Prior to joining the University of Glasgow, I was a Professor of Sociology at Stellenbosch University and previously served as Dean of Education at the University of the Free State and Head of School at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. I must add that before I started a career in higher education, I was a high school teacher myself and taught for several years in South African schools.
I hold a PhD in sociology, in addition to a master’s degree in Education for Social Justice. My master’s and doctoral research focused on identity, intersectionality, inequality, and marginalisation as they pertain to youth and schooling. Thus, my research career has addressed the social construction of normativity and marginalisation from the outset. My research, located in the sociology of education, engages with questions related to gender, sexualities and education. More specifically, it focuses on how structures, discourses and practices reproduce cisheteronormativity and social inequality in education and how these are also resisted and challenged. My research is committed to advancing social justice, but it also affords me opportunities to engage with and advance the field theoretically, methodologically and practically. In recognition of my contributions to South African educational research, I was awarded the Education Association of South Africa’s Medal of Honour in 2014.
My most recent books are Troubling the Teaching and Learning of Gender and Sexuality Diversity in South African Education (Queer Studies and Education – Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), Queer Social Movements and Outreach Work in Schools: A Global Perspective (Queer Studies and Education – Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, co-ed with Jon I Kjaran & Jukka Lehtonen) and Queer Activism in South African Education: Disrupting Cis(hetero)normativity in Schools (Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2023). My research has also been published in high-impact and relevant peer-reviewed academic journals, which can be viewed here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/education/staff/dennisfrancis/#biography,researchinterests,supervision,articles,publications
My current research and the focus of my next book troubles the connection or lack thereof between cisheteronormativity and higher education, specifically, how pedagogy is placed at the centre of this response. Offering a granular analysis, my research explores what happens when gender and sexuality diversity and identities are introduced and discussed in a higher education classroom. It is a candid and reflective ethnographic exploration of the pedagogical challenges and opportunities that arise when knowledge, praxis, and power intersect in a class that places compulsory cisheteronormativity under the spotlight.
Regarding teaching, I have taught graduate courses on education for social justice, research methods, queer feminism and the sociology of youth. I have been a recipient of the Stellenbosch University Distinguished Teacher Award in 2019, and in 2022, I was awarded a prestigious teaching fellowship.
Research interests
The primary domain of my research and scholarship, rooted in the anti-normative framework of queer studies, concentrates on genders, sexualities and schooling. Focusing on the sociocultural dimensions of gender and sexualities, my research examines how gender and sexualities are learnt, enacted and performed in ways that contribute to the illusion that they are indeed something fixed and essential, which makes us behave in seemingly unitary and predetermined ways. My writing, therefore, has troubled normalising tendencies such as the taken-for-granted socially constructed binaries of male/female, boy/girl, heterosexual/homosexual and other normative groupings within schooling, particularly the ways this reflects onto and refines broader debates of education for social justice.
I do favour fields of research that focus on social justice, anti-oppressive education, social movements and activism in education, youth studies, queer and trans studies, technologies of sexuality, health and relationship education and arts for social change, all of which are informed by queer feminism, theories of affect and emotion, and gender and intersectionality.
I am an inspired and creative researcher with broad methodological interests and insights. My research utilises a range of critical, transformative methodological approaches, including arts-based methodologies, Boalian theatre, school and classroom ethnography and participatory action research, all of which prioritise integrity and rigour.