Course content Legal Training Programme Legal Training Programmes Materials


Rethinking Democracy

South Africa boasts the highest inequality globally, despite three decades of democratic governance. Landlessness, exploitation, poverty, racism, violence, corruption, and service collapse persist. Politics faces mounting distrust, associated with elitism, patronage, and divisive agendas. Different explanations and answers to these challenges are presented. As the 2024 elections approach in South Africa and 64 other countries globally, political parties take centre stage: each representing different – or perhaps similar – explanations and answers to a countries challenges. Through delving into these challenges, explanations, and proposed paths to a better future, this course navigates South Africa’s past, present, and potential futures: exploring themes of African solidarity, critically assessing 1994’s significance, integrating global democratic perspectives, and scrutinizing elections’ role in participatory democracy.

Designed specifically for community-based paralegals and fieldworkers who provide a range of services to the communities they serve – including information access,  support with gender based violence cases and matters,  assistance with evictions, labour, consumer and social security matters as well as different kinds of dispute resolution – this course will locate the historical roots of the day-to-day issues that advice offices contend with and contextualize them within broader contestations, resistance and imaginations about democracy.  

Woven through the course are these questions: 

  1. What do the realities that community-based paralegals deal with on an ongoing basis reveal about the texture of South Africa’s democracy? 
  1. How can we explain the persistent and growing inequalities and injustices that dominate South Africa today, nearly 30 years into democratic rule? 
  2. What are some of the big struggles waged in South Africa today? What do they teach us about democracy, resistance and imagination?
  3. What does a democracy for the many, not a few, look like? What can we learn – from the past and today – about attempts to craft expansive and radical notions of democracy? 
Rethinking-Democracy-2024-Programme-FinalModule One
Rethinking-Democracy-Module-2-FinalModule Two

Course content Hide from category page Materials Minisite Rethinking Freedom


Feminism & Freedom

About this course

Various political traditions have been seized with the questions: “what is the meaning of freedom?” “who should enjoy freedom?” and “what is the content of this freedom?“. Different theoretical traditions provide different answers to these questions. The starting points are different, and so are the emancipatory visions. As an intellectual and political project, feminism grapples with women’s status in society, gender roles, gendered power relations and how various political traditions exclude women from their visions of freedom. From multiple angles, feminism provides a critical evaluation of the core claims and visions of freedom contained in political traditions such as liberalism, anti-colonial struggles, Marxism etc. This module will set up a conversation between some of the major currents of feminist thought, and political traditions such as liberalism, Marxism, and anti-colonial nationalism. With a focus on the different strands of feminism and where they stand in relation to these theoretical traditions, this module will explore broadened and enriched ideas of freedom. The module will also explore how – through interventions like queer theory – different currents of feminism have been challenged and critiqued for their incompleteness, blind-spots and exclusions. At the end of the module participants will assess whether feminism offers a radical vision of freedom in a world that is punctuated by horrifying levels of gender-based violence, inequality, the policing and surveillance of women’s bodies, and a lack of reproductive justice.

This module aims to answer these questions:

  1. How does feminism help us to defend freedom?
  2. How does feminism give us expanded notions of freedom?
  3. How does feminism give us insights that are neglected in other traditions?

Course outline

Day 1: Introduction

Day 2: Why Feminism

Day 3: Freedom and the Feminist Challenge

Day 4: Feminism, Freedom and Subversive Voices

Day 5: Wrapping Up