DEISA, Diversity and Equity Interventions in South Africa, is a research programme which studies the transformation 'industry' in South Africa, exploring issues such as: the kinds of interventions being undertaken under the rubric of diversity and equity, how these are experienced by people working in organisations, the theoretical frameworks used by practitioner, and, especially, how they may or may not articulate with the quest for social justice in a democratising South Africa. The project examined: 1) a questionnaire submitted to diversity practitioners across South Africa, and 2) diversity interventions conducted at 12 South African organisations. These organisations included government institutions and private-sector companies and ranged from multi-nationals to small family-owned concerns. They were situated mostly in the two major hubs of the South African economy - Gauteng and Cape Town. Two studies were in other regions of the country - Mpumalanga and North West Province.

The diversity workshops were held with academic staff who supervise fourth-year medical students' research and health promotion projects in the Public and Primary Health Care Department at the University of Cape Town. These include staff who are site facilitators, lecturers, and registrars in the Health Science Faculty. Many of them, except for the site facilitators who mainly supervise the health promotion projects, have had no training in teaching methodology or educational theory. Therefore, the emphasis of the training was on the supervision of the research Epidemiology projects. The supervisors were facing complex challenges in establishing new ways of teaching to support the changing learning environment, small group learning in institutional and community settings, and the increasing diversity of the student body. To enable staff to respond to these challenges, an Adult Educator from the Centre of Higher Education and Development was asked to run workshops with staff in which diversity is made an explicit presence in the learning process. This report documents the process of the workshop implementation.

Over the past three decades, the discipline of Disability Studies has emerged as an independent field within the social science research and theoretical arena. Questions surrounding the nature and origin of oppressive societal responses to impairment - ranging from service installations to bureaucratic policies, linguistic conventions to exclusionary practices - are the primary concern of the field. Disability Studies attempts to examine and debunk the 'disabled' identity as one ascribed to individuals arbitrarily, yet selectively, designated as disabled. Broadly, key theoretical positions within the field assert that the negatively valued and ascribed group identity of being disabled is one which serves, through the operation of complex ideological machinery, to justify and obscure the systematic exclusion of persons, so designated, from equitable participation in the production of culture. This study looks at dynamics of human rights and disability within higher education institutions from this perspective.

In this project, students spoke out about their experiences at UCT. In particular, they describe how they perceived the university and the other students, and how their experiences impacted their academic performance and general wellbeing while attending UCT. In the study, the authors consulted a variety of policy documents and publicity materials from UCT. The authors then held 19 workshops with focus groups of students. Five were mixed, while fourteen were purposive in that certain designated students such as black students foreign students women, etc., were targeted. The initiator of the study conducted ten of the focus groups, but for the others peer facilitators were used. From the findings, it is clear that in students experiences 'whiteness' still largely characterises the institutional culture. Many black students, and some white students, described incidents of overt racism against black academic staff and students. This report documents suggestions made by students and also puts forward some recommendations. It is hoped that these will be received in the spirit in which the research was undertaken, namely to be helpful to UCT as it continues along the road of transformation. This report provides a forum in which diverse students voices are collated and reflected on behalf of the students and committed educators and for the continuance of outstanding education at UCT.

During 2005, Mikki van Zyl was contracted as a consultant to do action research on farm dwellers' perceptions and experiences of HIVAIDS in two districts of the Western Cape, South Africa. The research project was the first step in a provisional three-year process to develop and implement integrated strategic interventions for addressing HIVAIDS on farms through multi-stakeholder forums in the two districts. Employing a team of community researchers working in locally-run NGOs on HIV/AIDS, we used individual interviews, focus groups, case studies, researcher field notes, evaluations, and workshops for our dataset. The research process is presented as a case study, focusing on the context dynamics and challenges in conducting the research and preparing the groundwork for setting up the stakeholder forums.

Over the past few years, the Faculty of Health Sciences at UCT embarked upon a series of transformation processes. Despite these efforts, students at Medical School continue to lodge complaints about racist practices on the part of staff at the School and to claim such practices undermine their learning and academic performance. Following some complaints lodged early in 2001, the Dean of the Faculty convened a meeting where a study was commissioned to provide a scan of issues to inform terms of reference for a panel to be tasked with an indepth evaluation of processes of transformation at Medical School. These issues are specifically related to students experiences and perceptions of race and racism.