Ronelle CarolissenStellenbosch University | SUN · Department of Educational Psychology
Ronelle Carolissen
DPhil (Psychology)
About
45
Publications
17,787
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629
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
April 2010 - present
Publications
Publications (45)
Despite the growing interest in student volunteerism, few students volunteer, and volunteer organisations struggle to retain those who do. We explore motivating factors, expectations, and demotivating factors as they relate to retention in student volunteerism Participants were selected from six volunteer projects associated with three South Africa...
Recent psychology scholarship has engaged topics of decoloniality, from conferences to journal publications to edited volumes. These efforts are examples of the decolonial turn, a paradigm shift oriented to interrupting the colonial legacies of power, knowledge, and being. As critical community psychologists, we contend that decoloniality/decoloniz...
Shame has typically been understood as a negative emotion, a view which is prevalent in individualist, psychologising discourses about human experience. Elspeth Probyn's approach to shame departs significantly from these tropes. As interviewers, we share a common interest in feminist ethics and productive affects in teaching and scholarship. Hence,...
Research suggests that the desire to help others (value) and learning interpersonal skills (understanding) are core reasons for student volunteerism. Interpretations of such reports often minimise the role of contextual factors in shaping volunteer motives. This study considers the policy and institutional contexts that advocate for community engag...
Citizenship and social justice have been explored from ethical and theoretical perspectives in education. Furthermore, alienation or belonging in institutional cultures, often invoking social locations such as gender and race, were explored. Little research, especially empirical research, exists at the nexus of narrative, citizenship, belonging and...
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 com...
Normative discourses about higher education institutions may perpetuate stereotypes about institutions. Few studies explore student perceptions of universities and how transformative pedagogical interventions in university classrooms may address institutional stereotypes. Using Plumwood’s notion of dualism, this qualitative
study analyses unchallen...
This chapter seeks to describe the history of community psychology in different regions of the world by focusing on key intellectual connections and important catalysts to the field’s development. However, describing community psychology development around the globe brings a unique set of challenges, the first being how to describe the rich history...
Reconceptualizing trauma has been the focus of many academic debates since conceptualizations of trauma typically are decontextualized and tend to focus on environments where safety now exists. This trend therefore has generated literature that conceptualizes trauma in more complex ways, where mental health sequelae appear to straddle a range of co...
Much of South African psychology has pursued the national imperative of critical engagement and reconstruction since 1994, in spite of collusion with Apartheid ideologies before 1994. Critical psychologists who mobilised against apartheid were also active post-1994 in reshaping the discipline and profession. Many of these efforts were directed towa...
Issues of social inclusion and difference within the co-curriculum are crucial. This article draws on themes central to a critical feminist framework of social inclusion and citizenship in HE to argue that the way in which co-curricular opportunities are traditionally structured at universities may exclude those students who are marginalised. It al...
There is a paucity of South African literature that uses feminist critical approaches as a conceptual
tool to examine intersections of social justice and citizenship. This article aims to address this gap by
examining the potential of critical feminist approaches to transform conceptions of citizenship in higher
education. It outlines how tradition...
This article argues that given the pernicious ways in which processes of globalization may be counter‐transformative for psychology as a discipline, it is important to consider which preventative mechanisms could be employed to engage psychological understandings of globalization in socially just and transformative ways. The notion of “belonging” a...
Dominant discourse about race in post-1994 South Africa foregrounds unifying
concepts such as the rainbow nation, suggesting widespread debate about inclusion
and accommodation of difference. Popular discourse also suggests that post-1994
South African children are ‘born free’ and experience few impacts of the legislated
inequity in apartheid South...
In the United States first-generation students (FGSs), those who are the first in their families to attend university, are recognised as disadvantaged and receive government support. Amidst affirmative action debates in higher education in South Africa, an increased awareness has emerged about challenges that FGSs in this country face. A systematic...
The notion of a pedagogy of hope has been conceptualised and symbolised as a significant conciliatory and propelling vision for the University of Stellenbosch. Yet few representations of hope engage with the historical and theoretical roots of this notion. These perspectives are crucial to understand in order to provide a foundation on which to bui...
The term “community” holds historical connotations of political, economic, and social disadvantage in South Africa. Many South African students tend to interpret the term “community” in ways that suggest that community and community psychology describe the experiences of exclusively poor, black people. Critical pedagogies that position the teaching...
There is little research exploring poverty amongst university students, which renders poverty on university campuses invisible. This study aims to begin to understand experiences and constructions of poverty among university students. The qualitative study design uses open-ended, in-depth interviews in which four students from a university in the W...
The paper describes a collaborative curriculum development project implemented over 3 years at 2 universities in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The project involved a short module in which students in their fourth year of study interacted and learnt collaboratively across the boundaries of institution, discipline, race and social class,...
This article reports on an interdisciplinary and collaborative educational module prepared for fourth‐year Psychology and Social Work students at two higher education institutions in the Western Cape, South Africa. The aim of the module was to provide students with the opportunity to experience learning across the boundaries of institution, discipl...
A key problematic in any post‐conflict society is how to account for the injustices of the past, while at the same time making a space for the development of a shared future. In South Africa, there is an increasing demand for health and social service workers, who are required to address the impact of an unjust past upon individuals and communities...
Despite desegregation, and educational policies calling for increased inclusivity in higher education, students in South Africa generally continue to have homogenous social and learning experiences. This article reports on a collaborative student learning community across three disciplines at two universities. The e-learning project aimed to provid...
Online learning is increasingly being used in Higher Education, with a number of advantages to online learning being identified.
One of these advantages is the suggestion that online learning provides for equality of opportunity. This article reports
on students’ evaluations of the use of e-learning in a collaborative project between two South Afri...
The question of what constitutes ‘a community’ or even ‘the community’ takes on an extra salience in a divided society such as South Africa where the entire environment remains imprinted with the legacy of enforced segregation along racial lines. Higher education institutions need to prepare emerging health and social service students for the world...
Fourth year students in psychology and social work from two South African universities worked together across boundaries of race and class in a course which required them to engage in a personal reflexive way with issues of community and identity. A combination of face-to-face workshops and online tutorial groups was used. The course was demanding...
The literature in psychology repeatedly hints at identity representation as important in transforming the discipline of psychology in contemporary South Africa. It simultaneously names curriculum, race and gender as areas of silence within the discipline. These literatures coexist with the reality that few psychologists work in public health servic...
South Africa, after decades of apartheid, continues to be a highly segregated society. Higher education institutions need to prepare students for work in such a divided society. Recent work on inter-group contact has stressed the importance of taking into account people's interpretation and meanings about contact in particular contexts, and the nee...
The terms "community" and "community psychology" need to be examined within the context of human diversity in order to understand the apparent marginalisation of community psychology in South Africa. Community psychology might be marginalized as the term "community" tends to be associated with black, poor individuals. Current teaching practices in...
The values which underlie a social program, and the ways in which they are realized in the program itself, are often left unspecified by the program planners. Two procedures to give practical effect to social values in a community health project are discussed in this paper: careful and systematic assessment of need; and community participation and...
This paper describes the use of community mapping as a participatory learning action (PLA) technique in a cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary higher education context. A group of higher education academics from historically advantaged and disadvantaged institutions in South Africa formed a community of practice to devise, implement and resea...
Projects
Projects (4)
PIs, Professors Relebohile Moletsane and Reitu Mabokela (joined by co-PIs Ronelle Carolissen, Nonhlanhla Mthiyane, Saajidha Sader, and Assata Zerai) are undertaking a collaborative a four-year project in collaboration between the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Durban Institute of Technology, Stellenbosch University, in South Africa, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) to explore the broad effects that neoliberalism has on gender and curriculum transformation in higher education. The overall aim is: 1) to explore the extent to and ways in which gender influences the research and curriculum development and leadership capacities of women academics in institutions of higher education in South Africa and the United States; and 2) to create a community of practice that will involve a network of women academics to collaboratively develop scholarship on the nature and influence of gender and neoliberalism on their research and teaching capacities.
This research project is intended to contribute to current concerns about inequities regarding curriculum and participation in higher education by opening and developing spaces, both face-to-face and online, where academics/researchers from diverse disciplines and geopolitical contexts - not only in South Africa, but also in other participating regions (e.g. the EU and other countries, such as Cyprus, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States) - can imaginatively and creatively engage with the entanglement of different theoretical perspectives, texts and data in order to reconceptualise socially just pedagogical practices in higher education.
Main question:
How might socially just pedagogical practices in higher education be re-conceptualised and disseminated using contemporary theories across different disciplinary and geopolitical locations?
Sub-questions:
- How could using theoretical tools such as new feminist materialist and critical posthuman perspectives provide new insights for re-conceptualising and conducting socially just pedagogies in higher education?
- How could relational ontologies such as the political ethics of care and feminist posthumanist ethics be diffractively read through each other to develop new insights into practising socially just pedagogies in higher education?
- What are the political implications of these theoretical frameworks for socially just pedagogies?
- How might we disseminate ideas about socially just pedagogies to achieve participatory parity in the distribution of ideas?
- How could transdisciplinarity and geopolitical diversity be used to reconceptualise transformative higher education pedagogies?
- What contributions might post-qualitative research methods make towards the scholarship, theory and practice of socially just pedagogies in higher education?
