Prof. Sharlene Swartz
Prof. Swartz is Divisional Executive: Equitable Education and Economies (EEE). She has been with the HSRC since 2008 and has held positions as acting Deputy CEO; Executive Director: Education and Skills Development, and Deputy Executive Director: Human and Social Development. A sociologist of education by training, she is currently Honorary Professor at the School of Education, University of Cape Town and a past Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the University of Fort Hare. She has been a visiting fellow at the Faculty of Education and Centre for Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, and at the Centre for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.
Her research focuses on what she terms "navigational capacities for the just inclusion of youth in societies in the Global South." She researches and writes extensively on transformative education, reimagining youth inclusion in economic development, and decolonising and emancipatory practices in research. Prof. Swartz holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK; a Masterâs degree in Education from Harvard University, USA; and undergraduate degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand (Life Sciences) and the University of Zululand (Philosophy).
Prof. Swartz has authored six books (among them Ikasi: The moral ecology of South Africa's township youth, Another country: Everyday social restitution and Teenage Tata: Voices of young fathers in South Africa), edited a further seven (including The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies, Transformative leadership in African contexts and Educational research practice in Southern contexts), and has completed over 75 journal articles and book chapters, produced 16 research reports, two ethnographic research documentaries, and presented more than 120 local and international invited lectures and conference papers, including several keynote addresses.
Prof. Swartz has been President (2018-2023) of the International Sociological Association Sociology of Youth Research Committee and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Moral Education, Journal of Youth Studies, Youth and Globalisation, and Autonomie Locali e Servizi Sociali. She has been involved in multiple civil society organisations focussing on youth and justice, has held positions on committees of the South African Human Rights Commission, United Nations Development Report Steering Committee for South Africa, National Research Foundation, and is a Commissioner on the Lancet inquiry on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing. She is a B-rated researcher in South Africa.
