The focus of Gender, Race and Identity Studies draws on multiple Disciplines within the University, to examine the ways in which identities are constructed, created and consolidated.

Disciplines across UKZN draw on several frameworks for engaging with issues of race, and gender, among other social categories – like age, sexualities and class. In the context of health inequalities, for example, AIDS, gender and sexual violence, the focus areas of Gender, Race and Identity provide important conceptual tools to address how social structures that arise in history are reproduced but are also open to change.

Strongly influenced by contemporary critical theories which question the framing of power inequalities, Gender, Race and Identity focus on the dynamism and intersections of social inequalities and the vulnerabilities and anxieties of those belonging to groups usually constructed as powerful, as well the agency of those belonging to groups usually seen as lacking power.

Through the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity (ccrri), the University has engaged specifically with the issue of “racial classification”. This theme is broad and demands inter-disciplinary approaches to formulating and executing projects and analysing data. It also requires that a range of discrete initiatives speak to each other – those that address thinking race and gender in everyday life and public discourse, that search for and challenge ‘race’ requirements in legislation, that raise questions about institutional location and purpose of race classification and research that express how the ‘agents’ of classification fulfill their tasks and the effects on those classified.

The focus area locates itself by initiating serious and difficult debate, and by researching alternative routes to creating a society that is non-racial and that is simultaneously and measurably moving towards greater equality than that which is currently experienced by all South Africans.