Eduard Fourie

Epistemological resistance towards diversality: teaching community psychology as a decolonial project

In contexts of political instability and change, the value of disciplinary knowledges and the processes that constituted them is often questioned. Psychology is not exempt from this process. Little South African work has illustrated what teaching for decoloniality may mean in South African psychology. We draw on examples of curriculum design in community psychology from the Universities of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and Stellenbosch, three large South African public universities, in an attempt to surface what we regard as the decolonial frameworks that underpin their development and delivery. Capacities for reflexivity and the ability to hold multiple epistemologies encourage economies of knowledge that may prevent abyssal thinking, while contributing to cognitive justice and minimising opportunities for epistemicide. Some challenges to our pedagogy involve the potential for romanticising decoloniality.

Critical Incidents Impact Management Among South African Police Service Officers

This article describes and interprets the law enforcement processes of managing critical incidents in a South African police district. Twenty participants from various police units were selected through purposive and theoretical sampling techniques. Data were collected using unstructured open-ended interviews, field notes, diaries and follow-up telephone interviews, and analysed through the constant comparative data analysis method. Findings suggest the police to have individual and in-group preferences for particular inner strategies of coping, as well as the external resources of relying on various forms of support from others and professional consultation in the form of debriefing. The study recommends that individualistic and contextual trauma management be considered.

The Experiences and Meanings That Shape Heterosexual Fathers’ Relationships With Their Gay Sons in South Africa

ABSTRACT Gay men’s relationships with their mothers are likely to be more positive than their relationships with their fathers, and fathers are less likely to be told, less likely to be told first, and more likely to react negatively to disclosure than mothers. Drawing on an interpretivist approach, an individual in-depth interview strategy was adopted in the study as a means of gathering data from six Afrikaans-speaking White fathers, between the ages of 53 and 61 years (median: 55.5 years), residing in Gauteng, South Africa. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed for later coding and analysis. Through thematic network analysis, eight organizing themes emerged and were explored. For the purpose of this article only three organizing themes are discussed, namely “subliminal awareness prior to coming out,” “epistemic rupture of internal systems of ideas/beliefs,” and “acceptance as a complex and ongoing dialectical and reconciliatory process.” The themes support the view that most parents are neither totally rejecting nor fully accepting of their gay sons. Although the fathers may have attained a level of “loving denial” in the relationships with their gay sons, most continue to struggle with the meaning and expression of same-sex sexuality. Despite these challenges, it is recognized that the fathers are adapting to changing circumstances and are trying to find ways to tolerate, accommodate, and in some ways accept their gay sons.

Teaching Community Psychology as Community Engagement

This report describes a model for teaching community psychology as a form of community engagement and the related practices to encourage active engagement between students and their communities. As active community learners, students need to explore self, family and community as interactive social entities. We propose to encourage students with community engaged learning to become aware of their comfort zones through facilitated learning at a distance. We conclude that epistemic partnering allows the timely leveraging of existing community resources for social and psychological transformation.

About accountants and translators: reshaping community engagement in South African psychology

In this article, we review four key historical processes that shape community engagement and that open up spaces for its further development: The long history of tensions and cooperation between those within and outside the ‘ivory tower’, the continuing corporatisation of academic and professional life, the drive for free access to academic publications, and the drive towards decoloniality. We position community engagement as potentially disruptive to the epistemological and political status quo and present ‘four aphorisms’ for critical community engagement: Charity begins at home; it is (not) all about the money; it is all about knowledge; and you need a translator more than an accountant.