Scott Burnett

Professional Bio

Scott Burnett was born in apartheid South Africa and lived through the transition to democracy in the 1990s. In 2018 he earned his PhD in Critical Diversity Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His dissertation traced the contemporary discursive links between liberal property orders and the hegemony of whiteness as a gendered and sexualized power structure that continues to characterize South Africa’s post-apartheid racial state. He holds a master’s degree in Philosophy from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a B.A. Hons. in English Literature and Philosophy from the university currently known as Rhodes. His current research is focused on two main areas: the reproduction of social inequality in environmentalist discourse, and critical studies of masculinism in the white supremacist ‘alt-right’ online. His theoretical-methodological grounding is in critical discourse studies, critical race theory, and gender studies. He is the author of White Belongings: Race, Land, and Property in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Lexington Books, 2022) and of numerous single- and co-authored articles in journals including Men and Masculinities; Sexualities; Critical Discourse Studies; Discourse, Context and Media; ACME; and Environment & Planning E: Nature and Space. He is currently working on a new book, provisionally entitled “Critical discourse studies and environmentalism: Critiquing the social visions of ‘green’ movements”. The monograph will serve as a call to a more critical approach by discourse analysts to social actors that claim to speak on behalf of the earth, and analyze in detail the various ways in which strands of advocacy for environmental protection are both historically and presently wound up in the reproduction of harmful racial, colonial, class and heteropatriarchal hierarchies.