Melissa Steyn

Melissa Steyn is a South African academic based at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Prior to moving to Johannesburg in 2011, she taught at the University of Cape Town.

Steyn obtained her BA in 1977 from the University of South Africa, passing all her subjects, bar one, with distinction. In 1982, she completed a BA Honours in English Literature, Cum Laude, from Stellenbosch University. Having been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue a master's degree in Intercultural Communication at Arizona State University in the US, she graduated in 1996 as the top graduate in Communication Studies and in the College of Journalism and Communication, and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Her masters’ thesis Whiteness Just Isn’t What it Used to Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa was published as a book by the same title by SUNY Press in 2001 and won the 2002 Outstanding Scholarship Award in International and Intercultural Communication from the National Communication Association in the United States. While in the US, Steyn studied at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication in Portland Oregon in 1995 and 1996. She obtained her PhD (Psychology) from the University of Cape Town in 2004.

Her late husband, Reginald Reggie September (1923-2013), was a veteran of the anti-apartheid movement.

Career

Steyn taught English at Stellenbosch University from 1983 to 1987. From 1988 to 2000 she was a lecturer in the Professional Communication at the University of Cape Town, which she directed in 1997–8. In 2000 she was seconded to Graduate School of Humanities at UCT, where she established Intercultural and Diversity Studies (iNCUDISA). In 2011, she moved to Johannesburg and joined the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was a professor in the Sociology Department. In 2014, she established the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies and in the same year was awarded the South African Research Chair (SARChI) in Critical Diversity Studies, a position which she still holds.

Steyn has served in numerous capacities on bodies promoting social justice issues. She is a member of the steering committee of the National Action Plan to Combat Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance; she was a member of the South African Ministerial Committee on Diversity in Textbooks (2017-8); and served as an expert witness to the South African Section 59 investigation inquiry into allegations of unfair Racial Discrimination and Procedural Unfairness by Medical Schemes (2000). She was a member of Academy of Science of South Africa panel which produced the report on Diversity in human sexuality: Implications for policy in Africa. A consensus report on the implications of recent scientific research for policy in Africa. She was co-chair and chair of Anti-racism Network in Higher Education (ARNHE) for 10 years which organized symposia at universities across South Africa.

Critical diversity studies

Steyn has spearheaded the development of diversity studies as an academic field in South Africa. This involved the establishment of a centre at UCT (2000 - 2011) and the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. The framework Steyn has developed, Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL), consists of ten criteria that characterize a sensibility open to differences, informed by a consciousness of power relations and willing to act towards more just societies. The framework has informed interventions both in South Africa and in various international contexts including Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and various Southern African countries. A co-edited book on CDL in Higher Education has appeared in German.