UKZN lecturer wins another research award
DR MAHESHVARI Naidu, named on Thursday as the top published female researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, is grateful for her parents’ encouragement.
“Both of my parents left a rich legacy for me. My father fed me a healthy diet of books, theatre and opera. My mother, who had a typical conservative and traditional background, always encouraged me to express myself.”
Last year Dr Naidu, who grew up in Clairwood, was also one of the winners of the annual Department of Science and Technology’s Women in Science Award for research excellence.
For the past four years she has been in the top 30 researcher rankings of UKZN, and in 2012 won the humanities college excellence award for top emerging researcher.
She is a National Research Foundation-rated scientist and senior lecturer in anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Naidu, who obtained her honours and masters degrees cum laude, is a feminist anthropologist.
Her doctoral work was in the contested field of African Feminism/s. Her more recent research focus is women’s health issues, and she considers this to be a core emerging research focus for her, within her “landscape of work in feminist anthropologies and female body construction”.
In one of her recent studies (of 1 290 women) on female condom use in KwaZulu-Natal, she found that “a staggeringly high” number of African women surveyed had very little exposure to, or knowledge of, the female condom.
Equally important in her work are “attempts to illustrate that any understanding of gender and fem- inism in Africa has to make contextual and situational sense to African women”.
Dr Naidu says although so many strides have been made in the fight to stop women and children abuse in South Africa, “the issues are so complex it may look as if not much has changed for the better”.