Shireen Hassim
Main profile
Shireen Hassim is a Visiting Professor at WISER and spends time in residence at the Institute. She is a former Professor of Politics at Wits and was seconded to WISER for a period of three years from the Department of Political Studies. She holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics at Carleton University in Ottowa, Canada. She is co-editor of many books and author of Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (2006), which won the 2007 American Political Science Association’s Victoria Shuck Award for best book on women and politics. Shireen’s new book project is entitled Contingency and Uncertainty: Working with and Against the State in South Africa. It is an attempt to theorise why and how it is that various feminist claims on the state are so easily incorporated without significant impact on the underlying power relations in the state, and between state and society. Other new work considers ways in which categories of citizenship rest on a binary conception of gender, and the ways in which addressing embodied claims (such as the recognition claims of intersex and transgender people) has shifted law and state into territories not conceived of by feminist activists or the state.