Shahnaaz Suffla
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 176006 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Shahnaaz Suffla |
| NOMBRES | Shahnaaz |
| APELLIDO | Suffla |
| FIRMA | SUFFLA S |
| AFILIACIONES | South African Medical Research Council |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4597-5472 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 65 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1997 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Police subjectivities in South Africa
Police officers in the South African Police Service (SAPS) undertake their police work within national, institutional, and personal discourses. Together, these discourses create different, often contradictory, police subjectivities. Resultantly, research on policing in South Africa is increasingly concerned with these subjectivities and the contexts in which they are constructed. However, despite this growing interest in discourse and subjectivit…
Radical healing in communities
The colonial wound signifies the contemporary societal structures which undermine, maim, and destroy the humanity of colonised subjects. In South Africa, the colonial wound manifests in different ways. We see the colonial wound at work in the country’s disproportionately high rates of racialised poverty and State violence, Afrophobia, and ongoing land dispossession. Addressing the colonial wound demands a kind of decolonial healing that transcend…
Decolonizing psychology through struggles for land
The conception of Indigenous land as terra nullius-territory without a master-was fundamental in globalizing the colonial project. Contemporary mechanisms of coloniality are no different. All over the world, people are expelled from their lands for purposes of mineral extraction, dumping, industrial development, control over territory, and suppressing resistance. In this, the histories, knowledges, and affective relations that people have with la…
Understanding community violence
Critical realism can unsettle a number of orthodoxies that surround the study of community violence within community psychology. This is to say, because critical realism is embraced so rarely by community psychologists, it can institute a parallax shift within the discipline, whereby we are granted alternative ways of perceiving violence within community contexts. Drawing on transdisciplinary thought, we offer in this article a retroductive frame…
Looking backwards, looking forwards
To mark the 30th anniversary of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA), 11 of PsySSA’s past presidents, along with two facilitators, gathered in early 2024 for a roundtable discussion on psychology in South Africa. This article represents an edited transcript of that conversation. The guiding motif of the discussion – looking backwards, looking forwards – led discussants through the historical temporalities, institutional, professiona…
Three decades of psychology in South Africa
Three decades have passed since South Africa’s formal transition from apartheid to liberal democracy. This milestone signified a triumph of hope over despair for a country that had struggled under a suffocating system of racist, dehumanising oppression since its colonisation in the seventeenth century. Reflecting this zeitgeist, divisions, and complicities that had characterised the study, practice, and organisation of psychology within South Afr…
Community gardens and the social solidarity economy
Although research has demonstrated the ecological, public health and food security benefits of community gardens, few studies have considered community gardens in relation to a broader social solidarity economy (SSE), that is, inter-community networks wherein people develop commitments to building just and equitable economic alternatives. In employing a thematic analysis on triangulated data (collected via an interview, participant observation, a…
Building Decolonial Peace into the Everyday
Coloniality structures everyday (i.e. the familiar, dynamic experiences that constitute people's day-to-day lives). It is, however, possible to build decolonial peace into the everyday as a means of slowly eroding coloniality from within. In this article, we draw on our collaboration with a community-led gender justice collective based in Johannesburg to illustrate some of the complexities inherent to building decolonial peace into the everyday. …
Epistemicide and epistemic freedom
Community Psychology has, in the main, contributed to different modes of epistemicide, that is, the destruction, distortion, marginalisation and silencing of other-than-Northern knowledges and ways of knowing. Increasingly, however, decolonising enactments of Community Psychology have resisted the discipline’s complicity in entrenching unequal knowledge hierarchies that depend on epistemicide. (Re)inspired by the latest iterations of the decoloni…
Decolonial Enactments in Community Psychology
Fanon’s Decolonial Transcendence of Psychoanalysis
Coloniality continues to invade the psychomaterial lives of the condemned. Invoking psychoanalysis and phenomenology to engage with modern psychopathologies and race, gender, and sexuality, Fanon developed seminal ideas on social suffering in the context of colonial violence on psychic life. In reading Fanon, we discern two challenges: the decolonial transcendence of psychoanalysis as a theoretical framework, and the decolonial transcendence of p…
Discourses of Gender and Political Violence in South Africa
Politically violent women are regularly muted or made exceptional. Yet, underplaying women’s involvement in political violence obscures the systemic nature of such violence. We employ a discursive psychology analysis of an in-depth interview with a South African woman who has been involved in decades of political activism, and identified two discourses: Gendering Politically Violent Symbols and Enactments, where political violence was wielded as …
Analyzing Discursive Constructions of Community in Newspaper Articles
The manner by which power is reified through newspaper reporting can assist community psychologists in getting a handle on the complex, often contradictory, ways by which ideology and power are constituted in relation to particular communities. Accordingly, the present study draws on discursive psychology to analyse how 377 newspaper articles construct the community of Thembelihle (a low‐income community in South Africa) and how these constructio…
Three Pathways for Enlarging Critical African Psychology
Departing from the position that critical African psychology is an endeavour whose objective is to harness psychological knowledge in, by, for, and with Africa, as well as the world, but also to critically think Africa into psychology, this article considers space as a key idea to consider in the further development of African psychology, and more specifically, a critically inclined African psychology. Taking critical African psychology as one of…
Introduction to the Special Issue
Against the backdrop of the global pandemic, which has deepened existing \nglobal struggles against coloniality and racist, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist \nsocial formations, this special issue focuses on Fanon, Southern Theory, and \nPsychoanalysis: Dialogues on Race, Gender, and Sexuality. In dialogue with the \nwork of Frantz Fanon-a key figure in thinking on colonialism and decolonization- \nand other critical thinkers from the Global Sou…
Mbeki's 'I am an African' Speech
We offer a critical reading of Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech to illustrate how he foregrounded humaning, namely ontoepistemological recovery, as a key dimension of psycho-political reconstruction. Mbeki’s speech, delivered on the occasion of the adoption of South Africa’s democratic Constitution, was inherent to the larger quest to (re)imagine South Africa and (South)Africanness and assert independent Black intellectual thought. Position…
Elaborations on (a) Decolonising Africa(n)-centred Feminist Psychology
In a previous article we sought to clear up some of the conceptual confusion on African psychology whilst simultaneously engaging with what it entails to do a decolonising African psychology. We dealt with questions such as: Is African psychology identical to psychology in Africa? What is the main dispute between Africa(n)-centred psychology and Euroamerican-centric psychology in Africa? Might ‘Blackening’ psychology decolonise the discipline? An…
Exploring police-protester interactions
Splintered politics of memory and community resistance
Oral history presents an especially effective way of exploring the multitudinous, contradictory, and contextual meanings that are attached to the notion of community. In this study, we argue for narrative‐discourse analysis as a critical means of studying contested community memories. We rely on focus group discussions and individual interviews to explore oral histories of state‐sanctioned relocation of residents of Thembelihle, a low‐income comm…
Decoloniality and psychology’s reckoning with rebellion
Reflecting critically on the researcher-participant encounter in focus groups
South Africa has a considerable history of public protest from which a contemporary “culture of protest” has emerged. Despite the wide-ranging body of research on protest in South Africa, few studies have considered critically the discursive space in which researchers and participants are embedded. In this article, we use discursive psychology to examine reflexively how South African protesters discursively contest, (re)produce, and negotiate Sou…
A multimodal reading of public protests
Public protests in (un)democratic polities, reflective of discursive articulations of resistance and material expressions of struggle, seek to disrupt prevailing unjust societal, political and cultural practices. The insurrectionist purposes of protests are often in contravention of public order regimens, which seek to regulate enactments of public protests, minimise the disruptions inherent to protests and legitimise those defined as non-violent…
Community psychology and its (dis)contents, archival legacies and decolonisation
This article serves as the introduction to the Special Issue on Liberatory and Critical Voices in Decolonising Community Psychologies. The Special Issue was inspired by the Sixth International Conference on Community Psychology, held in South Africa in May 2016, and resonates with the call for the conscious decolonisation of knowledge creation. We argue that the decolonial turn in psychology has re-centred critical projects within the discipline,…
Visually negotiating hegemonic discourse through Photovoice
Despite the immense communicative potential of visual methodologies, surprisingly few community-based research studies have meaningfully considered participants’ visual meaning-making processes. When working with youth participants from contexts with which researchers are unfamiliar, the use of visual methodologies and analyses is able to transcend much of the developmental and cultural barriers to communication that are inherent in many linguist…
Research translation through participatory research
In the context of a call for public health research to address social challenges and transform communities and society, research translation has increasingly become an imperative in South Africa. Research translation seeks to improve real-world settings and enhance quality of life by applying research-generated knowledge. These goals are shared by proponents of participatory action research (PAR). However, the way in which research is pursued con…
Community psychology and its (dis)contents, archival legacies and decolonisation
This article serves as the introduction to the Special Issue on Liberatory and Critical Voices in Decolonising Community Psychologies. The Special Issue was inspired by the Sixth International Conference on Community Psychology, held in South Africa in May 2016, and resonates with the call for the conscious decolonisation of knowledge creation. We argue that the decolonial turn in psychology has re-centred critical projects within the discipline,…
Reflexivity as Enactment of Critical Community Psychologies
The performance of critical community psychologies is always contextual, intersubjective, embodied, and politicized in nature. In this article, we draw from the epistemological standpoint that researcher and participant subjectivities are fully implicated in the (co)‐construction of knowledge and should therefore be documented and made retrievable. Through the lens of reflexivity, and drawing from an African‐centered Photovoice project on youth r…
How Has Psychology Fared over Ten Years of Democracy? Achievements, Challenges and Questions
Building Decolonial Peace into the Everyday
Coloniality structures everyday (i.e. the familiar, dynamic experiences that constitute people's day-to-day lives). It is, however, possible to build decolonial peace into the everyday as a means of slowly eroding coloniality from within. In this article, we draw on our collaboration with a community-led gender justice collective based in Johannesburg to illustrate some of the complexities inherent to building decolonial peace into the everyday. …
Reflexivity, Positionality, Context, and Representation in African and Arab Enactments of Community Psychology
Analyzing Discursive Constructions of Community in Newspaper Articles
The manner by which power is reified through newspaper reporting can assist community psychologists in getting a handle on the complex, often contradictory, ways by which ideology and power are constituted in relation to particular communities. Accordingly, the present study draws on discursive psychology to analyse how 377 newspaper articles construct the community of Thembelihle (a low‐income community in South Africa) and how these constructio…
A multimodal reading of public protests
Public protests in (un)democratic polities, reflective of discursive articulations of resistance and material expressions of struggle, seek to disrupt prevailing unjust societal, political and cultural practices. The insurrectionist purposes of protests are often in contravention of public order regimens, which seek to regulate enactments of public protests, minimise the disruptions inherent to protests and legitimise those defined as non-violent…
Visually negotiating hegemonic discourse through Photovoice
Despite the immense communicative potential of visual methodologies, surprisingly few community-based research studies have meaningfully considered participants’ visual meaning-making processes. When working with youth participants from contexts with which researchers are unfamiliar, the use of visual methodologies and analyses is able to transcend much of the developmental and cultural barriers to communication that are inherent in many linguist…
Psychological research and South Africa’s violence prevention responses
South Africa’s unprecedented levels of violence, which trigger significant health, economic, and social consequences, are marked by pronounced gendered, age-related, and socio-economic features. Extensive poverty, prolonged unemployment and income inequality, gender inequality, patriarchal notions of masculinity, exposure to abuse in childhood and compromised parenting, access to firearms, pervasive alcohol misuse, and fragilities in law enforcem…
Experiences of Induced Abortion among a Group of South African Women
Abortion, more than most procedures, is embedded in a social context that has implications for psychological responses of women. This study used a qualitative research framework to explore five black women's interpretations of their experiences of illegal abortion. Individual interviews were conducted covering the experience of the abortion decision, the abortion procedure itself, the perceived psychological impact of the abortion and perceptions…
Three Pathways for Enlarging Critical African Psychology
Departing from the position that critical African psychology is an endeavour whose objective is to harness psychological knowledge in, by, for, and with Africa, as well as the world, but also to critically think Africa into psychology, this article considers space as a key idea to consider in the further development of African psychology, and more specifically, a critically inclined African psychology. Taking critical African psychology as one of…
Introduction to the Special Issue
Against the backdrop of the global pandemic, which has deepened existing \nglobal struggles against coloniality and racist, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist \nsocial formations, this special issue focuses on Fanon, Southern Theory, and \nPsychoanalysis: Dialogues on Race, Gender, and Sexuality. In dialogue with the \nwork of Frantz Fanon-a key figure in thinking on colonialism and decolonization- \nand other critical thinkers from the Global Sou…
Mbeki's 'I am an African' Speech
We offer a critical reading of Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech to illustrate how he foregrounded humaning, namely ontoepistemological recovery, as a key dimension of psycho-political reconstruction. Mbeki’s speech, delivered on the occasion of the adoption of South Africa’s democratic Constitution, was inherent to the larger quest to (re)imagine South Africa and (South)Africanness and assert independent Black intellectual thought. Position…
Looking backwards, looking forwards
To mark the 30th anniversary of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA), 11 of PsySSA’s past presidents, along with two facilitators, gathered in early 2024 for a roundtable discussion on psychology in South Africa. This article represents an edited transcript of that conversation. The guiding motif of the discussion – looking backwards, looking forwards – led discussants through the historical temporalities, institutional, professiona…
Discourses of Gender and Political Violence in South Africa
Politically violent women are regularly muted or made exceptional. Yet, underplaying women’s involvement in political violence obscures the systemic nature of such violence. We employ a discursive psychology analysis of an in-depth interview with a South African woman who has been involved in decades of political activism, and identified two discourses: Gendering Politically Violent Symbols and Enactments, where political violence was wielded as …
Exploring police-protester interactions
Splintered politics of memory and community resistance
Oral history presents an especially effective way of exploring the multitudinous, contradictory, and contextual meanings that are attached to the notion of community. In this study, we argue for narrative‐discourse analysis as a critical means of studying contested community memories. We rely on focus group discussions and individual interviews to explore oral histories of state‐sanctioned relocation of residents of Thembelihle, a low‐income comm…
Research translation through participatory research
In the context of a call for public health research to address social challenges and transform communities and society, research translation has increasingly become an imperative in South Africa. Research translation seeks to improve real-world settings and enhance quality of life by applying research-generated knowledge. These goals are shared by proponents of participatory action research (PAR). However, the way in which research is pursued con…
Community conversations as community engagement
This article reviews community conversations as a community engagement tool within the South African context by exploring the perceptions of the conversation hosts. A focus group discussion was held with community conversation hosts to better understand the community conversation process and its community engagement value. Their reflections are reviewed against four principles of community engagement, namely, appreciation, applicability, provocat…
Towards the Development of a Responsive, Social Science-informed, Critical Public Health Framework on Male Interpersonal Violence
Emerging out of a larger study whose main focus was to identify the risk and protective factors in male interpersonal violence, and based on analysis of local and global empirical and theoretical literature, the main aim of this article is to develop a conceptual foundation for understanding and preventing male interpersonal violence in South Africa within the context of responsive local manifestation and dynamics of male violence. The conceptual…
Experiences of Induced Abortion among a Group of South African Women
Abortion, more than most procedures, is embedded in a social context that has implications for psychological responses of women. This study used a qualitative research framework to explore five black women's interpretations of their experiences of illegal abortion. Individual interviews were conducted covering the experience of the abortion decision, the abortion procedure itself, the perceived psychological impact of the abortion and perceptions…
How Has Psychology Fared over Ten Years of Democracy? Achievements, Challenges and Questions
Female homicidal strangulation in urban South Africa
The study contributes to an emerging gendered homicide risk profile for a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world. The results support the call for the development of evidence-based and gender-specific initiatives to especially address the forms of violence that instigate fatalities
Violence and injuries in South Africa
Peace, Its Indices and Implications for Swaraj
The issue of peace and its drivers is central to erudition on Hind Swaraj and associated texts dealing with liberty, self-rule, world order and social integrity. In this article, we therefore aim to describe a specific articulation of peace, embedded in peace psychology and the Global Peace Index (GPI), which was first initiated in 2007 and subsequently revised in 2008 and 2009. The GPI, which places countries according to their levels of peacefu…
Towards the Development of a Responsive, Social Science-informed, Critical Public Health Framework on Male Interpersonal Violence
Emerging out of a larger study whose main focus was to identify the risk and protective factors in male interpersonal violence, and based on analysis of local and global empirical and theoretical literature, the main aim of this article is to develop a conceptual foundation for understanding and preventing male interpersonal violence in South Africa within the context of responsive local manifestation and dynamics of male violence. The conceptual…
A Critical Review of Instruments Assessing Characteristics of Community
Community development is critical in South African and other low- to middle-income contexts characterised by unemployment, violence, poverty and poor infrastructure. The current asset-based trend in community research emphasises constructive community development and change through the mobilisation of existing and unrecognised community resources and skills. Following this trend we critically examine the conceptual soundness and logic of asset-ba…
Photovoice as Community Engaged Research
This article aims to describe Photovoice as a method and process of enacting community engaged research. The multi-dimensional nature of Photovoice is illustrated though a case application, focused on safety promotion in two South African low-income communities. Twenty youth, evenly distributed by gender and ranging in age from 13 to 15 years, were conveniently engaged as participants in the case application. In positioning ourselves as critical …
Community Engagement
Community conversations as community engagement
This article reviews community conversations as a community engagement tool within the South African context by exploring the perceptions of the conversation hosts. A focus group discussion was held with community conversation hosts to better understand the community conversation process and its community engagement value. Their reflections are reviewed against four principles of community engagement, namely, appreciation, applicability, provocat…
Community, intervention and provider support influences on implementation
This evaluation illustrated the complexity of intervention implementation. The study approach sought to support intervention fidelity by fostering and maintaining community endorsement and support, a prerequisite for the unfolding implementation of the intervention
Psychological research and South Africa’s violence prevention responses
South Africa’s unprecedented levels of violence, which trigger significant health, economic, and social consequences, are marked by pronounced gendered, age-related, and socio-economic features. Extensive poverty, prolonged unemployment and income inequality, gender inequality, patriarchal notions of masculinity, exposure to abuse in childhood and compromised parenting, access to firearms, pervasive alcohol misuse, and fragilities in law enforcem…
Reflexivity as Enactment of Critical Community Psychologies
The performance of critical community psychologies is always contextual, intersubjective, embodied, and politicized in nature. In this article, we draw from the epistemological standpoint that researcher and participant subjectivities are fully implicated in the (co)‐construction of knowledge and should therefore be documented and made retrievable. Through the lens of reflexivity, and drawing from an African‐centered Photovoice project on youth r…
Reflexivity, Positionality, Context, and Representation in African and Arab Enactments of Community Psychology
Visually negotiating hegemonic discourse through Photovoice
Despite the immense communicative potential of visual methodologies, surprisingly few community-based research studies have meaningfully considered participants’ visual meaning-making processes. When working with youth participants from contexts with which researchers are unfamiliar, the use of visual methodologies and analyses is able to transcend much of the developmental and cultural barriers to communication that are inherent in many linguist…
Research translation through participatory research
In the context of a call for public health research to address social challenges and transform communities and society, research translation has increasingly become an imperative in South Africa. Research translation seeks to improve real-world settings and enhance quality of life by applying research-generated knowledge. These goals are shared by proponents of participatory action research (PAR). However, the way in which research is pursued con…
Community psychology and its (dis)contents, archival legacies and decolonisation
This article serves as the introduction to the Special Issue on Liberatory and Critical Voices in Decolonising Community Psychologies. The Special Issue was inspired by the Sixth International Conference on Community Psychology, held in South Africa in May 2016, and resonates with the call for the conscious decolonisation of knowledge creation. We argue that the decolonial turn in psychology has re-centred critical projects within the discipline,…
A multimodal reading of public protests
Public protests in (un)democratic polities, reflective of discursive articulations of resistance and material expressions of struggle, seek to disrupt prevailing unjust societal, political and cultural practices. The insurrectionist purposes of protests are often in contravention of public order regimens, which seek to regulate enactments of public protests, minimise the disruptions inherent to protests and legitimise those defined as non-violent…
Reflecting critically on the researcher-participant encounter in focus groups
South Africa has a considerable history of public protest from which a contemporary “culture of protest” has emerged. Despite the wide-ranging body of research on protest in South Africa, few studies have considered critically the discursive space in which researchers and participants are embedded. In this article, we use discursive psychology to examine reflexively how South African protesters discursively contest, (re)produce, and negotiate Sou…
Elaborations on (a) Decolonising Africa(n)-centred Feminist Psychology
In a previous article we sought to clear up some of the conceptual confusion on African psychology whilst simultaneously engaging with what it entails to do a decolonising African psychology. We dealt with questions such as: Is African psychology identical to psychology in Africa? What is the main dispute between Africa(n)-centred psychology and Euroamerican-centric psychology in Africa? Might ‘Blackening’ psychology decolonise the discipline? An…
Exploring police-protester interactions
Splintered politics of memory and community resistance
Oral history presents an especially effective way of exploring the multitudinous, contradictory, and contextual meanings that are attached to the notion of community. In this study, we argue for narrative‐discourse analysis as a critical means of studying contested community memories. We rely on focus group discussions and individual interviews to explore oral histories of state‐sanctioned relocation of residents of Thembelihle, a low‐income comm…
Decoloniality and psychology’s reckoning with rebellion
Fanon’s Decolonial Transcendence of Psychoanalysis
Coloniality continues to invade the psychomaterial lives of the condemned. Invoking psychoanalysis and phenomenology to engage with modern psychopathologies and race, gender, and sexuality, Fanon developed seminal ideas on social suffering in the context of colonial violence on psychic life. In reading Fanon, we discern two challenges: the decolonial transcendence of psychoanalysis as a theoretical framework, and the decolonial transcendence of p…
Discourses of Gender and Political Violence in South Africa
Politically violent women are regularly muted or made exceptional. Yet, underplaying women’s involvement in political violence obscures the systemic nature of such violence. We employ a discursive psychology analysis of an in-depth interview with a South African woman who has been involved in decades of political activism, and identified two discourses: Gendering Politically Violent Symbols and Enactments, where political violence was wielded as …
Sociology (30 obras) · Political science (26 obras) · Psychology (22 obras) · Community Health and Development (16 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Politics (15 obras) · Gender Studies (13 obras) · Social science (11 obras) · Epistemology (10 obras) · Social Psychology (9 obras)