N Malherbe
Biographic Data
| ID | 54739 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Malherbe |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Malherbe |
| SIGNATURE | MALHERBE N |
| AFFILIATIONS | South African Medical Research Council |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4968-4058 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Respatialising the Cape ocean through planetary attending
Pivoting around the oceanic environment of the Western Cape in South Africa, this paper surfaces black geographies of ocean often submerged from view by colonial spatialities and formations. This is done through an analysis of the documentary—The Glow in the Water—that co-produced by the authors as well as interviews we conducted as part of making the film. Despite the colonial apartheid state’s efforts to sever black people’s relations with the …
Roadside refusals: Resisting infrastructural violence in the south of Johannesburg
In this paper, we offer an analysis of what we are calling “roadside refusals” – coordinated and quotidian resistance efforts that take place alongside highways and are directed against the racial capitalist state’s infrastructurally violent impositions and abandonments. In particular, we look at roadside refusal in Nana’s Farm, a marginalized community situated beside the N12 highway in the south of Johannesburg. Drawing from interviews, communi…
Police subjectivities in South Africa: A discourse analysis of police officers’ talk on protest
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: A decolonial reading
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: A critical realist framework for community psychology
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…
Building Solidarity With and Without Community Psychology
When dictated by neoliberal policy mandates, individualised empowerment agendas, Eurocentric hermeneutics, and top‐down development strategies, community psychology is held back from contributing meaningfully to community‐led solidarity efforts. There is, however, a tradition of critical community psychology that has been shaped and led by the solidarity demands of organised community struggle. Working in this critical tradition, I rely on reflec…
Denaturalisation and Liberation Psychology: Implications for Memory and Political Imagination
Although denaturalisation has been formulated in several different ways, for those working in the liberation psychology paradigm, denaturalisation refers to the practice of resisting mainstream psychology's psychologisation—and thus naturalisation—of systemic oppression. In this article, I work from within the liberation psychology paradigm to consider what denaturalisation means for psychologists working with collectives to consolidate anti‐capi…
Locating the sacrifice zone in capitalist and anti-capitalist political theology
An increasingly prevalent element of capitalism's uneven regime of accumulation is the 'sacrifice zone', where environmental injustices related to harmful toxins, ecological devastation or military testing are concentrated so that the environmental health and economic sustainability of other places can be maintained. All over the world, collectives are mobilising against sacrifice zones, making sacrifices of their own to do so. How might we under…
Against Climate Aid Colonialism: The Case for Climate Reparations and South-South Solidarity
Legacies of colonial rule, continuing neocolonial extraction, and excessive carbon dumping have meant that the majority of those living in the Global South experience many of the consequences of climate change more acutely than those in the Global North. As such, several countries in the Global North have committed to providing climate aid to decarbonise and reverse the alarming climate trajectory in the Global South. Yet, climate aid by and larg…
Fantasy and anti‐capitalist resistance: Some implications for psychoanalytic liberation psychology
Drawing from liberation psychology as well as progressive traditions within psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic liberation psychology represents a paradigmatic approach to practice, one that moves away from regressive disciplinary orthodoxies and toward the flows of desire and emotion that characterize emancipatory political spaces. For psychoanalytic liberation psychology, the manner by which fantasy is engaged within anti‐capitalist movements remain…
Anti-capitalist subjectivity: Considerations of fantasy, (in)action, and solidarity building
Anti-capitalist subjectivities are produced through politically generative refusals of the divisive, profit-oriented, and manageable subject positions made available by capitalism’s socio-symbolic order. Pushing back against liberal political theories which presume subjectivity to be a priori or coherent, this article employs psychoanalytic theory to grapple with the flowing, changing, patterned, and disjointed nature of anti-capitalist subject f…
Shock and the materialist conception of art: Considerations for a politicised cultural psychology
The materialist conception of art understands art in relation to the material conditions within and by which art is produced and consumed. For cultural psychology, the materialist conception of art has been useful for developing insights into how individual perceptions are shaped, and are shaped by, culture as a collectively produced and historically embedded site of meaning-making. However, in much of cultural psychology, the relationship betwee…
Looking backwards, looking forwards: Collective and critical conversations on psychology in South Africa
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…
Reading a liberation psychology archive in South Africa
Those working from within the liberation psychology paradigm strive to remould psychology so that it might be put to work for the task of liberation – a task with which most psychologists have, historically, been wholly unconcerned. In practice, liberation psychology tends to be porous, multiple, and under-resourced. Indeed, much of what we might think of as liberation psychology is not referred to as such by its practitioners. Surfacing liberati…
Three decades of psychology in South Africa: Legacies of hope and fault lines of the future
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…
Sports as placemaking: Critical Reflections on a Community-Engaged Campaign
Community-engaged scholarship has largely neglected the potential of sports to construct progressive forms of community and mobilize disparate interests. In this article, we critically reflect on how sports were used for placemaking purposes in the Friendship and Hope Campaign, an annual event that is driven by residents of Thembelihle, a low-income community in South Africa. The Campaign is a participatory and community-based intervention that s…
A Psychoanalytic Case for Anti-capitalism as an Organisational Form
For many, anti-capitalism signifies too much and thus lacks the political conviction needed to inform left-wing strategy and tactics. What remains neglected, though, is how anti-capitalism can function as an organisational form, one that is constituted by the democratic requirements of struggle. At different moments and for different purposes, anti-capitalist organising may rely on vertical, horizontal, centralised, or decentralised formations. W…
Unconsciousness-Raising: Considerations for Liberation Psychology, Subjectivity, and Reflexivity Theory
Consciousness-raising denotes the process of using people’s experiences of oppression to inform their collective political activity. The role of psychology in the history of consciousness-raising has been double-edged. On the one hand, mainstream psychology has recuperated consciousness-raising, depoliticizing it so that it reflects little more than a therapeutic mode of self-help that adjusts subjects to – rather than challenges – oppressive soc…
Unconsciousness-Raising Reconsidered: Reply to Woods and Stevens
In their responses, Alexandra Woods and Garth Stevens take care to unpack my sometimes-clumsy efforts at finding the conceptual language for unconsciousness-raising. Similarly, both responses offer an immanent critique of how I put this language into practice. As such, their responses compelled me to reappraise many of my original propositions. For this, I am deeply indebted to both scholars. I begin this reply by offering my appreciation to Wood…
Psychology and the question of radical democracy
Throughout its history, capitalism has undertaken its extractive, imperial, and expropriative operations under the sign of democracy. Psychology has played a part in the ideological consolidation of capitalist democracy, adapting people to this system while also legitimising it. However, what of radical democracy as an always-contested grassroots organisational form that stands in opposition to both capitalism and the capitalist co-optation of de…
Returning community psychology to the insights of anarchism: Fragments and prefiguration
Anarchism signifies the actions taken to bring about a fairer, more equal, non-hierarchical, and democratic society, one that exists without State coercion or domination. Although community psychology has engaged with some anarchist practices, such as mutual aid, the discipline has had little explicit or direct engagement with anarchism’s broader project of sociopolitical organization, with a notable exception. Almost fifty years ago, Seymour Sar…
Building Decolonial Peace into the Everyday: A Feminist Intervention
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…
Young people's reproductions of the 'father as provider' discourse: Intersections of Race, Class, Culture and Gender Within a Liberal Democracy
Despite a plurality of paternal forms available to men, certain enactments of fathering remain immobile. In South Africa the 'father as provider' discourse, which establishes the legitimate father as one who provides financially for his family, continues to be regarded as the primary mark of a good father. Using photo-elicitation interviews to interrogate the persistence of this discourse, this paper examines how adolescents from two low-resource…
Some basic questions about (a) decolonizing Africa(n)-centred psychology considered
Conceptual disagreement remains rife with regard to African psychology with some scholars mistakenly equating it to, for example, ethnotheorizing and traditional healing, while others confound African psychology with Africanization and racialization. Using writing as inquiry, this article aims to clear up some of the conceptual confusion on African psychology while engaging with the issue of a decolonizing African psychology. Accordingly, questio…
Young people’s discursive constructions of fatherhood in South Africa
The voices of young people remain, for the most part, under-considered within research on South African fathers. The present study relies on photo-elicitation interviews to explore how isiXhosa-speaking adolescents construct fathering roles and responsibilities in South Africa. Using discursive psychology, it was found that participants drew on the ‘Essential Fathering’ and ‘Social Fathering’ discourses to construct South African fatherhood. The …
Building Decolonial Peace into the Everyday: A Feminist Intervention
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. …
A psychopolitical interpretation of de-alienation: Marxism, psychoanalysis, and liberation psychology
Community psychology and the crisis of care
In addition to the twinned crises of ecology and political economy, we face today a crisis of care. The crisis of care, I contend, is fundamentally a political and an ethical crisis. In this short commentary, I outline the structural (i.e., systemic) and reproductive (i.e., labour) character of this crisis, using the COVID‐19 pandemic as an example. From here, I argue for the imperative to centre an expansive conception of care in critical commun…
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…
De‐ideologization, liberation psychology, and the place of contradiction
In following Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, we can understand ideologies as social processes that obscure the contradictions (i.e., how an object is not at one with itself) inherent to individual subjectivity and social structures. Despite claiming to be non‐ideological, mainstream psychology has, throughout its history, served the ideological interests of elite classes (e.g., by pathologizing political resistance). Working within the liberat…
Discourses of ‘service delivery protests’ in South Africa: An Analysis of Talk Radio
Although dominant discourses of various kinds are frequently reproduced on talk radio, the fundamentally collaborative nature of the medium also means that it is able to serve as a channel through which to challenge these discourses. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this article examines how neoliberal ideology structures discussions around ‘service delivery protest’ on South African talk radio, and explores some of the roles that talk radio is…
Visually negotiating hegemonic discourse through Photovoice: Understanding youth representations of safety
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…
Reading a liberation psychology archive in South Africa
Those working from within the liberation psychology paradigm strive to remould psychology so that it might be put to work for the task of liberation – a task with which most psychologists have, historically, been wholly unconcerned. In practice, liberation psychology tends to be porous, multiple, and under-resourced. Indeed, much of what we might think of as liberation psychology is not referred to as such by its practitioners. Surfacing liberati…
Sports as placemaking: Critical Reflections on a Community-Engaged Campaign
Community-engaged scholarship has largely neglected the potential of sports to construct progressive forms of community and mobilize disparate interests. In this article, we critically reflect on how sports were used for placemaking purposes in the Friendship and Hope Campaign, an annual event that is driven by residents of Thembelihle, a low-income community in South Africa. The Campaign is a participatory and community-based intervention that s…
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…
Locating the sacrifice zone in capitalist and anti-capitalist political theology
An increasingly prevalent element of capitalism's uneven regime of accumulation is the 'sacrifice zone', where environmental injustices related to harmful toxins, ecological devastation or military testing are concentrated so that the environmental health and economic sustainability of other places can be maintained. All over the world, collectives are mobilising against sacrifice zones, making sacrifices of their own to do so. How might we under…
Against Climate Aid Colonialism: The Case for Climate Reparations and South-South Solidarity
Legacies of colonial rule, continuing neocolonial extraction, and excessive carbon dumping have meant that the majority of those living in the Global South experience many of the consequences of climate change more acutely than those in the Global North. As such, several countries in the Global North have committed to providing climate aid to decarbonise and reverse the alarming climate trajectory in the Global South. Yet, climate aid by and larg…
Looking backwards, looking forwards: Collective and critical conversations on psychology in South Africa
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…
A Psychoanalytic Case for Anti-capitalism as an Organisational Form
For many, anti-capitalism signifies too much and thus lacks the political conviction needed to inform left-wing strategy and tactics. What remains neglected, though, is how anti-capitalism can function as an organisational form, one that is constituted by the democratic requirements of struggle. At different moments and for different purposes, anti-capitalist organising may rely on vertical, horizontal, centralised, or decentralised formations. W…
Returning community psychology to the insights of anarchism: Fragments and prefiguration
Anarchism signifies the actions taken to bring about a fairer, more equal, non-hierarchical, and democratic society, one that exists without State coercion or domination. Although community psychology has engaged with some anarchist practices, such as mutual aid, the discipline has had little explicit or direct engagement with anarchism’s broader project of sociopolitical organization, with a notable exception. Almost fifty years ago, Seymour Sar…
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…
What antiracist psychology does and does not (do)
Visually negotiating hegemonic discourse through Photovoice: Understanding youth representations of safety
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…
Expanding conceptions of liberation: Holding Marxisms with liberation psychology
By considering how psychologists are able to hold (that is, support distinctive ontologies) Liberation Psychology (LP) with Marxisms, this article interrogates psychological approaches to liberation in two ways. First, against the foundations of LP and Marxisms, as well as attempts to formulate psychological Marxisms and Marxist psychologies, the paper examines how holding LP with Marxisms facilitates a necessarily expansive, innovative, and demo…
Some basic questions about (a) decolonizing Africa(n)-centred psychology considered
Conceptual disagreement remains rife with regard to African psychology with some scholars mistakenly equating it to, for example, ethnotheorizing and traditional healing, while others confound African psychology with Africanization and racialization. Using writing as inquiry, this article aims to clear up some of the conceptual confusion on African psychology while engaging with the issue of a decolonizing African psychology. Accordingly, questio…
Reflecting critically on the researcher-participant encounter in focus groups: Racialized interactions, contestations and (re)presentations of South Africa’s “protest culture”
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…
Discourses of ‘service delivery protests’ in South Africa: An Analysis of Talk Radio
Although dominant discourses of various kinds are frequently reproduced on talk radio, the fundamentally collaborative nature of the medium also means that it is able to serve as a channel through which to challenge these discourses. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this article examines how neoliberal ideology structures discussions around ‘service delivery protest’ on South African talk radio, and explores some of the roles that talk radio is…
Young people's reproductions of the 'father as provider' discourse: Intersections of Race, Class, Culture and Gender Within a Liberal Democracy
Despite a plurality of paternal forms available to men, certain enactments of fathering remain immobile. In South Africa the 'father as provider' discourse, which establishes the legitimate father as one who provides financially for his family, continues to be regarded as the primary mark of a good father. Using photo-elicitation interviews to interrogate the persistence of this discourse, this paper examines how adolescents from two low-resource…
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…
Young people’s discursive constructions of fatherhood in South Africa
The voices of young people remain, for the most part, under-considered within research on South African fathers. The present study relies on photo-elicitation interviews to explore how isiXhosa-speaking adolescents construct fathering roles and responsibilities in South Africa. Using discursive psychology, it was found that participants drew on the ‘Essential Fathering’ and ‘Social Fathering’ discourses to construct South African fatherhood. The …
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…
Community psychology and the crisis of care
In addition to the twinned crises of ecology and political economy, we face today a crisis of care. The crisis of care, I contend, is fundamentally a political and an ethical crisis. In this short commentary, I outline the structural (i.e., systemic) and reproductive (i.e., labour) character of this crisis, using the COVID‐19 pandemic as an example. From here, I argue for the imperative to centre an expansive conception of care in critical commun…
What antiracist psychology does and does not (do)
Addressing psychology to antiracism
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…
De‐ideologization, liberation psychology, and the place of contradiction
In following Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, we can understand ideologies as social processes that obscure the contradictions (i.e., how an object is not at one with itself) inherent to individual subjectivity and social structures. Despite claiming to be non‐ideological, mainstream psychology has, throughout its history, served the ideological interests of elite classes (e.g., by pathologizing political resistance). Working within the liberat…
A psychopolitical interpretation of de-alienation: Marxism, psychoanalysis, and liberation psychology
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…
Multimodality, cultural production, and the protest event: Considerations of space, politics, and affect in South Africa
The high levels of protest in South Africa have produced varied academic literature on the subject. Although political and structural determinants of protest are readily acknowledged, social actors who comprise protest events are rarely centralised within scholarly inquiry. The particularities of protests are thus less considered than the structural issues underlying protests. We therefore argue that studying the multimodality of cultural product…
What and for whom is a decolonising African psychology
Contributing to work that locates the place of psychology in countering coloniality, we explore in this article what and for whom is a decolonising African psychology. We answer these questions not with a definitive statement, but through several moves, signals, and routes. First, we conceptualise African psychology as a kind of transdisciplinary praxis that occurs within psychology as well as outside of the received bounds of the discipline. How…
Unconsciousness-Raising: Considerations for Liberation Psychology, Subjectivity, and Reflexivity Theory
Consciousness-raising denotes the process of using people’s experiences of oppression to inform their collective political activity. The role of psychology in the history of consciousness-raising has been double-edged. On the one hand, mainstream psychology has recuperated consciousness-raising, depoliticizing it so that it reflects little more than a therapeutic mode of self-help that adjusts subjects to – rather than challenges – oppressive soc…
Unconsciousness-Raising Reconsidered: Reply to Woods and Stevens
In their responses, Alexandra Woods and Garth Stevens take care to unpack my sometimes-clumsy efforts at finding the conceptual language for unconsciousness-raising. Similarly, both responses offer an immanent critique of how I put this language into practice. As such, their responses compelled me to reappraise many of my original propositions. For this, I am deeply indebted to both scholars. I begin this reply by offering my appreciation to Wood…
Psychology and the question of radical democracy
Throughout its history, capitalism has undertaken its extractive, imperial, and expropriative operations under the sign of democracy. Psychology has played a part in the ideological consolidation of capitalist democracy, adapting people to this system while also legitimising it. However, what of radical democracy as an always-contested grassroots organisational form that stands in opposition to both capitalism and the capitalist co-optation of de…
Returning community psychology to the insights of anarchism: Fragments and prefiguration
Anarchism signifies the actions taken to bring about a fairer, more equal, non-hierarchical, and democratic society, one that exists without State coercion or domination. Although community psychology has engaged with some anarchist practices, such as mutual aid, the discipline has had little explicit or direct engagement with anarchism’s broader project of sociopolitical organization, with a notable exception. Almost fifty years ago, Seymour Sar…
Sociology (36 works) · Political science (28 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Politics (25 works) · Law (23 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Community Health and Development (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Psychoanalysis (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works)