In his lecture at the 27th Annual South African Psychology Congress, hosted by the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA), Francis B. Nyamnjoh emphasizes the urgent need for convivial scholarship in the field of healing. He argues that despite the independence of most African countries since the 1960s, colonial education, culture, and attitudes still persist, overshadowing indigenous healing traditions that have remained resilient yet largely unrecognized in the 21st century. Nyamnjoh advocates for a framework of decolonized healing practices that promote conversations and collaborations across various disciplines and organizations. He stresses the importance of integrating marginalized epistemologies rooted in popular universes and ideas of reality into the academic discourse. Central to his argument is the recognition and accommodation of incompleteness in individuals, disciplines, organizations, and knowledge-making traditions, challenging the illusion of completeness often perpetuated by zero-sum games of violence and violation. Instead, he calls for embracing compositeness and conviviality in healing practices while rejecting the outsourcing of debt and indebtedness to victims.

Therapies for Healing Justice: Redressing Systemic Oppression and Intergenerational Trauma

Panelists: Dr Sipho Dlamini, Ms Rejane Williams, Ms Thembelihle Mashigo & Ms Berenice Meintjes
Chair: Dr Jude Clark

Abstract

In alignment with the conference theme, this panel asks what a decolonial, healing justice can look like in relation to therapeutic practice. The conversation between practitioners explores the implications of systemic oppression, both historical and contemporary and the possibilities for collective healing. It considers the multifaceted issue of language and/in therapy, modalities of indigenous healing as therapeutic resource and the successes and challenges of community-based interventions for collective trauma recovery and healing. Rejane Williams invites interrogation of the limitations of Northwestern-centric models of psychological intervention and explores the kinds of approaches needed to tend to the historical and ongoing wounds of generational alienation and trauma, including racial trauma. Dr Sipho Dlamini considers the value of indigenous language in the therapeutic context and what becomes possible in moving beyond the dominance of English towards a more socially just encounter in the therapy space. Drawing from experience of working at the interface of indigenous healing and psychotherapeutic practice, Gogo Thembelihle Mashigo explores how therapies of Umoya (Spirit) offer a process based on a multiplicity of being, beyond the individual. Berenice Meintjies shares vignettes from the work of Sinani, an organisation engaged with psychosocial interventions for recovery from violence, to describe the dilemmas of decolonizing and contextualizing healing approaches in community-based trauma interventions.

Global Indigenous Psychologies: Movement toward healing historical harms

Panelists: Prof Malose Langa, Dr Mmatshilo Motsei and Mr Anele Siswana
Chair: Prof Peace Kiguwa

Abstract 

There is an imperative for a psychology of healing and self-determination that considers the ubiquitous nature of trauma today. The marginalization of Indigenous approaches to trauma and healing remains a critical site to interrogate disconnections to rich traditions and practices of healing. In this panel dialogue, three speakers engage these dis/connections, with a view to reimagining healing, trauma’s complex hold on communities, and imaginations for a healing psychology. There is a recognition that healing is itself a complex process of renewal, recovery, and refusal; that addressing psycho-social effects of neoliberal economies that are complicit in the erosion of communities remains fundamental to wellbeing, and that trauma as disconnection is political in form. The question of how we engage these entanglements is the concern of the speakers in the panel. Speaking from their respective practices as practitioners, activists and scholars, the speakers address themselves to the questions of trauma, community building, and healing. In turning to indigenous psychologies, they also address alternate rich traditions and approaches to healing that psychology as profession may do well to attend to.

2023 CONGRESS CALL

Between Psychological Practice and Psychosocial Praxis: Southern Standpoints on Radical Hope and Healing

We are pleased to announce the upcoming conference on the theme Between Psychological Practice and Psychosocial Praxis: Southern Standpoints on Radical Hope and Healing.

Colonialism as a global system of suffering has meant that the vast majority of those in the Global South have endured unprecedented scales of psychic, material and cultural suffering. At the same time, those in the South have also practiced radical kinds of psychosocial healing that are attuned to the structural nature of colonial wounding. As such, in the context of the South, there is a rich history of radical thought and action that fuses together resistance and generativity. As central to this history, hope and healing have been interminably connected to broader social issues, contexts and processes.  Today, we see the legacy of these radical iterations of hope and healing in the practices of social justice and transformative action that are attuned to the realities of the present while also striving towards and experimenting with future possibilities for emancipation.

Psychologies that root themselves in these histories of hope and healing commit to fostering the kinds of critical consciousness fundamental to catalysing transformative action from within Southern standpoints and realities. These psychologies acknowledge the socio-historical and cultural contexts of the collectives and individuals whom they endeavour to serve, and are thus in alignment with the decolonial shift that foregrounds indigenous ways of doing and knowing. It is, therefore, from within and in response to the interlocking structural crises of our moment that we find psychosocial praxes attuned to hope and healing; praxes that take seriously the inhumane histories that shape our structurally violent present and that move towards a yet-to-be realised future that recognises the flourishing of all humanity.

Deriving from the dialectics of historical and contemporary crises and apprehensions, the undeniable wounding that marks the social order, and current liberatory resurgences in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South, the 27^th Annual South African Psychology Congress seeks to centre and inscribe critical and emancipatory movements, possibilities and imperatives within the science, practice and profession of psychology. The Congress Scientific Committee invites submissions from practitioners, scholars, researchers, educators, students, community organisers, activists and policymakers that engage and contribute to psychologies that are rooted in disciplinary critiques and directed towards Southern-centric articulations, applications, reflexivities and praxes. The Committee encourages both conventional and non-traditional submissions across the different areas of psychology.

The 27^th Annual South African Psychology Congress will be held at Emperors Palace, Johannesburg, South Africa from the 4^th to 6^th October 2023. 

PsySSA looks forward to receiving your submissions and to your participation in this important annual event.