Professor Vishante Sewpaul

Durban, South Africa

Eileen Younghusband Lecture

Vishanthie Sewpaul [PhD] is a Senior Professor at University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN). She has been actively involved in several national structures on the cutting edge of policy and standards development in social work in post-apartheid South Africa, and in developing social work in Africa. She is currently part of a national taskforce re-writing standards for social work education and training in South Africa. She is the President of the Association of Schools of Social Work in Africa (ASSWA). Vishanthie was elected as the President of the first ever non-racial, unified National Association of Social Workers [NASW, SA] in 2007 and re-elected as its President in 2009, and is former President of the Association of South African Social Work Education Institutions [ASASWEI]. She is a Vice-President on the IASSW Board. She served as the Co-chair of the Global Standards Joint IASSW/IFSW Committee for Social Work Education and Training and is currently the Co-chair of the Global Social Work Definition Taskforce. She was twice voted one of top thirty researchers at UKZN, and was selected, by the Ministry of Science and Technology, as the 2013 Runner-Up for the Distinguished Women in Science Award (Humanities and Social Sciences) for “her outstanding contribution to building South Africa’s scientific and research knowledge base”.

Vishanthie comes from humble beginnings and managed to get to university against the odds. Her personal biography, and growing up under apartheid has a profound influence on her choice of emancipatory pedagogical, research and community engagement strategies. Her teaching, community engagement, research and writings are driven by her commitment to human rights and social justice underscored by a radical, emancipatory thrust that recognizes the relationship between the personal and political dimensions of people’s lives, and the importance of people-centred, participatory approaches to development. She is committed to enthusing and instilling students with passion and hope, increasing their sense of power, self–esteem and courage, and within the Freirian-Gramscian tradition, getting people to understand the power of ideological hegemony and to develop counter hegemonic consciousness and practices, particularly in relation to neoliberal and new managerial influences.

Throughout her teaching career she has maintained active practice links in several areas. An HIV/AIDS project that she ran was regarded as one of the best practice models that was filmed and screened on national TV (e-TV). Working in close collaboration with students, a community-based, participatory project with children and youth living on the streets of Durban, culminated in the production of a movie based on the narratives of the youth (with the youth as actors) used for schools based intervention in an attempt to prevent children from migrating to the streets. It is the latter schools-based intervention that she is currently engaged in. In whatever she does, the effort is to make a difference as an individual and as part of a collective within the spheres of her influence, which include emancipatory education, direct practice, public debate, open letters and petitioning in the interests of justice and human rights.

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