About
The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS) envisions a society in which it is accepted that the capacity to engage with difference in ways that promote socially just outcomes is essential and beneficial for the contemporary world.
WiCDS is based in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Through interdisciplinary postgraduate education and research, WiCDS aims to build capacity to meet the challenges of diverse societies, especially in post-apartheid South Africa. Initially started as Intercultural and Diversity Studies of Southern Africa (iNCUDISA) at the University of Cape Town, WiCDS was then established at Wits.
For the past nine years, WiCDS has successfully conducted international conferences that have brought together scholars, students, practitioners, artists and activists from different fields and areas of the world. Past conferences have resulted in book volumes such as: Decolonising the Human: Reflections from Africa difference and oppression (2021), published by Wits University Press. Journal special issues have also come out of WiCDS annual conferences, for instance: Re-Imagining Liberation Institutionalised Despair*Critical Hope: Vol. 2, No. 1, June 2019 International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies on JSTOR.
Our Mission
Through cutting-edge research, education, and social engagement, the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies aims to engage scholars, students and practitioners in deepening our understanding of how the construction of difference within unequal power relations creates systemic unfairness in society and on how to resist and reframe these constructions. WiCDS engages with the challenges of "being different together" in an interconnected, heterogeneous, decolonizing, and increasingly stressed world. We aim to have an impact on social transformation in South Africa and to become a leading hub internationally for the study of diversity, transformation, and social justice.