Professor Edith Phaswana is currently the Associate Professor at the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs at the University of South Africa. She also served as head of the former Thabo Mbeki Leadership Institute between 2018 and 2020 and is the current president of the South African Development Studies Association. In 2008, she completed her PhD in Development Studies in the UK and joined the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Humanities where she received an award for Distinguished Teaching Excellence in the Humanities.
She has taught in several prestigious programmes including the US Presidential Leadership Programme known as Young African Leader’s Initiative and the Youth Leadership Programme at the Mandela Institute for Development Studies. She has mentored and supervised over 56 postgraduate students at various levels, and has published scholarly works in the form of journal articles and book chapters including the 2020 award-winning edited volume Black Academics voices: A South African Perspective by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Apart from her academic commitments, Phaswana provides research and advisory services as well as policy reviews for the government of South Africa at the national and provincial levels. Her commitment to education and social justice saw her being named among the 2019 Mail and Guardian Top 100 women changing South Africa, and for the 2006 Leadership for Social Justice Award by the Ford Foundation’s International Fellowship Programme. She is one of the founding members of the Africa Decoloniality Research Network. She continues to serve as trustee, member of executive committees, and board of directors at various organisations.
