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When Professor Sarojini Nadar, holder of the Desmond Tutu South African Research Chair (SARChI), in Religion and Social Justice at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), appeared on the SABC Morning Live show, the morning after the 2025 South African Women in Science Awards (SAWiSA),  her message was as clear as it was provocative: science without the Humanities cannot serve humanity.

Nadar had just been named First Runner-Up in the Distinguished Woman Researcher: Humanities and Social Sciences category, an honour that placed her among South Africa’s top three women scholars in the field. Out of more than 300 nominations, only 30 finalists were selected across the categories.

The winner of Nadar’s category was a senior scholar at the South African Medical Research Council, while the second runner-up hailed from Public Health at the University of Cape Town. In such a line-up, where health and technical sciences usually dominate,  Nadar’s presence, and her use of the moment, transformed the meaning of the recognition itself.

Beyond STEM: The Case for STEAM

The recognition came in a year when the SAWiSA award theme was  “Unpacking STEM Careers: Her Voice in Science.” For most, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, fields long seen as the engines of progress.  But Nadar insists on something different: that South Africa must shift from STEM to STEAM, bringing the Arts and Humanities into the heart of scientific discourse. STEM fields are so often treated as the pinnacle of progress — measurable, fundable, profitable,” Nadar observed. “By contrast, the Humanities are routinely marginalised as ‘soft,’ ‘impractical,’ or ‘secondary.’ And within the Humanities, the study of religion is pushed even further aside, dismissed as outdated or irrelevant. That is why this recognition matters. It shows that our discipline has something vital to offer. Science is not enough without the ethical, cultural, and political insights the Humanities bring. Without them, science can advance technology ,but fail society. This is why the global call to move from STEM to STEAM is so important - because science must also be human.” 

Gaza in the Spotlight

Nadar's most recent book, Gender, Genocide, Gaza and the Book of Esther: Engaging Texts of Terror(ism) (Routledge, 2025), brings biblical scholarship into dialogue with one of the most urgent crises of our time. By drawing connections between the ancient story of Esther and contemporary cycles of political violence, Nadar demonstrates how sacred texts are part of the machinery of power, mobilised to legitimise, justify, or resist violence.

For Nadar, wars, genocides, and gender-based violence are not simply technical or medical problems to be solved by vaccines, drones, or policy instruments.  They are deeply cultural and ethical crises. They live in texts, in traditions, and in systems of belief and meaning.

And those who study these dimensions, whether they are scholars of religion, of literature, or of philosophy, are not only interpreting, they are, she insists, also intervening.

In that sense, Nadar’s Morning Live appearance was about demonstrating that scholarship itself can shape public consciousness. She reminded viewers that without the Humanities, science risks being reduced to a series of instruments without ethics — powerful, but not transformative.

Why Gaza, Why Now?

Some might ask why a South African woman in science awardee would bring Gaza into the conversation. For Nadar, the answer lies partly in UWC’s history. Founded as an apartheid “bush college” for so-called Coloured students, UWC became, under the leadership of figures like Jakes Gerwel, the “intellectual home of the Left.” Here, questions of justice and political struggle were not treated as secondary to scholarship but as constitutive of it.

In that tradition, UWC has consistently taken progressive stances on global struggles: its Senate and Council have passed resolutions in support of Palestine, making it one of the few universities in the country to do so. Nadar’s intervention on Gaza is a continuation of this institutional legacy, situating her scholarship within a university that has long recognised the inseparability of intellectual work and political responsibility. At the same time, she was reminding South Africans that Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s legacy, of speaking truth to power, and of refusing neutrality in the face of oppression,  remains alive in scholarship that refuses to separate the intellectual from the political. In a country still grappling with its own unfinished struggles against inequality, Nadar asserts that the Humanities provide tools for seeing oppression clearly, and, crucially, for imagining alternatives.