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Tamara Shefer, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS), Faculty of Arts and Humanities,
University of the Western Cape (UWC) , is the PI on the project. Her work primarily addresses youth, gender and sexualities. She is also engaged in a critical project of reconceptualising higher education, and thinking about and experimenting with critical, feminist, social justice scholarly practices, both pedagogies and research.

Carmine is a lecturer in the WGS Department at UWC and a researcher on the New Imaginaries Project. She is the former Chief Researcher in Parliament of South Africa, where she spent 16 years. Carmine is a feminist scholar, interested in matters related to gender justice, happiness, subjective well-being, care work, and gender-related policies and legislation.

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Born in 1991, Thandiwe is an MA student with an interest in Art, story telling and gender. 

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Monique van Vuuren is a transdisciplinary scholar who is inspired by African literature and the need to build on a distinctive, decolonial future for the humxnities and social sciences in Africa. She/they strive to contribute to innovative doctoral scholarship and a new generation of diverse Africa-based scholars who aim to work beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries. 

Leballo Tjemolane was born in Lesotho and grew up in Soweto.  He is currently working on his PhD in the WGS Department at UWC, which is titled 'Embracing and Resisting Democratic Masculinity in a Religious and Cultural Context'.

Janine Lange is a storyteller, trauma-informed embodied narrative practitioner, kundalini yoga teacher and social entrepreneur. She is currently a PhD candidate and New Imaginaries doctoral fellow in the WGS department at UWC.

Swati Arora's work engages with the intersections of performance and visual culture, feminist theory, Black Studies, and dramaturgies of urban life. At present, she is lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.

Wanelisa Xaba is a decolonial thinker, storyteller and PhD researcher from kwaLanga, Cape Town. She obtained a Bachelors, Honours and Masters in Social Sciences at UCT. She is interested in merging decolonial thought and ancestral wisdom for Black liberation.

Karen Graaff (she/her) is a research associate in the WGS department, currently focusing on issues of representation, diversity, and access in surfing. Her previous work has looked at masculinities and violence, with a particular recent interest in the impacts of masculinities-focused workshops as a gender-based violence prevention intervention.

Felix Mutunga is a researcher attached to the WGS Department, UWC. He has a PhD in African literature from the University of the Witwatersrand and an MA in literature from Egerton University, Kenya. His research interests straddle multiple intersections in the fields of literature and culture: gender, race, class, ethnicity, and nationality. 

I am a women and gender studies MA candidate. My research interests and writing are dedicated to politicising pleasure; exploring queer of colour interventions; the politics of sexualities, desires and perversions; identity politics; and gendered power dynamics. I am also curious about the complexities, contradictions and politics of sex and kink (BDSM).

Cheri Hugo is a PhD candidate at UWC in the Art’s Faculty in WGS. Here she is estivating the strategies of Womxn of colour in design and how they survive and thrive in academia. Navigating Race, Rage , intersectionality and Polite Politics.​​