Nolwazi Mkhwanazi is Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Pretoria. She joined the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS) in September 2021. Prior to this (2017-2021), she was the Director of the Medical Humanities program at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), University of the Witwatersrand.

Nolwazi is interested in issues relating to life course, kinship and care. While she has also done research on ageing and care, her main focus has been on young people, reproduction, sexuality and gender. In the last 5 years she has been working more broadly with young people regarding issues of sexuality, sex education and sexual health interventions. In this work, her fieldwork sites span across Southern Africa including Botswana and Eswatini, and she has collaborated with people in range of disciplines including fine art, biomedical sciences, public health, demography and other social science disciplines. These collaborative projects include partners based in the global South, mainly in Ghana, Mozambique, Malawi, Kenya, Chile and India. In her current project: Reimagining Reproduction: making babies, making kin in Africa, Nolwazi is working with scholars in Eswatini, Ghana, Malawi, South Africa and Uganda. She is also part of a research team working on the project Urban Enclaving Futures in Accra, Maputo and Johannesburg https://www.uib.no/en/urbanenclavingfutures

Nolwazi is co-editor of two books: Young families: Gender, sexuality and care (HSRC Press 2017) and Connected Lives: Families, households, health and care in South Africa (HSRC press 2020). She is working on a third book with (Lakshmi Lingam), Mobile phones, gender and society: Emerging empirical realities and feminist perspectives (Routledge: forthcoming).

Nolwazi is on the editorial board of the journals: Anthropology Southern Africa; Agenda; The Ethnographic Edge, Medicine Anthropology Theory and Somatosphere, and the book series: Medical and Health Humanities: Critical interventions (Bloomsbury Press). She is on the advisory board of the Hamwe Festival (University of Global Health Equity, Rwanda) and is one of the founders of the Medical and Health Humanities Africa (MHHA) network https://www.medicalandhealthhumanities.africa/