Did you miss our third webinar, Gender-Based Violence and Femicide in South Africa: Provocations & Possibilities – Recording Out Now!
Don’y worry, watch our recording now!
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided another moment in media, popular and scholarly discourse to visibilise the extent, persistence, and consequences of gender-based violence and femicide in South Africa. While the most recent statistics indicate a decline in the rate of femicide between 1999 and 2017 – we know that GBV and femicide continue to be an ongoing, impervious problem for South African women, sexual and gender diverse and non-conforming persons, limiting our freedoms and the true attainment of gender equity. In this current moment, we turn renewed and ongoing attention to the question of gendered violence and femicide and ask: What are the everyday knowledges and practices that we need to refuse and unsettle toward provoking change toward freedom? What and where are the possibilities for building a non-violent future?
Floretta Boonzaier is Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town, and co-Director of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa. She is noted for her work in feminist, critical and postcolonial psychologies, research on subjectivity in relation to race, gender and sexuality, work on gendered and sexual violence, and decolonial research methodologies. She was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Psychology in Society (PINS) from 2018 to 2021. She is a past UCT Mandela Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and a past recipient of the runner up award in the South African Department of Science and Technology’s Women in Science awards, for the category of Distinguished Young Woman Researcher in the Social Sciences or Humanities. She serves on the Board of Mosaic Training, Service and Healing Centre for Women, in Cape Town and the African Gender Institute and Huma Institute at the University of Cape Town. She is also an Executive Committee Member of the Sexuality and Gender Division of the Psychological Society of South Africa. Her recent publications include the co-edited volumes Engaging youth in activism, research and pedagogical praxis. Transnational and intersectional perspectives on gender, sex and race (Routledge, 2018), Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology (Springer, 2019 ), Men, Masculinities and Intimate Partner Violence (Routledge, 2020) and the co-authored book, Pan-Africanism and Psychology in Decolonial Times (Palgrave Macmillan, in press).
Dr Benita Moolman is a senior lecturer and programme manager at the Global Citizenship Programme at the University of Cape Town. I have a D.(Phil )in Feminist Geography from University of California, Davis (UCDavis) and a M(Phil) in Women and Gender Studies from University of the Western Cape. I have worked at the Human Sciences Research Council and at Rape Crisis Cape Town. I currently teach on social justice, decoloniality, gender-based violence and critical, community engaged research methodologies. I have researched and published on gender-based violence, masculinities, intersectional identities and feminist methodologies. I am interested in decolonial and feminist pedagogies, as well as thinking through African epistemologies and situated knowledge-making. My most recent publication is a co-edited collection with Nadia Sanger, entitled : Racism, Violence, Betrayals and New Imaginaries: Feminist Voices, 2022, University of Kwazulu Natal Press
Savuka Matyila is a gender non-conforming human rights activist born in Mdantsane, Eastern Cape. With over a decade’s experience working with civil society organisations, Savuka’s work targets legal, clinical, educational, and community-based fronts, through both local and international spheres. A degree in Sociology and Philosophy; and Gender, Religion and Health (Hons) studies inspire Savuka – to seek out possibilities of community consciousness that affect the overall psychosocial and economic livelihood of LGBTIQ+ people, and their families. Savuka hopes to progress the championing of efforts that secure the further realisation of dignity and wellbeing, inherent for everyone within the world of gender and sexual diversity.
Kaylynn Palm is a versatile reporter with a decade of experience in the field. She cut her teeth as a cub writer for the community papers straight out of university. It’s here, she believes, that she built invaluable skills and contacts while on the crime, investigative and community beat. It also laid a solid foundation for her leap towards an equally successful career in radio years later. A former Eyewitness News reporter, Kaylynn knows well the dynamics of a fast-changing and demanding news cycle. Her knack is finding the story behind the story and human behind the headlines. Nowhere is this more pertinent than when covering an array of stories including the tales of gender-base violence, the hard-felt impact of the real crime statistics and the realities of the Cape’s most marginalized and neglected families. Not just a talented wordsmith, Kaylynn’s also an acclaimed multimedia journalist. She may have hung up her radio mic, for now, but her activism hasn’t been silenced. It’s taken on a new form in her role as Gender Based Violence co-ordinator and communications officer at civil rights organization, Action Society.
Tarisai Mchuchu-MacMillan is an African-feminist, Advocate and crime and violence prevention specialist focussed on violence against women and violence against children. Tarisai, currently is the Executive Director of MOSAIC Training Services and Healing Centre for Women, an NPO that advocates for preventive laws and policies to be advanced to effectively reduce gender-based violence, in particular domestic, sexual and intimate-partner violence. Tarisai designed the SAFE-PR programme currently being piloted by MOSAIC, which is the main subject of the chapter. The SAFE-PR project is focussed on ensuring that women’s rights to safety in relationships, homes and communities is advanced by strengthening duty bearers and first responders who make up the security, justice, and psychosocial support services system in response to domestic violence (DV) and intimate-partner violence (IPV). MOSAIC coordinates localised multi-stakeholder platforms made up of first responders to domestic violence and intimate partner violence in communities and works with them to increase capacity to respond through a gender transformative lens by building relationships amongst local multi-stakeholder frontline responders in a coordinated manner that enables better service response for victims of DV/IPV, ensuring that protection orders protect and further harm is prevented. Tarisai completed her B.A. (2006) and LL.B. (2010) degrees at the University of Cape Town and is an Advocate of the High Court of South Africa.
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided another moment in media, popular and scholarly discourse to visibilise the extent, persistence, and consequences of gender-based violence and femicide in South Africa. While the most recent statistics indicate a decline in the rate of femicide between 1999 and 2017 – we know that GBV and femicide continue to be an ongoing, impervious problem for South African women, sexual and gender diverse and non-conforming persons, limiting our freedoms and the true attainment of gender equity. In this current moment, we turn renewed and ongoing attention to the question of gendered violence and femicide and ask: What are the everyday knowledges and practices that we need to refuse and unsettle toward provoking change toward freedom? What and where are the possibilities for building a non-violent future?
Did you miss our second webinar, Necrocapitalism and Psychic Violence?
Don’y worry, watch our recording now!
In 2021, the journal Social and Health Sciences published a Special Issue, guest edited by Professor Lara Sheehi, on Necrocapitalism and Psychic Violence. The articles that comprise this issue are wide-ranging, and explore how necrocapitalism harnesses death and dying to operationalised oppression in the local and global spheres, maintaining authority through an economy of deadly violence. The articles speak, in different ways, to our present conjuncture. However, they also go beyond present-day debates on necropolitics, and raise several important questions with respect to the urgency of resistance and the imperative of emancipatory future-building. At this virtual event launching this important Special Issue, four authors who contributed to the issue will discuss their articles, and what they mean today with respect to understanding the present so that we might change it. The speakers will be in discussion with Professor Garth Stevens.
Nick Malherbe is a researcher at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa & South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa Masculinity and Health Research Unit. His research interests include community psychology, violence, visual methods, and culture.
Garth Stevens is a Professor and Clinical Psychologist in the Department of Psychology, in the School of Human and Community Development, at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His research interests include foci on race, racism and related social asymmetries; racism and knowledge production; critical psychology, ideology, power and discourse; violence and its prevention; historical/collective trauma and memory; applied psychoanalytic theorising of contemporary social issues; and masculinity, gender and violence. He has published widely in these areas, both nationally and internationally, including co-editorships of A ‘race’ against time: Psychology and challenges to deracialisation in South Africa (UNISA Press, 2006) and Race, memory and the apartheid archive: Towards a transformative psychosocial praxis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He is the co-lead researcher on the Apartheid Archive Project, which is an international research initiative that aims to examine the nature of the experiences of racism of South Africans under the old apartheid order and their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa. He is also the co-lead researcher on the Violent States, States of Violence Project, which aims to re-engage a theorisation of violence in the contemporary world. At present, he holds a B-rating from the National Research Foundation, is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), serves as the Dean in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, and is the Past President of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA).
Azad Ashim Sharma is the director of the87press and author of Against the Frame (Barque 2017 / Broken Sleep Books 2022), Ergastulum (Broken Sleep Books 2022) and the forthcoming Boiled Owls(Nightboat Books 2023). He is a CHASE-funded PhD candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College.
Zoé Samudzi holds a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco and is a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class at the University of Johannesburg. She is a writer and art critic, and an associate editor at Parapraxis Magazine.
Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/hers), is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program. She teaches decolonial, liberatory and anti-oppressive theories and approaches to clinical treatment, case conceptualization, and community consultation. She is the president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA Division 39), and the chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and co-editor of CounterSpace in Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. Lara is on the advisory board to the USA–Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of the book, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022).
Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on trauma, state crimes and criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law and society. She studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gendered based violence, violence against children in conflict ridden areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the author of numerous books, among them “Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study” published in 2010; “Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear”, published by Cambridge University Press, 2015. She just published two new books” the first examines Palestinian childhood entitled: “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding”, and a new edited book entitled: Understanding Campus-Community Partnerships in Conflict Zones”. The second is a co-edited volume on the sacralization of politics. She is also completing a co-edited volume on Islam and gender-based violence. She and has published articles in multi-disciplinary fields including British Journal of Criminology, Feminist Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, State Crime, Violence Against Women, Social Science and Medicine, Signs, Law & Society Review, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. As a resident of the old city of Jerusalem, Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a prominent local activist. She engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives, spaces of death, and women’s birthing bodies and lives. Babette Gekeler is a clinical psychotherapist running a transcultural practice and lecturer at the International Psychoanalytic University of Berlin where she teaches Psychodynamic and Psychosocial Counselling with a focus on current societal issues and is a Co-Director for the Working Group on Refugee and Mental Wellbeing at the Network for Refugee Research. Her special research interests are in the investigation of cultural, racial and religious belonging and their relation to mental wellbeing and illness. Furthermore, participatory methodologies lie at the heart of her research engagement and interest. She received her PhD on Public Engagement with Multiculturalism from UCL in 2012, for which she has received an ESRC fellowship in 2007. She has regular engagements as a public speaker on issues relating to identity, group dynamics and wellbeing
Stéphanie Wahab, PhD, is a Professor at Portland State University’s School of Social Work, and Honorary Research Associate Professor at the University of Otago, Social and Community Work in New Zealand. She teaches courses focused on social justice, philosophies of science, qualitative inquiry, and intimate partner violence. Her research and scholarship tend to focus on issues of violence, including but not limited to intimate partner violence, institutional and state sanctioned violence such as criminalization, militarization, and occupation. She is a co-editor of Feminisms in Social Work Research: Promise and possibilities for justice based knowledge.
Shahnaaz Suffla is a specialist scientist at the South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit, and Professor Extraordinaire at the University of South Africa. Her research interests draw from the intersections of critical African, community and peace psychologies, and are located within liberatory philosophies and epistemologies. Her thinking and scholarship is influenced by the vision of research as a transforming and humanising enterprise.
Shose Kessi is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town; Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology; and co-director of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa. She has published on the psychology of racism in higher education and decolonial and pan-African approaches to psychology.
Floretta Boonzaier is Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town, and co-Director of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa. She is noted for her work in feminist, critical and postcolonial psychologies, research on subjectivity in relation to race, gender and sexuality, work on gendered and sexual violence, and decolonial research methodologies. She is President-Elect of the Psychological Society of South Africa and an Associate Editor for the South African Journal of Science and past Editor in Chief for the journal Psychology in Society. Her recent publications include the co-edited volumes Engaging youth in activism, research and pedagogical praxis. Transnational and intersectional perspectives on gender, sex and race (Routledge, 2018), Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology (Springer, 2019 ), Men, Masculinities and Intimate Partner Violence (Routledge, 2020) and the co-authored book, Pan-Africanism and Psychology in Decolonial Times (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Babette Gekeler is a clinical psychotherapist running a transcultural practice and lecturer at the International Psychoanalytic University of Berlin where she teaches Psychodynamic and Psychosocial Counselling with a focus on current societal issues and is a Co-Director for the Working Group on Refugee and Mental Wellbeing at the Network for Refugee Research. Her special research interests are in the investigation of cultural, racial and religious belonging and their relation to mental wellbeing and illness. Furthermore, participatory methodologies lie at the heart of her research engagement and interest. She received her PhD on Public Engagement with Multiculturalism from UCL in 2012, for which she has received an ESRC fellowship in 2007. She has regular engagements as a public speaker on issues relating to identity, group dynamics and wellbeing
Ismahan Soukeyna Diop holds a PhD in clinical psychology. She works as a teacher-researcher at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Sénégal. Since her obtention of a tenure-track position as a teacher-researcher at UCAD, she has managed the courses in the field of clinical psychology. Along with her colleagues, they have recently opened the department of psychology. Her fields of research are femininity and maternity in African mythology and tales. In her previous research, she was involved with women facing hysterectomy and breast mastectomy for psychotherapeutic support. As a result of this research, booklets of information were designed to be culturally appropriate and relevant for Senegalese women.
She has published the second book of this collection, African Psychologies, with Palgrave Macmillan in 2019, and has developed Tampsy Optoa, a psychotherapeutic tool based on African tales. Her current research focuses on the application of African traditional heritage, to clinical psychotherapy and community care, through the distribution of Tampsy Optoa to social workers, allowing them to provide psychoeducation and support to individuals and families facing mental health challenges.
Did you miss our first webinar, Pan-Africanism and Psychology in Decolonial Times, of our PsySSA 2022 Webinar Series – Facing the Future with Psychology: Perspectives, Praxes and People?
Don’y worry, watch our recording now!