Head: Community Engagement
Dr Janine Hicks is a Senior Lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, School of Law, where she is Head: Community Engagement. She is convenor for the Navi Pillay Research Group, a collective of academics from the School of Law seeking to address critical emergent issues of race, class, gender and disability in post-Apartheid South Africa through research, law and policy reform; and represents the School of Law on the UKZN Gender Based Violence Committee.
Janine is has served as Project Leader for the South African Law Reform Commission’s Project 143: Maternity and Paternity Benefits for Self-Employed Workers, and as a Council and EXCO member on the Human Resource Development Council. She is a former Commissioner with the South African Commission for Gender Equality.
Dr Janine Hicks’s research is located firmly within Public Law, with a particular focus on transformative constitutionalism, gender equality, and participatory governance. Her scholarship examines how legal and institutional frameworks shape the inclusion, representation, and accountability of the state in contexts marked by gendered power and inequality.
Her work engages four interconnected areas of Public Law:
Across these areas, Dr Hicks adopts a governance‑oriented and normative constitutional lens, exploring how law can both enable and constrain democratic participation and substantive equality. Her work contributes to debates on institutional reform, democratic accountability, and gender‑responsive governance within South Africa’s constitutional framework.
