Meet the Finalists in the Public Engagement with Research category at the South African Women in Science Awards 2025

As South Africa celebrates Women’s Month, the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI) proudly unveils the finalists of the South African Women in Science Awards (SAWISA) 2025. These exceptional women exemplify excellence, leadership, and transformative impact in research and innovation.
Prof. Carolyn McKinney is a Full Professor of Education, specialising in Applied Language and Literacy Studies at UCT. She is an active member of several international scholarly networks, including the International Association of Applied Linguistics Africa Network.
Holding a B2 rating from the NRF, Prof. McKinney has authored three books, 23 peer-reviewed book chapters, and 22 journal articles, including in top-tier international journals such as the Journal of Sociolinguistics and the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. She is a frequent keynote speaker for international audiences and has received several national and international awards, including the Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship (2007).
Prof. McKinney is particularly renowned for her critical research on colonial language ideologies, especially the concept of Anglonormativity – the privileging of monolingual English in educational spaces – which she introduced in her seminal monograph, Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling (2017). She is also recognised for her pioneering work on decolonial approaches to bi/multilingual language and literacy education. This collaboration involved students and scholars from South Africa, Brazil and Chile, and included mentoring postgraduate students to produce single-authored chapters, thus fostering inclusive and transformative scholarship across continents.
Her research has directly contributed to inclusive language policy development in public schools and has supported the Department of Basic Education's implementation of Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education (MTBBE). Despite limited national capacity and funding, she has worked with colleagues from the Bua-Lit language and literacy collective to develop a widely shared public education pamphlet series, as well as a free online course that drew over 3 000 participants in its first month. She has also co-developed two in-service teacher professional development courses at UCT focused on MTBBE.
Prof. McKinney is deeply committed to academic transformation and capacity-building, particularly for African language-speaking scholars. She has successfully graduated eight female PhD students, 40 master's, and over 30 honours students. She actively supports student development by funding conference attendance, co-authoring research publications, and running a weekly "Shut Up and Write/Thula Ubhale" group, which she has convened at UCT for more than a decade. Since 2014, she has played a key role in fostering a vibrant graduate research culture in her school, coordinating three annual PhD training events for a cohort of 30 to 50 doctoral students.
Stay tuned as we continue to profile the 2025 finalists during Women’s Month.