Are Black Women Persons?: SOAS World Philosophies Bi-monthly Lecture Series: Lecture 02
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2021-05-24

Date:
April 30, 2021

Speaker:
Dr Mpho Tshivhase, University of Pretoria

Lecture Summary:
There is something about the prevalence of gender-based violence and femicide, exclusion of women in various spaces that are said to be designed for equal participation that calls for pause to wonder why women are, in most if not all cases, marginalized to a point of being made to question their value, their uniqueness, their abilities, and sense of belonging among many other things. Without a doubt, this is a political problem. However, I want to cast an axiological lens on this problem by analyzing the theory with the aim to test whether the exclusion of black women from the category of ‘persons’ could be one plausible reason for their muted voices in the academic spaces – a kind of muting that has rendered black women knowledge consumers rather than knowledge producers.

About the speaker:
Dr Mpho Tshivhase is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria. She is the serving President of the Philosophical Society of Southern Africa (PSSA). Her research interests are personhood, personal uniqueness, and themes of love, autonomy, authenticity, death, and African ethics, aspects of race and feminism. She has authored (and reviewed) academic papers in the abovementioned areas and has presented papers at local and international conferences. Mpho has worked on different interdisciplinary institutional projects at the University of Pretoria that were hosted by the Center for Human Rights, the Faculty of Humanities, and the Center for Advancement of Scholarship. She was a member of the Moralities Research group at the Bayreuth University in Germany where she was invited as a visiting scholar. Mpho holds the 2018 Dean’s award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities Faculty and the 2019 Institute of People Management CEO’s Excellence Award. She is also on the list of the 2019 Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans.