1 Caring, Healing and Befriending: an Interdisciplinary Critical Realist Approach to Reducing Oppression and Violence against Women in Southern Africa Leigh Price, PhD Paper presented at the Critical Realist Reading Group, Institute of Education, University College London, 9 February 2015 ABSTRACT This paper is a critical realist attempt to move beyond postmodern nihilism to offer a theory of agency that optimistically suggests that we can achieve emancipation for women, specifically, in this case, southern African women, although the central lessons are applicable to all women. The non-violent activism outlined here theoretically avoids reinscription of oppression and the ineffectuality of reductive interventions by use of a strongly defined interdisciplinary process, based on seven levels of scale of the problem of women’s oppression. This paper also relooks at the idea of false consciousness from a critical realist viewpoint, suggesting that, with qualifications, it may yet prove useful. KEYWORDS: Critical realism, emancipation, interdisciplinarity, false consciousness, southern African women, structure and agency Introduction Southern African women experience severe oppression which has lead to shockingly high levels of violence against them. For example, Dunkle et al (2004) analysed 1,395 interviews with women in Soweto, South Africa. They found that the prevalence of physical/sexual partner violence was 55.5%. More than 25% of South African men questioned in a survey by Jewkes et al. (2009) admitted to raping someone and of these more than half admitted to raping more than one woman.