Ayabulela Mhlahlo
Ayabulela Mhlahlo is a 3rd year PhD student in the Philosophy Department. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Philosophy and African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand. She holds a Bachelor of Honors Degree in African Literature (with Distinction). She holds two Master of Arts degrees: one from African Literature (with Distinction – 2021) at the University of the Witwatersrand and another in Political Studies at the University of Cape Town (2023). She is now pursuing an MA and a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Connecticut (2023-2028).
Her work is primarily focused on topics in Mythology, Discourse Analysis, Africana Philosophy, Decolonial Philosophy, History of Ideas, Phenomenology and Social Metaphysics, as well as the Philosophy of the Humanities and Archival Practice. Her working thesis is on the relationship between Mythic Thought and the construction of social reality by use of language and symbolic games in colonial environments. She is being advised by Professor Lewis R. Gordon and Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres.
She has taught in various disciplines in South Africa like African Literature, Political Sciences and Philosophy. At UCONN, she has served as the Teaching Assistant for Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ PHIL 1104: Philosophy and Social Ethics, and for Professor Lewis Gordon’s PHIL 1109: Global Existentialism. She is currently serving as the Instructor of Record for PHIL 1104: Philosophy and Social Ethics and PHIL 1106: Non-Western Philosophy at the UCONN Hartford Campus.
At UCONN, she has served as the Vice President of the Philosophy Graduate Student Association (2024-2025). She is now serving as the President of Society of Women in Philosophy (SWIP), where she’s working alongside her fellow SWIP colleagues to develop a first of its kind Feminist public philosophies podcast.
In South Africa, Ayabulela has had a long record as a student activist in the #FeesMustFall, #InsourceWorkers, #DecolonizeEducation and #RhodesMustFall.
Outside academia, Ayabulela is deeply invested in building and capacitating Anti-Colonial epistemic recuperation projects and organizations in Soweto and the broader Johannesburg area. She has been a long-term member of the Soweto-based Black House Kollective (BHK), where she currently serves in the Board of Trustees and as the current director of the Philosopher in Soweto Symposia. She is also a founding and executive member of the Wits-based Black Intellectual Praxes (BIP), that is primarily interested in nurturing and capacitating young black academic and artistic talent in CBD Johannesburg. She also works closely with the Funda Center on public-facing philosophy projects in Soweto. She is currently shadowing and volunteering at the Mansfield Sustainability Committee. The entirety of her activism is focused on the democratization of knowledge production. She also hopes to be more involved in Climate Justice programs.
In her downtime, Aya is a passionate vegan who enjoys weightlifting, swimming, basketball, meditation, reading, silence, solitude, nature, the ocean, art-viewing, and exploration. She’s deeply fascinated by the promise of building sustainable and just models for radically humane ways of sustaining and capacitating human, plant, and animal life on the planet.
“Yes! We Must Dare to Invent the Future.”
– Thomas Sankara
“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”
– Frantz Fanon
“If you are free, you need to free somebody else.”
– Toni Morrison
