Professor Deevia Bhana
Professor/South African Research Chair: University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Email: bhanad1@ukzn.ac.za
Profile
Deevia Bhana is the South African Research Chair at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her research reflects a long-standing focus on children and young people, challenging the marginalisation of gender and sexuality in the study of childhood, while opening up and confronting children and young peoples’ experiences of gender inequalities, heterosexual domination and violence and addressing the educational response to these problems. This research has catalysed fresh interdisciplinary approaches to theorising gender and childhood sexuality within material experience underwritten by historical forces, age, race, class while actively expanding the theoretical and epistemological horizons of research in childhood sexuality. The research is of particular significance given the low profile given to researching childhood sexuality in educational development and in the Global South. The research is deeply aligned to the broader political commitment that young people are deserving of safety, better educational, health and economic outcomes and gender equality.