Session 1

Social justice perspective: “Social Justice refers to the view that everyone deserves equal rights,
opportunities, and treatment regardless of their race, economic status, sexuality, or gender identity.”

Non-racialism: refers to the denial of the existence of race.

● “Denial of the salience or even the existence of the concept 'race' and also tendencies to organise
on the basis of race essentialism are examined. It is accepted that race does not exist at an
ontological level, in that it is not required for the constitution of the human subject. But race does
exist historically and socially. To ignore its existence in addressing the question of non-racialism
would be to deny the validity of the experience of racial inequality.” - Raymond Suttner,
Understanding Non-racialism as an Emancipatory Concept in South Africa

Emotional labour: “Emotional labour strategies are techniques used to manage and express emotions in
a workplace. They include surface acting - modifying outward expressions, deep acting - adjusting
internal feelings, and emotional intelligence - understanding and handling personal and others' emotions.”

Social dominance theory: “SDT is a theory of social and intergroup relations that focuses on how people
develop hierarchy supporting belief structures as a support for institutional dominance. It involves studies
of who is likely to hold such attitudes, how they come to do so, and what are the ramifications for thought
and action”

“Consistent with the logic of social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001), most multiethnic
societies can be more accurately described as “Herrenvolk Democracies,” in which dominant ethnic/racial
groups exercise disproportionate control of the state, its symbols, and its institutions, and which function
for the disproportionate benefit of their own dominant constituents” (Sidanius et al, 2019).

“Sidanius et al. (1997) reasoned that one of the characteristics of Herrenvolk Democracies is an
asymmetrical interface between ethnic and national identities across the dominance hierarchy. This
asymmetry manifests by dominants experiencing a greater sense of ownership of, and identification with,
the nation and its sacred symbols than is the case for subordinates (Sidanius et al, 2019).

“This asymmetry manifests by dominants experiencing a greater sense of ownership of, and identification
with, the nation and its sacred symbols than is the case for subordinates (Sidanius et al, 2019). Because
the state functions for the disproportionate benefit of dominant ethnic groups, one should expect that
among dominants, there should be a more positive relationship between psychological identification with
one’s ethnicity and identification with the nation (Sidanius et al, 2019). In contrast, because the state
allocates less positive social value to subordinates, among them, one should observe a less positive or
even a negative relationship between ethnic and national identities (Sidanius et al, 2019). This is referred
to as ideological asymmetry (Sidanius et al, 2019).”

“Given the 1994 transition from a state in which political power rested exclusively in the hands of South
African Whites, into a political regime based on majority rule, and, thus, largely in the hands of South
African Blacks, and using the Cuban case as a model, there is at least some reason to expect reverse
asymmetry in the interface between ethnic and national identities in South Africa. This is to say that one
might expect a stronger relationship between one’s ethnic/racial and national identification among Blacks
than among Whites. However, if the egalitarian dis- course of the “Rainbow Nation” is determinative, one
should expect a symmetrical interface between racial and national identities across the South African
racial hierarchy such that the connection between one’s ethnic/racial and national identities are equally
strong across all major ethnic/racial groups (Sidanius et al, 2019).”

Herrenvolk: to be innately superior to others (as displayed during Nazi Germany).

Pauperisation: the process of making a person or group of people very poor; impoverishment.

Slides will be posted before class - engagement with the reading materials

Class notes

Assignment 1

Questions: 7-10 questions - with potential probing questions.

Look at the instructions for the written report as to what information is required from the interview on
diversity

Session 2

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” - Audre
Lorde

● We occupy multiple social identities at any point in time - we are not just our race, sex, gender,
sexuality or our religion, all these identities work together to inform our experience and navigate
our social world
● Various systems of oppression work together and don’t exist in isolation e.g. racism works with
sexism, heteronormativity etc.
Social identities:
● Race
● Gender
● Socio-economic status
● Sexuality
● Religion
● Age
● (Dis) Ability
● HIV status
● Nationality
● Citizenship Status
● Skin Colour
 ● Geographic Location
● Etc.
Forms of Oppression:
● Racism
● Colonisation
● Colourism
● Sexism
● Transphobia
● Classism
● Homophobia
● Heterosexism
● Ageism
● Xenophobia
● Ethnocentrism
● Etc.
Social Structures: - Perpetuates forms of oppression
● Politics
● Globalisation
● Capitalism
● Education
● Immigration systems
● Historical forces
● Economies
● Legal systems
● Media
● Etc.

Feminist intersectionality and the matrix of domination in South Africa

● Intersectionality refers to the interlocking relations of dominance of multiple social, political,

cultural and economic dynamics of power that are determined simultaneously by identity
categories of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability and others (Gouws, 2017).
○ How different social identities such as race, gender, class, disability, sexuality and others
intersect with each other - how lived identities are experienced as interlocked with
systems of oppression that are mutually constitutive and reinforcing/ simultaneous
entanglement of inequalities.
● Mutually constitutive refers to how people experience these multiple aspects of identity
simultaneously and the meanings of different aspects of identity are shaped by one another.
● Subjectivities and experience.
● Intersectionality can be understood as a critical lens on epistemology, a need to challenge
scientific traditions and a demand for the decolonisation of knowledge production (the exclusion
of black people and women as knowers and producers of knowledge), as well as the creation of
counter-hegemonic knowledge.
● Hegemonic: ruling or dominant in a particular context.
● Counter-hegemonic: an attempt to critique or dismantle hegemonic power; it is the confrontation
or the opposition to the existing status quo.
● Contextualise: place or study in context.
● Concept of feminist intersectionality, first coined and used by Kimberle Crenshaw to describe the
problems that black women experience with law. E.g. The experiences of black men determine
the parameters of anti-racist strategies and the experience of white women that is foregrounded in
the women’s movement.
● The concept in relation to feminist literature was initially used to critique radical feminism’s
essentialisation of identities (e.g. that all women experience discrimination in the same way),
prioritising gender to the exclusion of other markers of identity.
● May (2015:34) argues that the following aspects of the multifaceted quality of intersectionality
are often not dealt with:
○ Its epistemological practice: Challenging existing knowledge and interrogating gaps and
silences as a socially located, political practice;
○ Its ontological dimension: It accounts for complex subjectivity and reconceptualises
agency to include privilege and oppression simultaneously;
○ Its coalitional political orientation that is grounded in solidarity rather than sameness; and
○ It's a resistant imaginary that disrupts dominant social imagination and contests
single-axis thinking.
● From the above discussion it becomes clear that intersectionality deals with issues of difference
and sameness simultaneously in a form of liberatory praxis, if used correctly. What is less clear is
what the basis of solidarity is when the intersection of different identity categories locates people
differentially in relation to power and privilege.
● “Oppression Olympics” with groups competing for the acknowledgement of being the most
oppressed.
● Othering
● By using the matrix of domination different identities of students operate in reinforcing ways in
relations of power, subordination, privilege and domination that are mutually constitutive.
Historical or political conditions create spaces for students to foreground or prioritise one or more
specific identities in order to resist forms of exclusion or othering in specific contexts. The main
ordering principle is, however, racial identity.
● Yuval-Davis (2006:195) argues that the essentialisation of identities as specific forms of
concrete oppression conflates the narrative of identity politics with descriptions of
positionality. It also constructs identities for the purposes of specific political projects (in
this case the decolonisation project). What this does is to render invisible nonconforming
experiences, creating a hegemonic ‘right way’ of being members.
● How pain positions the subjects of colonial experience as oppressors and as the oppressed in a
postcolonial society needs to be interrogated to understand how historical processes produced
certain dynamic intermeshing of identities in tertiary education.
● Identities have to be connected to a liberating praxis in order to move us beyond identity politics.
● Levine-Rasky (2013:243) maintains that “multiple, fragmented, and shifting identities signify the
contradictory positions of oppression and domination within it”. There are rarely pure victims or
pure oppressors. She suggests that using economic, political or other types of relations are better
 than using identities that reify difference itself, because identities are formed through social
relations.

‘Doing’ or ‘using’ intersectionality? Opportunities and challenges in incorporating intersectionality

into Open Access knowledge translation theory and practice

● Intersectionality argues identities such as gender, race, sexuality, and other markers of difference
intersect and reflect (macro-level) large social structures of oppression and privilege, such as
sexism, racism, and heteronormativity.
● Intersectionality represents an implicit critique of exclusion and erasure of difference.
Intersectionality argues that oppression and privilege can shift depending on the context, and that
all experiences of marginalisation are relevant.
● In the context of public health, Bowleg outlines three tenets of intersectionality: first, that social
identities are not independent but multiple and intersecting; second, people from historically
oppressed and marginalised groups are the focal point; and finally, intersectionality can help
reveal disparate health outcomes.
● Intersectionality foregrounds lived experiences and presumes that individuals may have a vastly
different experience of a health condition, service, or intervention mediated by their specific
identities.
● Reflexivity refers to the fact of someone being able to examine their own feelings, reactions, and
motives (= reasons for acting) and how these influence what they do or think in a situation.
● Knowledge Translation (KT) refers to the science and practice of changing behaviours to move
the findings of health research into health care settings.
● Cho, Crenshaw and McCall call us to think of intersectionality as an ‘analytical sensibility’ in
order to emphasise ‘what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is.’
● Conversely, Rice et al. argue that social justice is integral to using this concept: ‘Intersectionality
orients to social justice, so research utilising intersectional analysis must commit to justice in its
processes and knowledge production.’
● Women and gender studies training and research often includes an explicit commitment to
improving equity and social justice for women as well as other marginalised identities, and
connections to grassroots social justice movements.

Invited Reflection: Intersectionality Theory and Feminist Psychology

● Intersectionality theory was first developed by Black feminists Kimberle

́Crenshaw(1989,1991)and Patricia Hill Collins (1990) as an analytical lens for theorising the
oppressions faced by women of colour in the United States. Crenshaw observed that Black
women in particular are located at the ‘‘crossroads’’ of ‘‘multiple oppressions.’’ A key insight of
intersectionality theory is that the social categories by which hierarchies are constructed
‘‘intersect.’’ That is, the categories are co-constitutive and synergistic; no category has a single,
fixed meaning. This insight serves as an admoni- tion against universalizing claims about women.
● ‘‘The phenomenon of intersectionality has been applied to specific client populations.’’
Expressions like this imply that some people have intersectionality and some people don’t. How
could that be? How could there be a person who does not inhabit multiple social categories, such
 as age, gender, and ethnicity? Further, intersectionality, at least as its originators (e.g., Collins,
1990; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) intended it, is not an attribute of individuals. It is a way of
characterising the system of social stratification. Intersectionality theory focuses on the
intersecting categories upon which such systems are built. In short, people are not
intersectional, social categorisations are.
● Intersectionality theory, however, goes a step further than issuing a plea to acknowledge and
examine diversity among women; it urges us to interrogate the matrix of social categories
and hierarchical structures that upholds relations of oppression and domination.

Class notes

Concept Paper Part 1:

Questions 1,4,5 - no theoretical input
Questions 2,3 - theory needed - should be your starter pack for paper - theoretical framework - can’t be
bombarded with theory - individual academic needs to come through

Fear of the unknown

Single-view around issues
What is the narrative, what is the agenda, who is pushing it?

Session 3

Has democracy led to the demise of racism in South Africa? A search for the answer in Gauteng
schools

● The effects of apartheid, colonialism and imperialism are deeply entrenched in most people.
● Dispensation refers to a political, religious, or social system prevailing at a particular time.
● The first multi-racial election 1994 - saw the passing of legislation which intended to bring major
transformation in the education system - the ANC govt. adopted the principles of equality, redress
and access, which was considered crucial to any transformation of the education sector.
● However, the ANC has warned that educational problems are deep rooted and there are no easy or
quick-fix solutions.
● Adherence to the principles of equality, redress and access saw the development of a single
education department to replace the multiplicity of race-based national and so-called homeland
departments that had characterised apartheid.
● Definition of racism: . A slightly more helpful definition for this study is in the Early Years
Trainers’ Anti-Racist Network Manual (1994:9), of an unjust situation, in which a group because
of its unequal place in society, suffers from a persistent pattern of prejudice, exclusion, injustice,
discrimination and disadvantage which are slow to change and rooted deep in the institutions and
structure of society and in people’s psyches.
● For Lane (1999), racism may include practices and procedures that discriminate against people as
a result of their colour, culture and/or ‘race’ or ethnicity, with the term ‘race’ being seen as a
social and political construct linked to power, status, wealth and social position (Derman-Sparks
and Phillips, 1997). Turning the process of definition on its head, McLaren and Torres (1999)
 argue that racism is an ideology that produces the concept ‘race’, and it is not the existence of
‘races’ that produces racism.
● Individuals become racist because the structures, practices and values of the institution, and
the society in general, are racist.
● Structural racism thus occurs as a result of the way society is structured and the way power is
positioned.
● Institutional racism can occur when long-established practices and procedures, whether official
or unofficial, combine with thoughtless (usually unconscious) prejudice, negligence, stereotyping
and cultural assumptions to produce discrimination.
● Overt racism refers to openly expressed explicit pronouncements for instance discriminatory
rulings, blatantly prejudicial attitudes and in schools, name-calling and bullying.
● Personal racism refers to beliefs, thoughts and feelings that some groups are inferior and
insignificant in comparison to others. These values have been learned or internalised either
directly (through negative experiences), or indirectly through imitation of, and modelling by,
others.
● Interpersonal racism refers to behaviour towards other groups, given personal attitudes, values
and beliefs.
● Internalised inferiority or superiority.
● Cultural racism refers to a belief that a particular group has a better or superior way of doing
things, that is the right way of doing something; cultural heritage and values.
● The roots of behaviour and feelings are embedded in the major socialising influences that
individuals have been exposed to since birth: family, school, media and peers.
● Ngugi (1986:128) argues that ideology, which is a whole system of symbols, images, beliefs,
feelings, thoughts and attitudes by which individuals explain the world and their place in it,
becomes cultural practice.

The continuing salience of race: Discrimination and diversity in South Africa

● Apartheid project entailed 3 board objectives:

○ Ideological: maintain racial purity preventing the mixing or dilution of white blood -
racial segregation.
○ Privileged economic position: reserved land for white ownership and better-paid
occupations - discriminatory education; privileged family backgrounds.
○ Political dominance - restrict political rights of black people to the native
reserves/homelands; remove coloured voters from voter rolls.
● Apartheid entrenched racialised identities and fostered racial division at the same time as
exacerbating inequality in the distribution of income.
● South Africans still see society in racialised terms.
● Whilst almost all South Africans use racial categorisation in everyday life, it seems to be only
white South Africans who hold onto biological conceptions of race. This is, in part, because white
South Africans like white people in many other contexts take their culture for granted.
Culturally, whiteness is invisible to most white people (Steyn 2001). African people are much
more conscious of their cultural distinctiveness, that is, of speaking different languages at home,
often attending different churches, and perhaps above all retaining distinctive beliefs about, for
 example, ancestors, witchcraft (see Ashforth 2005) and family (Russell 2003). The end of
apartheid has also been accompanied by a resurgence of coloured identity. Under apartheid,
coloured identity was defined by the intermediate status of coloured people in the racial
hierarchy: aspirations to assimilation into white society and fears of relegation to the status of
African people combined with widespread feelings of shame as well as marginality.
● After apartheid, a racialised conception of ‘colouredness’ has grown stronger, with renewed
affinities to whiteness and deepened racism towards African people (Adhikari 2006).
● It would be more appropriate to view South Africa economically in terms of 3 nations: the almost
entirely African poor, the mostly African working classes, and the multi-racial middle classes and
elites - economic stratification.
● Deracialisation of education; labour market; discriminatory post-apartheid policies of affirmative
action = growth of the African middle class - 2003 Black Economic Empowerment Act.
● Old white elite and emerging black elite.
● In post-apartheid South Africa - class is increasingly important.
● Race retains its central position in identities and culture.
● Post-apartheid - few South Africans enjoy much or are exposed to inter-racial contact.
● Resilience of race - residential segregation has hardly changed since the transition to democracy -
South African towns and cities began to desegregate, racially in the 1990s - pace of desegregation
is very slow - mono-racial neighbourhoods.
● Choices about where to live are severely limited by economic inequalities.
● Lower middle class - combination of upwardly mobile and downwardly mobile.
● Preserving the white identity in previously segregated schools - schools highly racialized.
● The perception of whiteness.

Class notes

For written report assessment 1

Questions for interview:

What are the issues, challenges and complexities surrounding the diversity issue
How did it impact the participant? Supportive? Unsupportive?
Bullet 1 and bullet 3 - solutions towards the issue that the challenges represent
Analyse what you’re picking up from the narrative - what is this participant expressing to you - negative
or positive narrative e.g. defeatist? How has it impacted the participant?

Session 4

In our culture, in our gender: Implications of the culture/gender interface for

South African psychotherapists

- Relationship between gender and culture - respecting both multicultural and feminist principles
and values
- Cultural ascriptions of maliciousness or murderousness - cultural beliefs potentially jeopardise
gender rights, mental health and therapeutic recovery.
- Ascription refers to the action of regarding a quality as belonging to someone or something.
- Intrapsychic refers to being or occurring within the psyche, mind, or personality.
- The practice of psychotherapy brings both client and therapist into close proximity with
potentially competing values, beliefs and ideologies.
- Africanisation and traditional african beliefs and practices; ‘African’ life and identity
- Hegemony - western/Eurocentric ideas in academia continue to be contested.
- Invocation of respect for ‘cultural’ values.
- ‘Race anxiety’ reflects worry about being culturally inappropriate or (eliciting accusations of
being) racist if they question or criticise particular practices.
- Culture should be understood as transforming and transformable.
- Conversational phrases like, “in my culture” used predominantly by black African South Africans
have come to represent a statement of legitimacy and an expectation of acceptance and tolerance.
- The danger that cultural relativism can justify the continuing oppression of women in “the name
of culture and tradition”.
- A central concern has been the lack of problematisation of ‘whiteness’ and observations that in
writing about tensions between cultural and gender rights there is often a failure to recognise that
feminism also continues to tackle oppressive practices justified in the name of westernised
‘culture’.
- Tradition or custom often referenced as ‘culture’ continues to marginalised women as subjects.
- It should be remembered that gender oppressive practices are not limited to so-called traditional
groups and that gender problematic cultural warrants operate in a number of settings, such as in
the courts and in political discourse .
- Interrogate how the personal is political within a particular set of complex relationships.
- Psychodynamic therapy focuses on unconscious processes as they are manifested in the client's
present behaviour. The goals of psychodynamic therapy are client self-awareness and
understanding of the influence of the past on present behaviour.
- Transference is when someone redirects their feelings about one person onto someone else.
During a therapy session, it usually refers to a person transferring their feelings about someone
else onto their therapist. Countertransference is when a therapist transfers feelings onto the
patient.
- Cultural practices are in many instances designed to promote well-being and to foster group
cohesion and a sense of belonging but can paradoxically imply accepting the interpellation of
oneself as being malevolent, leading to social ostracisation and internal conflict.
- Cultural location.
- Cultural point of reference.
- Cultural attributions.
- Cultural sympathy.
- Culturally informed constructions.
- Client autonomy, mental state of the newly traumatised, vulnerability to suggestibility and
unconscious associations.
- It has been well documented that traumatised clients may present as regressed in their cognitive
functioning and may be uncharacteristically dependent upon others for decision making and
 support - coupled with this kind of cognitive disorganisation is a high degree of suggestibility to
others interpretation of events (including those from their therapists) - traumatised individuals
may draw upon frameworks of understanding characteristic of earlier stages of maturation -
which may previously have been inactive.
- “Within the body of writing about gender and multiculturalism several authors adopt the
perspective that it is important to foreground intersectionality (Bredstro ̈ m, 2006; Burman, 2004;
Crenshaw, 1991), i.e. to understand that identity positions within individuals and groups are
multiple and intersecting, making it difficult to give priority to one dimension over others in any
fixed way.”
- Liberal multiculturalism tends to reify and idealise cultural forms. Critical multiculturalism
advocates for sensitivity to the fluidity of identity and an awareness of the multiple vectors at play
in occupying subject positions in particular contexts and moments.

Cultural Embeddedness of Health, Illness and Healing: Prospects for Integrating Indigenous and
Western Healing Practices

Session 9

● Are you making assumptions?

● Learning how to write critically, question the research you have found - confirmation bias -
acknowledge that the research that you have found confirms your beliefs on the subject.