Dr Sharlene Swartz is a sociologist and senior research specialist in the Child, Youth, Family and Social Development research programme. She holds a Master's degree in Education at Harvard University and a PhD at the University of Cambridge. While in the US she worked for the Harvard School of Public Health on setting standards for peer education and at Cambridge participated in a DFID project investigating the impact of education on poverty and a national review of primary school education. She has taught Sociology of Education and Psychology at an undergraduate level and has co-supervised masters' and doctoral students working on gender, AIDS and child labour in the developing world at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD thesis considered how youth living in poverty understand and represent the notion of morality. Before embarking on graduate studies, Dr Swartz spent 12 years at a youth NGO where she pioneered peer-led social justice and lifeskills programmes. Her academic expertise includes urban ethnographies, youth development, inequality and social exclusion, and the sociology of morality. Her current research interests centre on masculine morality, teenage fatherhood, the effects of culture and religion on HIV/AIDS risk behaviours, and extending Bourdieu's notions of capital to include 'moral capital'. Dr Swartz has presented eighteen conference papers, locally and internationally, has published eight journal articles, two book chapters and numerous reports and training manuals. Publication topics include kwaito music as an agent of social and economic empowerment for South African youth; the relationship between citizenship, religious and moral education in South Africa; narrative theology; and the churches' response to HIV/AIDS. She serves as reviewer of several scholarly journals and is the guest editor of the 2010 edition of the Journal of Moral Education which focuses on Africa, poverty and morality. She is the author of two books, the first with Professor Arvin Bhana entitled Teenage Tata (2009, HSRC Press) provides an account of young fatherhood in South Africa and The Moral Ecology of South Africa's Township Youth (2009, Palgrave Macmillan). She is a member of the Association for Moral Education, the International Sociological Association and the Centre for the Study of Values. She is also the deputy chair of the Restitution Foundation, and holds an honorary position as a visiting research fellow at the University of Cambridge's Centre for Commonwealth Education. |
