Talk Probes Faith, Gender-Based Violence

Meredith Whitnah, assistant professor of sociology, examines how faith-based NGOs in South Africa that had resisted apartheid have addressed gender-based violence in a lecture Monday, Oct. 19, at 7 p.m. in Westmont’s Hieronymus Lounge at Kerrwood Hall. The Gender Studies Lecture, “Faith and the Fragility of Justice: Religious Responses to Gender-Based Violence in South Africa,” is free and open to the public.

“I hope people come away with a deeper appreciation of the fragility of efforts to enact social transformation, especially when it comes to gender,” Whitnah says. “I will invite us to think about how the South African story can illuminate the power of religious ideas for both promoting and undermining social justice.”

Whitnah became interested in South Africa when she was 11 and read Alan Paton’s “Cry, the Beloved Country.” She first traveled to South Africa in 2007 to intern at a women’s center in Cape Town. She returned to different parts of South Africa on several short trips during 2012-13 to interview people and collect archival data.

Whitnah, who graduated from Gordon College and earned a master’s and a doctorate at the University of Notre Dame, studies the role of religion in both perpetuating and mitigating different forms of social injustice. At Gordon, she majored in gender studies through the Pike Honors Program. Her master’s degree and doctorate where both in sociology. She began teaching at Westmont in January 2015.

Coordinator Caryn Reeder says the series highlights the research of faculty members who teach in the gender studies program. “We hope to create campus-wide conversations around questions of gender —  questions that are important for all people to consider,” Reeder says.