Email: geoffreyh@dut.ac.za
Tel: 031 373 5609

Bio: An Australian by birth and an economist by training, Geoff Harris co-facilitates the postgraduate Peacebuilding Programme. He has researched issues of military expenditure in developing countries and recovery from armed conflict for around 30 years. His current research interests include restorative justice, demilitarisation and the effects of economic inequality on inter-personal violence. He is chair of the Board of Phoenix Zululand, which operates restorative justice programmes in the Zululand prisons. Recent publications include Building infrastructures for peace in sub-Saharan Africa (Springer Nature, 2019), jointly edited with Mediel Hove.

Research Areas: Restorative justice and practices in household, school and prison contexts; demilitarisation; faith communities and peacebuilding

Crispin Hemson

Email: icon@dut.ac.za

Bio: Crispin Hemson, has a background as an adult educator and was formerly Head of the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.  His current research interests are in addressing gender-based violence and in developing pedagogies that promote nonviolence. Apart from his teaching in the General Education programme of DUT, he has led the Durban Innovative Leadership Programme, which develops DUT students and community activists as leaders. As an environmental activist, he heads the Friends of Pigeon Valley, which supports a nature reserve in Glenwood, Durban.

Sylvia Kaye

Email: sylviak@dut.ac.za

Bio: Sylvia Kaye co-facilitates the postgraduate Peacebuilding Programme. Her PhD was a study of women entrepreneurs in Botswana and enterprise sustainability.  Her current research interests are on the importance of equity in all aspects of human society, particularly with respect to the role of women in peacebuilding initiatives. She is a member of the Association for Baha’i Studies, an association dedicated to the study of peaceful solutions to societal problems.

Simóne Plüg

Email: simonep@dut.ac.za

Bio: Simóne Plüg is a lecturer at ICON. She has a background in critical psychology and holds a PhD in cultural studies from Rhodes University. Her research interests include gender, identity, and consumer culture, violence, trauma and neglect, and transformative pedagogies. More broadly, her research focuses on critically understanding current social issues, challenging well-established hegemonic norms, and opening spaces for the negotiation of less oppressive identities and social practices, in order to promote more cohesive and constructive ways of collective being. Simóne is an avid baker, nature lover, and wool craft enthusiast.

Research Areas: Critical psychology, intersectional feminism, gender and identity, transformative pedagogy and vicarious trauma