Desmond Painter

Critical Psychology in South Africa: Looking Back and Looking Ahead

In this article we sketch the development, current status and future prospects of critical psychology in South Africa. We review critical psychology initiatives across a number of domains, including professional and activist organisations, university courses and programmes, conferences, and publication initiatives. In each case we show how developments in critical psychology reflected and contributed to broader social processes as South Africa emerged from apartheid. We also trace the links between local critical psychology groupings and the international critical psychology movement. Finally, we draw attention to areas (such as mental health activism, forensic psychology and community psychology) where South African critical psychologists have been relatively inactive or have played a politically ambiguous role. We conclude with suggestions for making critical psychology theory and practice relevant, not only to academic psychologists, but also to all who have a stake in South African psychology.

‘They all Speak Your Language Anyway …’: Language and Racism in a South African School:

This article reports a rhetorical discourse analysis of learner perspectives on language diversity in a contemporary South African high school. Based on four group discussions with Grade 12 isiXhosa, Afrikaans and English-speaking learners, the analysis traces two interrelated clusters of argument. In the first, a liberal discourse of individual freedom and human rights is mobilised to argue against a language order where languages are made compulsory, or forced upon people. We show that this argument was employed inconsistently: it only extended to languages other than English. To understand how this dilemmatic use of liberal ideas was justified, we trace a second line of argument. This is the construction of English as a universal language and, consequently as neutral, necessary and unifying; a language of ‘rational choice’ for all South Africans. Based on these arguments, language diversity – or the formal recognition and empowerment of languages other than English – was problematised as both violating individual rights of choice and a public order characterised by the mutual and universal understanding afforded by the universality of English. Supporting English-only practices in the school was thus presented as itself a liberal gesture, allowing not only the continued racialisation of isiXhosa, but also a rhetoric of racial blame: isiXhosa speakers, when they use their language in public, were blamed for instigating racial tension and misunderstanding in the school.

Mapping East London: Sketching identity through place

This article provides an analysis of sketch maps of a South African city drawn by local university students. The analysis is compared to previous sketch map studies in Psychology, and highlights the use and relative absence of the analytical concepts of race and class within these studies. An understanding of sketch maps as rhetorical moments is developed, that is, that these drawings represent characterisations of lived space that is ideologically embedded. Consequently, a quantitative and qualitative description and commentary is provided of the depictions and absences in these maps. From this a place identity is suggested and its implications for personal identity are discussed. In conclusion, it is argued that apartheid town planning continues to be successful in that it now accommodates a politically naïve consumerist culture.

Heading south! Importing discourse analysis

Postmodern critiques problematise the import of social psychology into non-western contexts on epistemological and ideological grounds. Yet, British approaches to the discipline remain popular with critical social psychologists in South Africa. One such import product is discourse analysis, which, as a “postmodern” social psychology, seemingly resolves challenges of “intellectual colonialism” by endorsing a constructionist understanding of social psychological phenomena. However, by extending a conception of language into a discursive ontology enables only a partial social psychological understanding of the often insidious nature of experience and social conduct even when discourses change. What is required is an understanding of these aspects of social agency as also pre-reflexively and non-propositionally patterned, making necessary a conception of culture that works, so to speak, directly on the body. This remains impossible in a theoretical system that has to fall back on the notions of reflexivity and ideology in order to explain the social and political determination of experience and meaningful conduct.

Gripping stuff: A response to Kevin Durrheim

In this response to Kevin Durrheim we argue that he misrepresents some of our arguments by Implying that talk of pre-reflexive patterning of social form and experience and the role of the body in this suggests biological and cultural essentialism. He further overstates the consensus amongst discursive social psychologists and social constructionists on these matters, as we briefly show in relation to the problem of the body in social psychology.

German Critical Psychology Interventions in Honor of Klaus Holzkamp

In the political and scientific context of the 1960s, German Critical Psychology emerged as a theoretical and practical elaboration of Marxist thinking on the topic and discipline of psychology. Klaus Holzkamp played a central role in the establishment of Critical Psychology, and this special edition of Theory & Psychology honors his contributions even as it documents the development of his ideas. In this preface we briefly sketch the emergence of German Critical Psychology and introduce the contributors to this special issue.

Book Review Language and politics By John E Joseph (2006)

Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Hardback ISBN 9780748624539 170 pages Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2008, 26(2): 295–296

Book Review: Send in the Idiots, or How We Grew to Understand the WorldSend in the idiots, or how we grew to understand the world, Author: NazeerKamran, 2006, Bloomsbury ISBN: 0 7475 7910 5 (hard cover, 230 pages)

Extracted from text ... Book review 656 Book review Title: Send in the idiots, or how we grew to understand the world Author: Kamran Nazeer Date: 2006 Publisher: Bloomsbury ISBN: 0 7475 7910 5 (hard cover, 230 pages) This book about autism is, quite simply, remarkable. It is intelligent and insightful. It is also funny and, at times, heartbreakingly sad. In the early 1980s the author, Kamran Nazeer, attended a school in New York that specialised in the teaching of autistic children. About 25 years later he visited three former classmates and the parents of a fourth, who had committed suicide, to find out ..

Social psychology and modernity, Thomas Johansson : book review

According to the publishers blurb Thomas Johansson was trained in both psychology and sociology, and, at the time of publication, was spending his academic life in a social psychology institute as well as in a centre for cultural studies. This certainly qualifies him to comment on the challenges facing social psychology as a field of study, as well as on the theoretical requirements more generally for studying and commenting on contemporary social life. In this book, Social psychology and modernity (translated from Danish by Karen Williams), he does both these things with great effect.Extracted from text ... S. Afr. J. Psychol. 2001, 31 (4) 78 Social psychology and modernity Thomas Johansson (2000) Buckingham: Open University Press. Paperback ISBN: 0-335-20104-0 176 pp. ?16, 99 According to the publishers blurb Thomas Johansson was trained in both psychology and sociology, and, at the time of publication, was spending his academic life in a social psychology institute as well as in a centre for cultural studies. This certainly qualifies him to comment on the challenges facing social psychology as a field of study, as well as on the theoretical requirements more generally for studying and commenting on contemporary social life. ..