Building a Unified, Relevant, and Responsive Psychology

PsySSA-Web Support

Member Login
Chris McLachlan Elected to the Board of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health

Chris McLachlan Elected to the Board of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health

by | Sep 9, 2022 | Collaborations, Events and Announcements, Sexuality and Gender Division (SGD)

PsySSA would like to congratulate Chris McLachlan, Sexuality & Gender Division Chairperson, on their appointment to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Board (Members-at-Large (4-year terms)).

The Board will be installed on September 20, 2022, at the 27th Scientific Symposium, being held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Chris will be the first voice from the African continent on the WPATH Board!

Chris continues to make our Society Proud and we look forward to seeing what meaningful work Chris will continue to do with the WPATH

We wish Chris all the best on the WPATH Board!

Meet Chris McLachlan 

Chris McLachlan is a clinical psychologist working at Thuthuzela Care Centre (Rape crises centre) in KwaZulu-Natal and has a special interest in the fields of Sexually and Gender Diversity and Gender Affirming Healthcare. Chris has completed a Masters degree in Theology, Clinical Psychology and Biblical Studies and is a PhD candidate at UNISA. Chris is the co-chair of the team that developed the first South African Gender Affirming Healthcare Guideline and is part of the core team that developed the Practice Guidelines for Psychology Professionals Working with Sexually and Gender-Diverse People. Chris is one of the South African representatives at iPsyNet.

Nominations for PsySSA Executive Committee Vacancies 2022

Nominations for PsySSA Executive Committee Vacancies 2022

by | Sep 7, 2022 | 26th Annual Psychology Congress

PsySSA Call for Nominations

The PsySSA Nominations Committee wishes to advise that the following positions on the PsySSA Executive Committee will become vacant at the forthcoming 27th AGM to be held at Emperors Palace, Johannesburg, South Africa, on 12 October 2021.

  1. President-Elect
  2. One Additional Members

Members in good standing may propose suitable candidates for consideration by the Nominations Committee, which will duly present appropriate candidates for election at the AGM.

Nominations Guidelines for all these positions are available here.

All nominations with supporting documentation should be emailed to the Chair of the Nominations Committee, Prof Saths Cooper, at nominations@psyssa.com by 03 October 2022.

Guidelines

Please download the Call for Nominations and the Guideline Documents for each of the Executive Committee vacancies using the buttons below.

President-Elect
Additional Member

Nomination Form

Download (PDF, 327KB)

You’re Invited: SPSSI’s New Webinar Series on “Decolonial Approaches to the Psychological Study of Social Issues

You’re Invited: SPSSI’s New Webinar Series on “Decolonial Approaches to the Psychological Study of Social Issues

by | Sep 5, 2022 | Collaborations, Events and Announcements, Mental Health Advocacy, Psychology Events, PsySSA Announcements

This webinar series (“Decolonial Approaches to the Psychological Study of Social Issues”) features 15 presentations (organized into 5 installments) based on contributions to a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues (JSI) devoted to decolonial perspectives in/on psychology. The first two installments feature 6 presentations that consider the psychology of colonial violence.  Decolonial approaches propose that colonial violence is not confined to the distant past (i.e., colonialism) but instead persists as coloniality: racialized ways of thinking and being that have their roots in colonial violence, are inherent in the Eurocentric modern order, and are inseparable from modern individualist development. An important implication is that colonial violence extends beyond physical space to psychological space, such that complete liberation requires forms of psychological decolonization. The last three installments feature 9 presentations that consider the coloniality of knowledge in hegemonic psychology. Researchers are not innocent bystanders observing effects of colonial violence from some neutral position. Instead, epistemic violence in psychology occurs via epistemic exclusion of racialized others from the knowledge production process, imperialist imposition of white-washed knowledge products as universal standards, pathologizing forms of explanation that construct racial others as deviants in light of white-washed standards (i.e., epistemological violence; Teo, 2010), and forms of harm (e.g., zero-point epistemology and individualist lifeways) associated with hegemonic psychology’s modern/colonial roots. An important implication is that a decolonial approach may require epistemic disobedience and refusal of the discipline of psychology.

SPSSI’s new webinar series, “Decolonial Perspectives on the Psychological Study of Social Issues,” launches in just two weeks. All webinars are free and open to SPSSI members and non-members alike. Please join the SPSSI for their first webinar in their series, entitled… 

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COLONIAL VIOLENCE, I: Bodies and Space

Wednesday, September 14, 16:00 UTC (12:00 PM EDT, 9:00 AM PDT)

Convener/Discussant: Kopano Ratele

Presenters:

Melissa Tehee, Erika Ficklin, Devon Isaacs, Racheal Killgore, & Sallie Mack
Fighting for our sisters: Community advocacy and action for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls

Johanna Lukate
Space, race and identity: An ethnographic study of the Black hair care and beauty landscape and Black women’s racial identity constructions in England

Anjali Dutt
Refugee experiences in Cincinnati, Ohio: A local case study in the context of global crisis 

Click here to find out more!