Amanda Gouws is Professor of Political Science at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. She holds a PhD from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the USA. Her specialization is South African Politics, Gender Politics and Political Behavior. Her co-authored book with James Gibson from Washington University St Louis, Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in Democratic Persuasion. Cambridge University Press 2003 was awarded the Alexander George Book Award for best book in Political Psychology in 2003. In 2004 she received the Rector's Award for Excellence in Research. She has published widely on issues in South African Politics such as the electoral system, women's representation and the National Gender Machinery for Women and sexual harassment.
She is the editor of (Un)Thinking Citizenship: Feminist Debates in Contemporary South Africa. (UK: Ashgate and Cape Town: Juta, 2005). This book looks closely at the conditions of citizenship for women in South Africa and has been selected as the book of the month for February 2007 by Constitutional Hill, the seat of the Constitutional Court. She has a regular political opinion column in a prominent South African newspaper.
She is a Board Member of the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town. In 2007 she was the Edith Keeger Wolf Disthinguished Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, USA.
Her recent articles in academic peer reviewed journals have appeared in Signs, African and Asian Studies, Journal of International Women's Studies, Feminist Africa, Politikon, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics and the South African Journal of Higher Education.
At the moment she is doing a major research project on conditions of care in communities in South Africa with a high HIV/Aids prevalence from the perspective of the feminist ethics of care. The results should be released in the second half of 2009. She is also doing research on the South African Women's Movement and its trajectory since 1994.
