Christi van der Westhuizen, PhD, is Professor in Sociology at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and the Lead Principal Investigator of the Repairing Sociality, Safeguarding Democracy research group. She serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Research Centre Global Dynamics, Leipzig University, Germany, where she was a visiting professor in 2022-3. Her research interests are identity, difference and democracy, as mediated by ideology in postcolonial settings.

Her monographs are White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party (2007) and Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa (2017). Her books as lead or co-editor are the Routledge Handbook of Social Cohesion in Africa (forthcoming), The D-Word: Perspectives on Democracy in Tumultuous Times (2023) and the Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness (2022). She has published articles in Law & Critique, Africa Today, Comparativ Zeitschrift, Critical Philosophy of Race, and other journals. Recent book chapters include ‘Apology as a pathway out of white unknowing’ in Unsettling Apologies - Critical Writings on Apology from South Africa (2022, eds. M. Judge and D. Smythe, Bristol University Press).

Prof Van der Westhuizen is a regular columnist and political commentator in South African and international media.