about us

Based within the Humanities Faculty of the University of Johannesburg (UJ), the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) is a transnational hub for multimodal scholarship driven by Black/African/postcolonial feminist, queer and decolonial agendas of emancipation. The centre offers a home in the Southern Hemisphere for engaged scholarship around intellectual, creative, spiritual and everyday practices that both refuse and reimagine worlds shaped by the violent logics of white supremacy/coloniality, heteropatriarchy and global capitalism. Our work calls for a different kind of historical imagination, responsive to the multiple temporalities, geographies and specificities of Black and other discursively minoritarian experiences, and to the productive entanglements of indigenous, Black radical, Black feminist and anti-/decolonial forms of knowledge production. RGC’s commitment to thinking Blackness globally in tandem with other forms of racialisation and difference is grounded in a dynamic conception of the local, in which the particular histories and encounters that have informed Black political thought and praxis in South Africa are understood in relation to the intimacies, adjacencies and intersections of Pan-African and Black diasporic emancipatory struggles.

We recognise that South Africa’s particular conditions of continued violence have global resonance - entangled as they are in other histories, experiences and present conditions of racialised and gendered oppressive norms and class inequities. RGC offers a generative platform for the critical work of reimagination – for speculative thinking/doing that is framed by African and Black diasporic realities, struggles and complexities; and oriented towards reparative justice, radical intimacy, decolonisation and Black feminist love. 

With its research community, RGC hosts a dynamic programme of seminars, workshops, reading groups, summer/winter schools, digital residencies and more, clustered around four interrelated thematic concerns:

• reading and seeing the self/selves

• performing and making identity

• identity and technology, the body and science

• geographies/economies of being

Coming out of these, RGC has two anchor projects: Global Blackness (from the South) and Digital Humanities South.

our values

RGC is a Black feminist-led, community-centred space. In our policies, programmes and relationships we hope always to embody a genuine commitment to reparative justice, emancipatory politics and the possibility of thinking and living the world differently. We acknowledge that ‘safe spaces’ are more easily announced than sustained – nevertheless, we aspire towards a radical hospitality of vigilant care, and to conditions that guard against the normative, intersecting violences of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, classism, ableism, ageism and other oppressive social structures. To this end, we embrace personal and institutional self-reflexivity, and are committed to a journey of attention, recognition and responsiveness. We welcome input from those who engage with us and who similarly seek to uphold a radical politics of care.

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All RGC programmes are free of charge, and participation is welcome from within, between and beyond the academy. To stay in touch, please sign up to our newsletter (see below) or follow us on Instagram @racegenderclass.uj

who we are

At the heart of RGC’s community and programmes is a small but passionate team of researchers and organisers, led by Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi. RGC has a vibrant Advisory Board, and is supported by the Faculty of Humanities at UJ. Meet our Board and Research Associates by visiting our community page.

For a number of years, RGC Director Victoria Collis-Buthelezi has advocated strongly for thinking race, gender and class from the South, and from South Africa in particular. This she argues in her 2017 The Black Scholar essay, “The Case for Black Studies in South Africa”, drawing attention to South African institutions of the 1970s such as the Institute of Black Studies and Fatima Meer’s The Black Review. Similarly, in her current book project Ends of Empire, Black Liberation, she mobilises for greater recognition of the Global South in the making of Black struggle, providing an in-depth critical analysis of early twentieth-century Black thought. Ends of Empire, Black Liberation is the culmination of over a decade of archival research in South Africa, the Caribbean, the US and the UK.

the RGC team

Left to right: Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi (RGC Director), James Macdonald (Research Coordinator), Dani Bowler (Curator), Nombuso Mathibela (Archivist), Thandiwe Ntshinga (Researcher) & Kutlwano Mokwena (Administrator) & Zoe Neocosmos (Researcher). Meet the team here