In this latest Roger Wood podcast, Dr. Sindiso Mnisi Weeks of Nashua discusses HB 544, the so-called “divisive concepts” legislation that is now part of the proposed New Hampshire state budget bill. The University of Massachusetts assistant professor talks about a wide range of issues regarding race equality and the striving for harmony between persons of different skin colors in New Hampshire and elsewhere.

 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.

Sindiso Mnisi Weeks is Assistant Professor in Public Policy of Excluded Populations in the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Roger Wood is an award winning radio, newspaper and television journalist, with over 40 years of experience in the media.   Roger has spent his entire professional career in New Hampshire. Roger currently serves as associate publisher at InDepthNH.org.  He has produced news and special feature reports for InDepthNH, New Hampshire Public Radio, NPR, and other Public and commercial radio stations.  He also produced spot news for CBS Radio.