Sindiso Mnisi Weeks

Sindiso Mnisi Weeks has served as a senior researcher in the Centre for Law and Society at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In her role at UCT, she worked on the Rural Women's Action-Research program. This program combines research, advocacy, and policy work on women, property, and governing authority under customary law. She also taught African Customary Law as a senior lecturer in UCT's Department of Private Law. In 2013-2014, she was a resident scholar at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, where she held a fellowship for the completion of a book.

Mnisi Weeks has published in academic and popular media on customary law, women’s rights, cultural rights, governance, participatory democracy, dispute management, and the South African constitution. As a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, she researched the tensions between living customary law(s) and South African state law. Prior to Oxford, she clerked for the Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Dikgang Moseneke. Her current work focuses on the pursuit of justice and human security in indigenous courts by poor women and men living in rural South Africa.

As a young researcher, Mnisi Weeks is highly rated by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. She has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Women in Science Award for the Development of Rural Women through Science and Technology.

Areas of Expertise

Law and society, human rights, human security, and human development, interface between culture/indigeneity and human rights/state law, gender and women's rights, economic, social, and cultural rights, governance and participatory democracy, deviance, informal justice, and community-based conflict management, political economy, colonial–postcolonial African history, community-based participatory and action-research methods

Degrees

• DPhil, Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford (UK)
• MSt, Legal Research, University of Oxford (UK)
• LLB, Law, University of Cape Town (South Africa)
• BA, Law, Philosophy, and Language, University of Cape Town (South Africa)