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Eventually all the bubbles we retreat to shrink and the messiness of the world finds its way to our doorsteps. The reality is that no one escapes the crises of our time – not the devastation of climate change events, the impact of wars, violence against women, entrenched capture and corruption, or the burdens of disease and virus.
It can make the tumult of the world feel like churn too great for anyone of us to bring to stillness. But rather than being lost to panic or overwhelmed into inaction, the converging crises signal a moment for shake-up - also opportunity. There’s a chance to develop smarter tools and gain knowledge and perspective in order to see more clearly how the world and its crises have come to be made.
Knowing how imbalances, hierarchies and divides are constructed, propped up and reproduced makes clear that inequalities underpin the crises of the moment – the human crises we all face. And knowing how they are made also means knowing how they can be unmade.
The Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS) and the School of Economics and Finance (SEF) at Wits University have for the past two years presented a Masters of Commerce degree in Inequality Studies. The programme focuses on interdisciplinary scholarship and applied research to tackle inequality in its multiple manifestations and intersecting points. It centres a global South gaze but understands the relational dynamics of the global.
This programme makes an innovative leap in the way it’s structured. The programme shifts from the dominance of economics or sociology as primary lenses to look at inequality studies and instead applies an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach. It also slots into current research work of SCIS, allowing students to engage with the most up-to-date work in the different areas of research. These research streams include climate change, the future of work(ers), public economy and wealth inequalities.
Dr David Francis is Deputy Director at SCIS. He says: “The argument SCIS has always made is that an interdisciplinary approach to thinking about inequality is needed, because inequality is not just about money and income and wealth, it’s about power and politics too.
“The MCom in inequality studies pulls together economics, sociology, politics and other social sciences in a coherent interdisciplinary focus. The material that is taught is aligned to the cutting edge research happening within SCIS and there are series of lectures presented by the researchers.”
Francis says the key is to equip students to critically think about issues around inequality, particularly the political and normative dimensions.
“Our programme approach goes beyond the data. We are not examining the critical numbers without asking questions like how bad is inequality? How widespread is it? And why isn’t it changing? Inequality isn’t a technical phenomenon, it’s a political phenomenon and it’s about power. It involves questions of who has power in society to preserve the status quo. By finding ways to describe this unequal distribution, to deconstruct it and to track it is part of the toolkit in this programme,” he says.
Intake for the third cohort of the programme is underway and the application deadline is 30 November. Over the past two years, the students on the programme have been drawn from diverse backgrounds and at different stages of their academic and work careers. For Francis, this has added a “real world” dimension to the programme with lived experiences as part of the dynamic in lecture rooms. Francis says past students have included honours students continuing their studies, to those well advanced in their careers as policy makers, politicians, activists and journalists.
Tshepang Phawe is part of the class of 2024. Her research project focused on township economics. She says the structure, nature and scale of inequality in South Africa presents a serious threat to social cohesion. Studying the MCom is her way to push back. Phawe adds: “Inequality in South Africa in the defining pathology of our country. And the rate at which this is growing makes inequality a moral, social and political obligation that we must combat in a front-facing way.”
Her classmate Adam Potterton focused on private security and elites. For Potterton, the apparent doom spiral presented by inequality calls for less pessimism and more preparedness. It’s meant being armed with better tools and knowledge to interrogate equality and to think through interventions and solutions.
“I chose to study inequality so that we can come up with novel ideas to deal with pressing issues such as the precarity of work or climate change,” he says.
Musawenkosi Cabe, a freelance legal journalist and social activist was part of the inaugural class of the MCom programme. For Cabe the programme has allowed him to apply more nuanced approaches to his reporting and writing and to have richer perspectives of the stories and people he engages with daily.
“We often speak about South Africa as being the most unequal country in the world but we don’t have a deeper understanding of what that means. When we look at how inequalities of capital developed here we need to be looking at the dispossession of people’s land in creating wealth and capital; how people had to sell themselves as labour.
“The inequalities we see in South Africa today are a manifestation of historical injustices. Coupled with this the policy positions we have today do not place the centre the role in addressing existing inequalities. So the way the state is presented is corrupt, inherently corrupt, and the role it plays in dealing with these issues becomes minimal,” he says.
Cabe says the SCIS MCom programme taps directly into a global shifting conversation. It’s a world waking up to the inconvenient truth that the way capitalism is created and continues to be reproduced is not just the problem of the poor, or the problem of the Global South. The crisis of inequality is made real in security, healthcare, migration and living wages – concerns that impact everyone, everywhere.
There are more conversations to be had, conversations that make classrooms where change can seem possible. It is the kind of change that helps us switch directions and imagine pathways out of inequality. Pathways to a future that is more sustainable, fairer and ultimately one that benefits more people - even the wealthy elites and the most powerful.
*For more information on the programme visit https://www.wits.ac.za/course-finder/postgraduate/clm/mcom-inequality-studies/