Prof Garth Stevens

In this article, I engage with apparent absences in our clinical work and our writings on the clinical encounter itself, when race becomes salient between patient and therapist in the room. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida on absence and presence, I suggest that despite representational absences in our clinical work and writings, that these nevertheless signal a spectral presence of sorts, that require a diverted gaze, as they may point to pivotal sights for further interrogation. In commenting on Long, Matee, Jwili and Vilakazi’s “Racial Difference, Rupture, and Repair: A View from the Couch and Back” (this issue), I recognize the novel vantage point of storied accounts of racialized experiences between Black patient/trainees and their White therapists, and their described moments of rupture and repair in the encounter. I identify three present/absences in these narrations that perhaps require further consideration: the present/absent White therapist in the clinical encounter, the present/absent White author in their clinical writing on these encounters, and the present/absent Black trainee therapist. In each of these instances, I suggest that they raise questions and new challenges about the possibilities and impossibilities of attenuating and resolving experiences of racial alienation that are prevalent in racialized contexts, both in the clinical encounter as well as within broader social life.

In this paper, we provide empirically informed reflections on the difficulty of undertaking critically inflected, decolonial praxis in community psychology within the overdetermined global order of neo‐liberalism. Using interviews with 10 alumni of the Masters in Community‐Based Counselling (MACC) psychology program at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, we extend what have hitherto been largely theoretical debates about the fundamental constraints on teaching decolonial theory as an important touchstone of criticality in the context of the constraining forces of the free‐market economy. We focus on our participants’ attempts to navigate the inevitable tensions between the tenets of decolonial critical community psychology and neo‐liberal market pressures on employability. We analyze accounts of job‐seeking and employment experiences of the program alumni to ask whether we may have to contemplate the imminent evacuation of critical community epistemologies wi...

In this paper the authors make use of Erikson's psychosocial theory and Bulhan's analysis of identity develop-ment within oppressed social groups, and explore how black adolescents may be attempting to negotiate the developmental challenges facing them within the changing socio-historical contexts of post-apartheid South Africa. It explores the impact of apartheid-capitalism on black adolescent identity development, as well as the impact of several ideological, economic and socio-political factors on these adolescents ' attempts at attaining identity integration and congruence in post-apartheid South Africa. More specifically, the paper firstly argues that both the apartheid and post-apartheid socio-historical contexts have had contradictory and multiple impacts on the development of black adolescent identities and secondly, that the increasing shift from collectivist ideals to individualist ideals amongst many black adolescents, represents one possible response to th...

ABSTRACT Threading across different discursive, cultural, and political moments of the postapartheid context, gender-based violence, inarguably, is a phenomenon that must be read contextually and as contingent upon intersecting configurations of power that are tied to historical, political, and material fractures of our colonial legacies. Three immediate intersecting threads of analyses are undertaken here: (1) how extant knowledge archives on gender-based violence discursively reference spatial geographies and frozen temporalities of violence that result in the implicit racialization of gender-based violence and the psychological pathologization of its associated subjectivities in South Africa; (2) using Fanon’s concept of sociogeny, we read gender-based violence through a psychosocial lens to address this problematic; and (3) extending Fanon’s idea of psychopolitics, we argue that the trauma, racial alienation, and toxic gendering of society within coloniality is reflected in a neurotic structuring of the psyche itself.

This article engages with key contemporary questions about the extent to which the obstinacy of racial formation processes, as well as the apparent global resurgence of raced thinking, represent a paralysis of the global anti-racist project or signal an important analytic opportunity for revitalising critical race scholarship and antiracist praxis. To this end, it is incumbent upon critical race scholars and practitioners to take stock of their historical, current and future contributions to addressing the vexing nature of race and racism. The article mobilises three main illustrative arguments in this regard. First, we have to deploy our analytic tools more thoughtfully and robustly in the service of understanding the current historical period in which

In this chapter, we offer a conversation (or rather, a product of an ongoing series of historical and current conversations) whose aim is to orient ourselves and the reader to a number of intellectual, political, practical, and theoretical concerns that surround decolonial Africa(n)-centred community psychologies. In the first part of the chapter, we explore how conversation can serve as a collective and epistemologically just modality of knowledge-making within and for Africa(n)-centred decolonial community psychologies. Conversation, we argue, is able to disrupt, build upon, appreciate and stretch some of the ways by which these psychologies are written, practiced and thought about. In the second part of the chapter, we draw upon this conversational method to consider decolonial Africa(n)-centred community psychologies through a critical, non-psychological knowledge canon. Specifically, we dialogue over what the works of Edward Said, Walter Rodney, and the Combahee River Collective are able to offer those of us who are looking to reimagine community psychologies through Africa(n)-centredness and decoloniality. We conclude by ruminating on the potentialities of form (i.e. conversation) and substance (i.e. the non-psychological canon) for decolonising Africa(n)-centred community psychologies.

Recent psychology scholarship has engaged topics of decoloniality, from conferences to journal publications to edited volumes. These efforts are examples of the decolonial turn, a paradigm shift oriented to interrupting the colonial legacies of power, knowledge, and being. As critical community psychologists, we contend that decoloniality/decolonization is an epistemic and ontological process of continuously disrupting the coloniality of power that is the hegemonic Western Eurocentric approach to theory, research, and practice. To document and critically understand this process of colonial disruption—the roots and routes toward decoloniality within and outside of community psychology—we collected information at conference workshops and an open-ended online survey disseminated across international contexts. Through an analysis of two conference workshops (Chile; United States) and a survey, we describe four orientations that capture how participants engage with a decolonizing praxis....

For writers such as Fanon, Smith, Freire, Martin-Baro and Maldonado-Torres, a central task for historically oppressed and marginalised communities within the decolonial project is to disrupt and redefine the partial colonial histories that have and continue to occlude their voices of experience in the postcolonial context. In this regard, archives are central sites of contestation, given that they tend to truncate the totality of human experience by generating official histories that in turn shape grand narratives and public discourses that frequently elide and negate these experiences. This chapter focuses on the psychosocial and psychopolitical mobilisation of memory through storied and narrational accounts of ordinary peoples’ experiences of oppression, as a participatory method that facilitates a reclamation and refiguring of archives. Using the idea of a critical psychosocial mnemonics, it argues that storied accounts provide a converging psychosocial space in which critical analyses of the relationships between materiality, socioculturality, memory, narratives, history, subjectivity and identity can help to destabilise historical, existing and future hierarchical relations of power through deconstructing and de-ideologising them. Here, storytelling facilitates memory recall and its articulation, comes to restructure and shape such memories and their articulation, and dialectically serves to reinforce and “create” such memories. Ultimately the aim of a critical psychosocial mnemonics is to utilise personal and collective memory to disrupt taken-for-granted understandings of the world, to seek forms of incoherence or discontinuity in the grand narratives of history, in the service of destabilising existing hierarchical relations of power. Drawing on the Apartheid Archive Project as an exemplar, the chapter illustrates how such a method may contribute to a transformative and decolonising praxis that involves reclaiming the archive, refiguring the archive, generating inter-communal spaces, fostering public mobilisation, and building an insurgent citizenry. While recognising that there are limitations to memory and storied accounts, the chapter argues that they are nevertheless critical to offsetting the totalising effects of official histories and helping to foster a decolonial ethic of historical witnessing, recognition and inclusion that challenges existing relations of power, forms of knowledge and ways of being.

This article engages with key contemporary questions about the extent to which the obstinacy of racial formation processes, as well as the apparent global resurgence of raced thinking, represent a paralysis of the global anti-racist project or signal an important analytic opportunity for revitalising critical race scholarship and anti-racist praxis. To this end, it is incumbent upon critical race scholars and practitioners to take stock of their historical, current and future contributions to addressing the vexing nature of race and racism. The article mobilises three main illustrative arguments in this regard. First, we have to deploy our analytic tools more thoughtfully and robustly in the service of understanding the current historical period in which race seems to have an infinite elasticity globally as such analyses have a great deal to offer us in thinking through the contemporary relationships between race, materiality, histories, politics and populism. Second, writing from S...

What paradoxes, ambiguities and affects of race circulate when black bodies occupy social and physical space not originally designed or articulated with them in mind? Nirmal Puwar’s theorisation of the body politic and its intersection with race and gender challenges the so-called neutrality of space and embodiment. Engaging processes and moments of racialization calls for layers of analysis that interrogate both the normalization and disruption of spaces that have become racialized. In an attempt to engage this complexity, the current discussion provides an analysis of institutional spaces within higher education within a post-apartheid academy, exploring the ambiguous emotions that not only circulate in the emergence of the ‘black subject’ but also the strategic responses of ‘race traveling’ – moving between race groups and performing different racialized subjectivities – adopted by black students within this context. Bourdieu’s theorisation of social reproduction of Doxa through ...

This study examined how men accounted for their violent behaviours against their intimate female partners. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 12 men from three men’s groups in Johannesburg, South Africa. All the men self-reported that they had committed acts of intimate partner violence previously, and the majority were from low-income, township settings. Dissociations, justifications and confessions featured as the predominant accounting forms that worked to transform participants’ subject positions from the ‘violent abuser’ to the ‘legitimately violent partner’ and even to the ‘changed man’. Attention is accorded to how gender ideologies and heteropatriarchal discourses legitimating male violence against women were reinforced, yet were at times challenged within their talk and through rhetorical devices. In line with a poststructuralist reading, the study highlights the complexities underpinning men’s varied meanings of violence. On the one hand, it reveals the ag...

Já se passaram mais de 20 anos desde que o regime do apartheid foi extinto; porém, para quem viveu na África do Sul dos tempos do apartheid a racialização ainda é um elemento central de sua subjetividade, tanto dentro quanto fora do país. Para a diáspora sul-africana na Austrália há processos psicossociais, arranjos socioestruturais e sistemas de significados específicos ao seu contexto que precisam ser negociados, inclusive a relação com o país natal. Neste artigo apresentaremos aspectos do Projeto Arquivo do Apartheid (Apartheid Archive Project, ou AAP), cujo objetivo é expandir a história oficial pela inclusão de histórias e narrativas de pessoas comuns sobre a vida durante o apartheid.

In this article, five Black researchers bring their insights into conversation about meanings of blackness in contemporary Australia, Jamaica, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. We critically interrogate blackness transnationally and also within the historical contexts of our work and lived experiences. Situated within critical race studies, we draw on multiple theoretical frameworks that seek to preserve the complexity of blackness, its meanings and implications. We examine what it means to be made Black by history and context and explore the im/possibilities of transcending such subjectification. In so doing, we engage blackness and its relationality to whiteness; the historical, temporal, and spatial dimensions of what it means to be Black; the embodied, affective and psychical components of Black subjectivity; and the continued marketisation of blackness today. The article concludes by reflecting on the emancipatory promise of continued engagemen...

Employing the lens of radical peacebuilding, this chapter revisits the histories and contemporary manifestations of race and racism more than 20 years after the transition to a fully enfranchised and democratic political system in South Africa. Framed within the broader Apartheid Archive Project, which examines the nature of the experiences of racism of ordinary South Africans under the old apartheid order, and their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa, the chapter explores the ways in which archives, memory, stories and narratives may illuminate the challenges and possibilities for peacebuilding in a racialised society. It argues that archival sites offer us the possibility for a critical engagement with the past and the present through forms of interrogatory destabilisation—a process of persistent and deconstructive critique of status quos in countries that have transitioned from authoritarianism to post-authoritarianism. In addition, it suggests that such a deconstructive approach to archives may inform an insurgent form of citizenship and politics that is necessary for radical peacebuilding in societies that remain structurally violent and socially unequal.

In the wake of apartheid, many in the South African health and social sciences shifted their orientation to understanding violence. Rather than approaching violence as a criminal problem, post-apartheid scholarship surfaced violence as a threat to national health. This re-orientation was well aligned with a global groundswell that culminated in the World Health Assembly’s 1996 declaration of violence as a public health problem. In response, researchers and other stakeholders have committed to the public health approach to violence in South Africa. Despite some unquestionable successes in applying this approach, violence remains a critical social issue and its recalcitrantly high rates signal that there is still much work to be done. One avenue for more focussed research concerns understanding the mechanisms by which upstream risk factors for violence are translated into actual enactments. We argue that South African psychology is well placed to provide greater resolution to this foc...

The Apartheid Archive Project seeks to expand the archive by inserting everyday stories into the public record, thereby allowing for the reconstruction of historical memory, voicing silenced stories and recognising experiences of excluded communities. Stevens, Duncan and Sonn (in this volume) note that personal memories are the primary raw data within the Apartheid Archive Project at present, and that narratives are a key means for conveying stories about racism during the apartheid era (see Mankoskwi & Rappaport, 1995, for a further explication of the distinction between stories and narratives).

ABSTRACT In the last 6 decades, large sections of the global population have been exposed to ongoing dangers in circumstances of pervasive conflict, violence and trauma. In this article, we revisit the concept of continuous traumatic stress, originally proposed by South African researcher-practitioners to characterize mental health conditions and challenges under apartheid, and explore its viability as an alternative and supplementary framework for understanding and addressing exposure to situations of ongoing threat. The article highlights the political and mental health limitations associated with the dominance of posttraumatic stress conceptualizations of these forms of human suffering and distress, and calls for more nuanced and complex understandings of such complicated psychosocial conditions and their effects. It concludes by foregrounding several critical debates related to continuous traumatic stress, namely, the importance of understanding contexts of ongoing exposure to danger as both political and psychological (psychopolitical) in nature; of developing socially relevant clinical and conceptual models that can meaningfully account for the varied impacts of, and responses to, these conditions of continuous threat; and the need to extend our intervention practices to include culturally and contextually appropriate intervention strategies that are both clinical and psychosocial in orientation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)

ABSTRACT Soudien’s ‘The modern seduction of race: whither social constructionism?’ provides a compelling philosophical argument that highlights how the potential for the reinscription of race in certain epistemic traditions has in fact become realised in everyday practices, especially in the contemporary academy. In particular, he suggests that the increasingly uncritical and widespread utilisation of social constructionism as a framing for our analysis of race as a social construct, has begun to fold in on itself, resulting in a decline in the criticality of these analyses, and in fact an inadvertent return to more essentialised notions of race as a social marker and category of difference. Here, he points to antithetical ways of thinking embedded in dialectics, more static conceptualisations of history, the reification of difference in the turn to language, as well as newer technologies – all as some of the contemporary knowledge counter-weights to the potentially progressive influence of social constructionist perspectives that have historically shaped the nature of critique in the humanities, arts and social sciences. The article is particularly pertinent, given the influence of the academy on broader social discourses that are consumed and reproduced in everyday life outside of the academy, or in more commonsense contexts of deployment. On the one hand, the academy as a space of elite discourse production, reproduction and articulation has often lagged as it has described everyday articulations of race in all its mutable forms (eg symbolic racism; aversive racism; rhetorical strategies, lexical registers and interpretative repertoires associated with the denial and reproduction of race and racism; the culturalisation of racism; the ethnicisation of racism; etc). On the other hand however, this is by no means a unidirectional process where the academy simply responds to everyday discursive uses of terms and labels, as it is also instrumental in co-constructing these phenomena through the very naming, labelling and production of it as an object of study. Clearly, elite discourses that are produced in particular places and spaces also directly and indirectly shape the commonsense use of certain terms and understandings within the public domain more broadly. Van Dijk (1993:4), when referring to the issue of elites and their discourses, notes that: [a]lthough this notion is notoriously vague […] [it serves] to denote those groups in the socio-political power structure that develop fundamental policies, make the most influential decisions, and control the overall modes of their execution: government, parliament, directors or boards of state agencies, leading politicians, corporate owners, directors and managers, and leading academics. Of course, this debate on the potential reinscription of race in the very work that attempts to disavow and undermine its existence is by no means new, and certainly people like Bowman et al (2006) have examined the contradictions in the use of race categories in data that focused on redress in the social and health sciences; Ellison et al (1997) conducted work on health statistics and the problematic implications for their ongoing racialisation in post-apartheid South Africa; and, of course, Taylor and Orkin (1995) have written on the problems associated with the racialisation of social scientific research in and on South Africa; to mention but a few. However, what this does raise is a phenomenon that we have been increasingly aware of in the era of mass and instant communication, and that is that elite discourses are perhaps more easily and readily accessible, apprehended and consumed by a public and integrated or reconfigured into everyday commonsense discourses in sometimes contradictory ways. This of course immediately raises the critical question about the role of intellectuals in knowledge production processes (and in this case, in relation to race and racism) and the fundamental Gramscian (1982) question about the importance of the relationship between the intelligentsia, ideology and/or its critique, as well as their relationship to the political project of transformation itself. Soudien makes several important points in his paper, the first of which suggests that within the collective social imaginary it is difficult to extricate ourselves from a world that is raced, even when we are committed to such an imagined future time and space. He suggests that there is a tendency to constantly reinscribe race, even if in deeply inadvertent ways, and draws...