PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Prof Jace Pillay

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Prof Jace Pillay

Psychology disrupted by a social justice call for psychologists to promote agency and empowerment of disadvantaged and vulnerable people

The aim of this paper is to argue the disruption of psychology from a Western and Eurocentric viewpoint to a psychology that addresses the needs and aspirations of disadvantaged and vulnerable people. From a social justice perspective psychology cannot be business as usual preparing psychologists to think only about lucrative private practices. This negatively impacts on the role of psychologists to contribute to the agency and empowerment of disadvantaged and vulnerable people. Building on this premise I begin with a global conceptualisation of social justice and then zoom into the nature of social justice in South Africa. This is followed by an exploration of social justice within the discipline of psychology and how it would apply to the contexts of disadvantaged and vulnerable people. Then attention is drawn to a specific psychology category demonstrating systemic challenges that inhibit social justice practices in South Africa. Next, I discuss core psychology principles that must be embedded in the preparation of psychologists to make them advocates of social justice to empower disadvantaged and vulnerable people in local communities contributing to a better society. The paper encourages psychologists to think globally and act locally in addressing common problems across the globe.

About the Presenter

Prof Jace Pillay

Prof Jace Pillay is a registered educational and counselling psychologist and the South African Research Chair in Education and Care in Childhood in the Faculty of Education at the University of Johannesburg. In February 2024 he was appointed a UNESCO Chair in Mental Health and Psychological Support for Teachers and Learners in SA. His previous positions at UJ were the Head of the Department of Educational Psychology and Vice Dean in the Faculty of Education. Currently, he heads a research team focusing on the mental health of learners and teachers as well as psychosocial support in schools.  As an academic he has published more than 100 journal articles, book chapters and conference proceedings both nationally and internationally. Also, he has supervised numerous postgraduate students and Postdoctoral Research Fellows. Prof Pillay is a keynote and invited speaker in numerous international conferences and has several international research collaborations. In addition to his academic stature, he serves on the Professional Board for Psychology. Also, he serves on the National Steering Committee for Care and Support for Teaching and Learning and chairs the CETA Programme for the Department of Education.

PsySSA 30th Anniversary Congress – Final Congress Programme Out Now!

PsySSA 30th Anniversary Congress – Final Congress Programme Out Now!

PsySSA is proud to share with you the Final 30th Anniversary Congress Programme. The Congress will be held at Emperor’s Palace, in Johannesburg, South Africa from 8-11 October 2024.

This milestone event, in conjunction with the 10th Anniversary Pan African Psychology Union (PAPU) Congress, features an extensive lineup of sessions from practitioners, scholars, researchers, educators, students, community organisers, activists, artists, and policymakers, each contributing to the rich tapestry of psychological thought, practice, and activism.

This year’s 30th Anniversary Congress is set to be an exhilarating and stimulating experience.

Here’s to 30 years of PsySSA, 10 years of PAPU, and to a milestone Congress!

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PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Documentary

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Documentary

The Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa &  Decolonising Psychology Division of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA)
Invite you to…

Where Olive Trees Weep offers a searing window into the struggles and resilience of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. It explores themes of loss, trauma, and the quest for justice.

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress

Date: Thursday, 10 October 2024

Time: 08h00 – 10h00 SAST

Venue: Emperors Palace, Venue 8

PsySSA AGM Notice 2024

PsySSA AGM Notice 2024

Notice of the 29th Annual General Meeting
 
Notice is hereby given that the 29th Annual General Meeting of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) will be held virtually on Zoom, on Wednesday, 2 October 2024, at 18:00. All PsySSA Members are invited to attend for transacting the following business:
 
1. To confirm the Minutes of the Previous AGM held on 4 October 2023 (posted on the PsySSA website).
2. To receive the Annual Report, including the Annual Financial Statements for the year ended 31 December 2023.
3. To confirm relevant decisions of Council.
4. To transact such further business as may be transacted at an AGM.
5. To elect Executive Members.
 
We look forward to your attendance.
 
PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Prof Kopano Ratele

PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Prof Kopano Ratele

American psychology has admitted perpetuating racism and white superiority, so what are we going to do about it?   

In 2021, the American Psychological Association apologised for its role and that of American psychology for perpetuating racism, racial discrimination, and the idea that humans are arranged in a hierarchy with white people at the top. Does that not urge us to delink from American psychology? If we are not going to turn away from American psychological research, theories and therapeutic tools, what are going to do about its disciplinary arsenal?

About the Presenter

Prof Kopano Ratele 

Kopano Ratele is professor of psychology at the University of Stellenbosch and head of the Stellenbosch Centre for Critical and Creative Thought. He served on the second Ministerial Committee on Transformation of South African Universities, and is former director of the South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa’s Masculinity and Health Research Unit, former president of the Psychological Society of South Africa and the former chairperson of Sonke Gender Justice.

His books include There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (2009), Liberating Masculinities (2016), The World Looks Like This From Here: Thoughts on African Psychology (2019) and Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity (2022). 

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.