PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Symposium by Prof Lara Sheehi and Prof Stephen Sheehi

Illuminations, refusals, and liberation: honouring the seminal works of Hussein Bulhan

Professor Hussein Bulhan is a Fanonian, liberation and Somali studies scholar, and Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Conflict Studies. His seminal book, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, published in 1985, has been a radical companion for generations of de/anti-colonial thinkers and activists. The book and Professor Bulhan’s other published works on imperialism in the studies of the psyche, black psyches in captivity, stages of colonialism in Africa and occupation of the mind, family therapy in the trenches, ruin and renewal in Somaliland, liberatory subjectivities and the dynamics of cultural in-betweenity, integral to African knowledge archives, are critical reading and thinking resources for students, established scholars, practitioners, and activists. Professor Bulhan has inspired and schooled a generation of black and anti-colonial psychologists-activists. Professor Bulhan has the distinction of having supervised over thirty-five doctoral dissertations at Boston University, USA in the late 1980s. Professor Bulhan has led on the establishment of several independent development and educational institutions. He is the founding President and current Chancellor of the Frantz Fanon University, Hargeisa, Somaliland. Professor Bulhan served as the President/Chancellor of University of Hargeisa, Executive Director of the Institute of Health and Development, Hargeisa, and Founder and Director of the Center for Health and Development, a non-profit organisation in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. In the early 2000s he was the 2011-2014 Chief of Staff Counselling and Welfare, UNAMID, Darfur, Sudan. This symposium will celebrate, honour and engage critically with Professor Bulhan’s scholar-activist and development contributions as part of the liberatory project of retrieving and consolidating African and South knowledge archives.

Bulhan’s Legacy as Abolitionist Register and Colonial Disruption

by Prof Lara Sheehi

In this talk I will ground the symposium in Bulhan’s intellectual and clinical legacy, taking up especially his seminal Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression. In doing so, I will highlight how Bulhan’s work can be interpreted through an abolitionist register—one that early on attempted to underscore what academic and abolitionist, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, reminds us: “Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments, and possibilities… [it is] building the future from the present, in all the ways we can.” (2018) In focusing on “third world people” and offering a piercing analysis and counter-register to white supremacist, Eurocentric frameworks that continue to haunt psychology well after his 1985 intervention, we can understand Bulhan’s work as the very pieces and possibilities of which Gilmore speaks. More specifically, in leading us through and offering alternatives out of our “shared predicament of captivity”, Bulhan offered an inversion of where one must begin to reimagine and enact an anti-oppressive clinical, psychological, and political praxis. That is, one must begin with Fanon. Decades later, Bulhan’s work can continue to help us disrupt coloniality and presence Fanonian possibilities for the study and practice of psychology.

Against the Colonial Republic of Psychoanalysis:  Hussein Bulhan, Fanon and “Rest of the World”

by Prof Stephen Sheehi

In 1985, Hussein Bulhan’s Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of the Oppressed compelled psychoanalysis to confront the constitutive violence of its universalizing mission. In the hands of Bulhan, the implications and conclusions within Fanon’s most radical liberatory theories and realizations emerge in full force. In this presentation I explore more than “a superficial look at establishment psychology—its diverse theories, profusion sanctioned theories and techniques [that] serve to justify the status quo of oppression and are used as instruments of social control.” Rather, in debt and gratitude to Bulhan, I map the “psychic sovereignty” claimed by, what Lara and I have called elsewhere, “the colonial Republic of Psychoanalysis.” Starting with the IPA’s Constitution, codified in Jerusalem in 1977, that divides the provinces (and providence) of psychoanalysis and the IPA into Europe, North America (North of the United-States-Mexican border), all America south of that border; and “the rest of the world,” I consider how psychoanalysis, psychoanalysts and their institutions police the sovereignty of racialized and minoritized subjects, especially those of the Global South. I explore how psychoanalysis as a normative, disciplinary method and practice administers sovereignty over the internal worlds of black and brown people globally. In extending the psychic universality of the “globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of “Man.”, in Sylvia Wynter’s words, to “the rest of the world,” psychoanalysis and its liberalism designates not only who is perverse and who is deviant, who are genuinely good and bad objects, but pathologizes resistance to the hegemony of racial capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism as not worthy of the privileges of this ethnoclass of “Man”. Moreover, learning from Fanon and Bulhan’s exploration of his oeuvre, I invite participants also to consider how this universalized sovereignty over the psychic  and internal worlds of “the rest of the world” -namely the bodies and minds of Arabs, Muslims, black people, the disabled, and queer and trans folks –are invited “innocently” into the globally hegemonic ethnoclass  to collude with psychoanalysis’ roles in regulating and enforcing white supremist, cis-hetero-normativity.

Date: 10 October 2023, Thursday

Time: 13h30 – 15h30 SAST

Venue: Emperors Palace Convention Centre, Venue 8

Convenor: Mohamed Seedat, Emeritus Professor, University of South Africa

Raconteur: Hussein Bulhan, Professor/President, Frantz Fanon University, Somaliland

 

About the Presenters

Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar, and the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She is currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto, 2025).

Stephen Sheehi is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies in the Asian and Middle East Studies Program, Asian and Pacific-Islander American Studies Program and Arabic Studies. at William and Mary. He is also the director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project. His most recent books are Psychoanalysis Under Occupation (with Lara Sheehi) and Camera Palaestina: Photography and the Displaced History of Palestine (with Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar), along with co-editing with Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the special issue “Settler Colonialism, Abolition, and State Crime,” in the Journal of State Crime.

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Prof Nadera Shalhoub-Kervokian and Prof Lara Sheehi

The Psychology of Anti-Colonial Resistance: Praxis from the Flesh

by Prof Nadera Shalhoub-Kervokian

Genocidal violence in Gaza, the colonized scattered and shredded body parts bring into focus the violent enmeshment of Palestinian ashlaa’/flesh within the geo-politics of psychology. The violent dismemberment of bodies testifies to state terror and its psychological warfare. By understanding how people of Gaza make sense of scenes of brutal dismemberment and death in their everyday lives, amidst a genocide, I offer an anticolonial resistance psychology and praxis from the flesh. My talk is a call to read the inscriptions of dismembered, wounded and dying flesh/body/land in their racial command. I will conclude by insisting that an anti-colonial resistance psychology invests in life and liveability against the permanence of otherness, in which racialized people are turned into the exploded, shattered, decomposed, unidentified no-bodies. It is a psychology that insists on re-assembling the wholeness of life, a psycho-political effort to rebuild new spaces of love in a struggle for a dignified humane life.

 

The Psychology of Anti-Colonial Resistance: Praxis from the Flesh
“On Refusing Psychic Intrusions”

by Prof Lara Sheehi

In engaging with Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s theorizing, I will discuss psychic intrusions and the various ways anti-colonial resistance refuses them. I will take up how to conceptualize the arduous, yet life sustaining struggle that allows for this refusal to happen just as consistently as the intrusion insists on making itself felt. In this talk, I will highlight how refusing the terms of settler colonial psychic intrusion by refusing its hollow attempts at “repair” is not out of recalcitrance, but rather as an ethical imperative that guides the possibility of another mode of being and staying in (or importantly, opting out of) relation. Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst, Avgi Saketopoulou, in speaking of exigent sadism reminds us: “In refusing repair, exigent sadism is not indifferent to the other’s gesture: what the exigent sadist seeks to do, rather, is to stage an encounter that stands to rearrange the terms by which the relationship proceeds.” Using this as a springboard, I will explore how the mere presence of Palestinians is enough to stage that encounter in the settler colonial matrix, a Palestinian in presence, then, becomes the register by which repair is refused. Maintaining and sustaining, presence, in the face of genocide; in the face of dismemberment, erasure, subjugation, intrusion and coercion is enough to stage the encounter of which she speaks. The promise of this potential mounts a libidinal excitation that has the urgent potential to withstand the pressures of the deathscape that threatens to subsume us all.

 

About the Presenters

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.

Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar, and the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She is currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto, 2025).

Respondent

Urmitapa Dutta is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Greeley Peace Scholar Program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Through her scholar activism, she strives to bear witness to and dismantle everyday violence. Dr. Dutta’s journey began in the Northeastern borderlands of the Indian state, where she grew up navigating contested terrains of borders and belonging. She has extensively studied the dynamics of coloniality, identity, power, and resistance while accompanying communities facing ethnoracial persecution in Northeast India. At the heart of this work is a fierce commitment to centering the struggles of those relegated to the margins of national and global imaginaries. Dr. Dutta has contributed to decolonial perspectives in psychology that span theorizing “from below,” dissident pedagogies, and community-engaged research as a form of solidarity praxis. She has written extensively about critical qualitative methods as interventions to combat marginality and exclusion, notably through participatory action research, feminist ethnographies, counterstorytelling, and insurgent poetry. She also currently serves as Associate Editor of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology.

Climate Change and Climate Justice – Reflecting on Psychology, Community Psychology, The Streetlight Effect*, Social Change and Questions of Scale” (*Not a Psychological Finding!)

 Climate Change and Climate Justice – Reflecting on Psychology, Community Psychology, The Streetlight Effect*, Social Change and Questions of Scale” (*Not a Psychological Finding!)

Date: 25 September 2024

Time: 16h15

About the webinar: Back in 2018, before the pandemic, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) noted that “rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems” were needed, that were “unprecedented in terms of scale”. Globally, these changes are not happening fast enough and limiting global warming to 1.5°C seems to be beyond us as a planet.

Against the above backdrop, this webinar, will provide no easy answers, but does seek to explore, the climate and ecological emergencies, wider social challenges and climate justice. It will discuss what this means for psychology, community psychology, and the well-intentioned people (the speaker hopefully included) who are trying to make a positive difference.

Reflecting on some of his own, limited, climate related research, and his wider activities outside of the academy, Dr Miles Thompson will share some thinking and facilitate some wider discussion around our current challenges, and both the potential and possibly the potential shortcomings of mainstream psychology and community psychologies in addressing the enormity of the unfolding poly-crisis.

 
Meet The Presenter

Dr Miles Thompson is an Associate Professor in Psychology at UWE Bristol in the UK. He leads a final year undergraduate module called “Psychology and Social Justice”. He is also the lead of UWE’s Psychological Sciences Research Group (PSRG).

Miles’ main research interests are in psychology and its relationship to social, global and environmental justice and change. For Miles, these interests are often approached through the lens of community, critical community and liberation psychologies.

Miles is a clinical psychologist by background, registered with the UK’s HCPC (Health and Care Professions Council) and a Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy (HEA). He worked full-time in the NHS at the Bath Centre for Pain Services from 2005 until 2011. Prior to working at UWE, he worked as a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Canterbury Christ Church University. His PhD was awarded by Goldsmiths, University of London (2016). And his Professional Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (DClinPsy) by the University of Plymouth (2005).

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Dr Debra Machando

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Dr Debra Machando

Expanding Mental Healthcare Access in Zimbabwe: A Model for Global Impact

Limited access to mental healthcare remains a pressing global challenge. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Special Initiative aims to bridge this gap by expanding services for 100 million people worldwide. Zimbabwe exemplifies successful initiative implementation through a country-driven approach.

Following a comprehensive national assessment, Zimbabwe identified seven key areas for improvement: leadership, funding, service organization, staffing, research, community engagement, and emergency mental health support.

Collaboration between WHO and Zimbabwe yielded significant results. Over 1.8 million individuals gained access to crucial mental health services, with over 3,000 receiving help for the first time. Additionally, over 370 new mental health workers were trained, and e-training programs reached over 1,500 individuals.

Policy changes are underway, with the Ministry of Health approving a review of mental health legislation and strategy. Collaboration has been strengthened through regular stakeholder meetings.

Integration of services is another success. Training programs were rolled out, and mental health screening is now integrated with HIV services and offered routinely in primary care.

Critically, $3 million was secured to expand services in primary care, aiming to reach 2.5 million in four priority provinces. Additional resources, integration, and collaboration are required to scale up the interventions to the rest of the 10 provinces.

Zimbabwe’s experience serves as a model for expanding mental healthcare access globally. It highlights the importance of country-driven approaches, capacity building, policy advocacy, service integration, and resource mobilization. By replicating this model, other countries can make significant strides in improving mental health outcomes for their populations.

About the Presenter

Dr Debra Machando

Dr Debra Machando is a seasoned mental health professional with a proven track record in leading and implementing innovative programs in Zimbabwe. She is the  World Health Organization – Zimbabwe Nechnical officer  for mental health in Zimbabwe since 2020. She  has played a pivotal role in shaping the country’s mental health landscape. Dr Machando served as an executive member  of the Pan Africa Psychology Union for six years and as Chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Allied Health Practitioners’ Council (2015-2020).

Dr. Machando’s expertise extends to a wide range of areas, including clinical psychology, public health, and research. With experience working in both government and non-governmental organizations, she possess a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing mental health services in Zimbabwe.

Under Dr.  Machando’s leadership, the WHO Special Initiative for Mental Health has made significant strides in expanding access to mental health services, improving quality of care, and strengthening the mental health workforce. Key achievements include:

Expanding Access: Successfully increasing access to mental health services for over 1.8 million people, particularly in primary care settings.

Capacity Building: Training over 400 healthcare professionals in mental health interventions and providing essential e-training to over 6000 participants.

Advocacy: Securing government approval for a review of mental health laws and policies, and fostering collaboration with user-led organizations.

Scaling Up Services: Piloting and implementing innovative mental health interventions in multiple provinces and integrating mental health services with existing HIV/TB programs.

Dr. Machando’s research has focused on African mental health systems, with a particular emphasis on cultural considerations and service delivery in resource-limited settings. She has also been instrumental in mobilizing resources to support mental health programs, including securing a $3 million grant from Grand Challenges Canada. Dr Machando loves collaboration with regional and international teams on research and program implementation.

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Prof. Charles Mate-Kole

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Prof. Charles Mate-Kole

From Birth to Old Age: What has African Culture taught us?

Africans  ensure the continuity of its tradition  through by highlighting  the mutual care between generations. Older adults are seen to be the pride of the family; they provide guidance to younger generations and function as spiritual heads. Thus, it is expected that ageing starting from birth to old age allows the African to age healthily.

Africans view spirituality and its practices as a major source of healing. Spiritual and religious practices, such as dance, singing, and storytelling, are seen to contribute to healthy ageing. Thus, spirituality is considered a fundamental process in ageing. There is growing evidence that people in Western societies are embracing spiritual practices to promote healthy aging. This trend has given rise to the field of neurotheology, where scientists explore the connection between the brain and religion. This address will focus on spirituality and its relation to neuroscience emphasizing its role in the ageing process.

About the Presenter

Prof Charles Mate-Kole

Charles Mate-Kole, PhD is Professor of Psychology and the Founding Director of the Centre for Ageing Studies, College of Humanities. He is Consultant Clinical Neuropsychologist at the Department of Psychiatry, UG Medical School, University of Ghana. He is Professor Emeritus and Psychology Founding Director of the Centre for Africana Studies at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU), New Britain, Connecticut, USA. He is the, CCSU. His research is primarily in ageing, dementia, traumatic brain injury, and neurocognitive remediation.

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Prof. Ruth Bukabau

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Prof. Ruth Bukabau

Psychological Consultations in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Practice and Evolution

Context: The work retraces the painful journey of this science, the struggles of the precursors and the happy outcome thanks to the association of practicing psychologists, united within the National Union of Clinical Psychologists, on the other hand. This practice, it should be noted, remained for a long time in the scientific ghetto in the DRC, thus making the masters of yesterday as the holders of a scientific approach very inaccessible to their successors. Which earned them attributions linked to mystical-religious considerations.

Objectives of the work: To constitute a capacity building tool and to offer an orientation, in the discipline, to students and other scientists who are interested in psychological consultations on the one hand, and to describe the progression curve of the activity in the framework of psychological practice.

The culture of psychological consultations in the DRC dates back to the second half of the 20th century by university professors, notably those from the University of Kisangani who migrated to the University of Kinshasa on the one hand, and those from the Institute National Pedagogical on the other hand. During this period until the 1990s, psychological services were not known to the public nor were they structured. Since 2000 to the present day, the need for psychological interventions has increased by 85%, in the context of the mental health of the population, especially with the social intrusion of pandemics and the repeated wars in the East of the country.

Conclusion: Psychological consultations, through their practice, help to understand the client’s real psychological experience and ensure efficient psychotherapeutic support or treatment.

 

About the Presenter

Prof. Ruth Bukabau

Dr Ruth Bukabau Babuya is a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of Kinshasa, where she serves in the departments of psychology, demography, and criminology. She also teaches at the Evangelical University of Bukavu. Her research focuses on the psychopathology of children, adolescents, and women, and she is a specialized educator for children with autism. In addition to her academic work, Dr Bukabau is a consultant at the Fistula Clinic of Saint Joseph Hospital and the Congolese Center for Children and Families (CCEF). She is a member of various professional organizations, including the Association of Urologists of Congo, the International Association for Research in Educational Science (AFIRSE), and the National Union of Clinical Psychologists of Congo (UNPC), where she also serves as treasurer.