking into their organisational cultures. As with any concept used to normalise social arrangements, diff...

The enforcement of racial segregation during apartheid was aimed not only at regulating public spaces, residential areas and the workforce, but also at shaping the subjectivities of individuals who were socialised to see themselves through the lens of a white racial hierarchy. The ideology of white supremacy and superiority that informed apartheid...

One of the myths that informed the thinking of modernity was that groups came out of nature, appearance and intrinsic characteristics intact and bounded. The construction of race drew on such a myth, the notion that white and Black people were born into natural groupings of human beings, endowed with differentiating characteristics that mapped fort...

It has become a commonplace joke in South Africa that one cannot find any white South African who admits to have voted for the Apartheid government. White South Africans tend to produce accounts of their past that present innocence, or at the least, ignorance of how their privilege was premised upon the disadvantaging and oppression of black South...

Reactions to this phenomenon have been diverse, ranging from those who see the song as an attempt to recuperate the history of the Afrikaners to find a place of selfrespect, to those who see the song as a virtual incitement to treason. Afrikaans radio stations in neighboring Namibia banned the song for fear of importing the political controversy. 2...

The concept of critical diversity literacy (CDL) has been a work in progress for more than a decade. 1 It represents an attempt to distil into a single framework the analytic proficiencies I believe a qualification in diversity studies should provide. The particular framing is the outcome of a confluence of factors: the specific higher education co...

Drawing on scholarship in Critical Pedagogy, this article speaks to the debate about pedagogical approaches within social justice education (SJE). The article addresses itself to privileged positionality within the context of university-based SJE, with a specific focus on race and whiteness. As a conceptual piece, it addresses some key consideratio...

This paper examines space, identity and power in Prince Albert, a small town in the South African Karoo, through analysis of white representations of urban and social change in the town since the end of apartheid. In doing so, this analysis seeks to contribute to the growing stream of critical philosophy concerned with the relationship between raci...

Conference Concept The overall aim of the projected conference is to make a significant contribution to the development of migration theory. In order to achieve this, it will focus on three interlinked concepts: border(land), citizenship and cosmopolitanism. These are currently highly debated in transnational and transdisciplinary academic discours...

We advance “incorporation” as a new way to understand immigrant identities as sutured within and sustaining symbolic and material structures of racial inequality. Incorporation elucidates the interlacing of the multidimensional symbolic and material processes overlooked in theorizing adaptation, assimilation, and integration as forms of cultural ch...

The flow of history deposits us in positions relative to others–social spaces of greater or lesser power, privilege or disadvantage, spaces of collective honor or shame, hope or despair, ascendency or decline. Our communication is shaped within such historical legacies–we speak out of, and into, those contexts. The way we construct meaning about ou...

Abstract South African society has undergone a remarkable political and legal transformation since 1994, moving from apartheid towards a democratic society that enshrines the rights of diversity. However, deep social divisions and inequalities persist. Twelve case studies were conducted as part of the DEISA research programme into diversity and eq...

This article sets out the purview of this special issue of Ethnicities. Whiteness Studies has moved from the margins and has become an accepted focus for study in Critical Race Studies. We argue that current scholarship is developing the paradigm empirically and theoretically, and does so without need to justify its approach. This special issue inc...

What is the Prize, and who pays the Price? The desired and the desirable are often constellated through our ideas of what is undesired and undesirable, deeply knotted into our sense of self, our sense of where and how we fit into the world. These notions of desire form the backdrop to this powerful volume which examines the historical continuities...