0000015478 00000 n (2003). In G. Eagle, G. Hayes & A. Bhana (Eds.). In D. Hook & B. Harris (Eds. Detention and torture in South Africa. However, proto-critical social psychology in its various guises made, due in no small part also to the political integrity of some of its adherents (Don Foster is an obvious example), important contributions to the struggle against apartheid in areas like mental health provisions for political prisoners and victims of torture (Foster with Davis & Sandler, 1987), court testimony for struggle activists (Friedman, 1989), as well as advocacy for changing legislation regarding collective action and crowd control (Heymann, Brown, Fijnaut, & Foster, 1992). Duncan, N & Van Niekerk, A. Towards peaceful protest in South Africa. Stevens & Mohamed, 2001) and HIV/AIDS (e.g. Teaching someone to surf by just handing them a surfboard seems less than optimal, as does teaching students to think by simply delivering worksheets. Apart from actual community interventions, advocacy and some research on issues like street children, political violence and later HIV/AIDS, their conferences (e.g. (Eds.). In this comprehensive model, students are taught the explicit skills of thinking as they learn their discipline knowledge. MacCrone, I.D. Kelly, K., Parker, W. & Lewis, G. (2001). Psychology, the scientific study of the individual agent, was thus called into being by the capitalist mode of production. Also academically, the South African scene increasingly resembled the architecture of disciplinary formation and specialisation internationally, with clear distinctions developing between the various "sub-disciplines", like developmental psychology, social psychology, environmental psychology and the like, taught in ever-growing, independent departments of psychology. The dependency theory Discontentment with the modernization theory in the 1950s precipitated new strands of thinking which resulted in the dependency theory. While liberal and socialist alternatives for South Africa, in psychology and elsewhere, acknowledged racism and the importance of race as a line of cleavage, they failed to explicitly analyse the psychological and social erosion that had been brought about by it. In this the role of the journal PINS, established in 1983, cannot be overstated. Gripping stuff: A response to Kevin Durrheim. & Orkin, M. (1986). While the relevance debate, for example, has arguably played an important role in the political interrogation of psychology and the later development of critical agendas, it also, in retrospect, seems in many cases to have been overly cautious and inward-looking. 0000003690 00000 n (p. 1). But not all of psychology was equally guilty of this pattern of either active or passive support for the apartheid system. Manganyi, N.C. (1973). — This is partly due to the relatively small size of South African psychology, with groups and individuals who in other countries may have been pushed to the margins of the discipline, here not infrequently finding themselves in more central positions. Since the mid 1990s, when South Africans first started forging links with European discourse analysts such as Ian Parker, Erica Burman and Theun van Dijk, there has been a steady stream of discourse-oriented work appearing in PINS (which continues to be an important forum for critical work), SAJP and in the form of book chapters. Manganyi, N.C. (1991). Teaching critical thinking is not something that teachers are explicitly trained to do – in fact very few people are. 0000017903 00000 n ), Social Psychology in South Africa (pp. Cape Town: Juta. We conclude with suggestions for making critical psychology theory and practice relevant not only to academic psychologists, but to all who have a stake in South African psychology. Cloete, N., Muller, J. It is perhaps worth mentioning that one of the key players in this renaissance of academic publishing in South African psychology is not an academic, but a commissioning editor, Solani Ngobeni, who works for UCT Press/Juta and has seen to the publication of a string of texts by Hook, Ratele, Duncan and others. Online, London, City of, Copyright © 2010–2020, The Conversation Trust (UK) Limited. In their very a-political stance these researchers, ironically, displayed an exquisite sensitivity to politics: This was, however, the sensitivity of a seismograph which reflected, quite unconsciously, the tremors and quakes of the ground on which it had its foundation - never anticipating such seismic events and never attempting to understand the larger geological forces which gave rise to them. The ordinary superstition of subjectivity: Liberalism and technostructural violence. 0000003347 00000 n While the burgeoning of critical academic work described in the previous section and these prospects for further extending it are exciting and encouraging, one should not forget that critical psychology is driven by a handful of academics concentrated in only a few departments (often at former liberal English or historically black universities), and that it is still essentially disconnected from larger political movements in South Africa and globally. Ideology & Consciousness, 6, 5-21. The role of place and metaphor in racial exclusion: South Africa’s beaches as sites of shifting racialization. Social psychology and research methods. Theory & Psychology, 11(4), 521-547. South African Journal of Psychology, 32(1), 1-8. This conference series has over the years been a forum for the airing of critical views on topics such as narrow empiricism in psychological research, psychology’s neglect of the body (see Terre Blanche, Bhavnani, & Hook, 1999), pathologising tendencies in clinical psychology, gender politics, and the psychology of neo-liberal economics. In the flurry of institutional transformation that characterised early post-apartheid South Africa, the white-dominated Psychological Association of South Africa (PASA) was disbanded and a more inclusive body, the Psychology Society of South Africa (PsySSA), founded. Seen from a more radical political perspective, however, these attempts at turning organised psychology in South Africa into something like the APA (only better), take on a more ambiguous character. In a similar vein, Terre Blanche and Seedat (2001) trace how, over a forty year period, the politics of class, race and gender entered into industrial psychology research at the National Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR) - not overtly in the form of racial bias (most NIPR researchers in fact claimed to be opposed to apartheid), but in attempts at professional and disciplinary neutrality. In our conclusion we reflect on some of the challenges and possibilities this academic and professional landscape present to the development of critical psychology in South Africa (and elsewhere). Psychology, history and society. In K. Ratele & N. Duncan (Eds.). The first of the international conferences is the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP) Conference, which has long been a forum for the development of critical theory in psychology and has over the years been attended by a small cadre of South Africans.