Dr Sharlene Swartz is a sociologist and research director in the Human and Social Development research programme. She holds a Master's degree in Education at Harvard University and a PhD at the University of Cambridge. Her expertise lies in the sociologies of youth, morality and education, as well as poverty and inequality. She is also experienced in urban ethnographies, visual methods, childhood vulnerabilities and social exclusion. . Her current research interests include restitution, moral discourses, youth navigational capacities and the impact of culture and religion on youth risk behaviour. 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 at an undergraduate level and has co-supervised masters' and doctoral students working on gender, AIDS, child labour and teacher-student sexual relationships. Her PhD thesis considered how youth living in poverty understand, represent and enact 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 Dr Swartz has presented 33 conference papers, locally and internationally, has published 16 journal articles, three book chapters; guest edited two special issues, and numerous reports and training manuals. Publication topics include extending Bourdieu’s notion of capitals to include ‘moral capital’, kwaito music as an agent of social and economic empowerment for South African youth; the state of youth work in South Africa, the relationship between citizenship, morality and religion; ethics in research; narrative theology; and the churches' response to HIV/AIDS. She serves as reviewer of several international scholarly journals including the Journal of Moral Education, Qualitative Research and Sociological Theory. She is the author of three books: Ikasi: The Moral Ecology of South Africa's Township Youth (2009, Palgrave Macmillan; Wits University Press); Teenage Tata: Voices of Young Fathers in South Africa (2009, HSRC Press with A. Bhana) and Moral education in sub-Saharan Africa: Culture, economics, conflict and AIDS (2011, Routledge with M. Taylor). She is an executive member of the Association for Moral Education and the International Sociological Association (Vice President for Africa and the Middle East – Sociology of Youth Research Committee) and a member of the Centre for the Study of Values. She is also the 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. |
