Shahnaaz Suffla

• D.Phil
• Professor at University of South Africa

Police officers in the South African Police Service (SAPS) undertake their police work within national, institutional, and personal discourses. Together, these discourses create different, often contradictory, police subjectivities. Resultantly, research on policing in South Africa is increasingly concerned with these subjectivities and the context...

Three decades have passed since South Africa’s formal transition from apartheid to liberal democracy. This milestone signified a triumph of hope over despair for a country that had struggled under a suffocating system of racist, dehumanising oppression since its colonisation in the seventeenth century. Reflecting this zeitgeist, divisions, and comp...

To mark the 30th anniversary of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA), 11 of PsySSA’s past presidents, along with two facilitators, gathered in early 2024 for a roundtable discussion on psychology in South Africa. This article represents an edited transcript of that conversation. The guiding motif of the discussion – looking backwards,...

Background Circumstances of child sexual abuse (CSA) have been identified as an important knowledge tool to address interventions for prevention Worldwide. Despite CSA is described as reason of great concern and has been broadly investigated in high income countries, the scenario in Low-income countries, in Africa, particularly, remains underreport...

Coloniality structures everyday (i.e. the familiar, dynamic experiences that constitute people’s day-to-day lives). It is, however, possible to build decolonial peace into the everyday as a means of slowly eroding coloniality from within. In this article, we draw on our collaboration with a community-led gender justice collective based in Johannesb...

Critical psychosocial interventions aim to improve and maintain well-being by addressing the individual and the social as a single psychosocial entity. Critical psychosocial interventions can assist in developing a holistic and context-sensitive understanding of suffering which can inform how suffering is addressed. As such, critical psychosocial i...

Researchers have played a significant role in influencing the public’s critical engagement with the South African Police Service (SAPS). Resultantly, SAPS officers tend to be wary and/or untrusting of researchers. In the present study, we sought to understand how this climate of suspicion impacts policing research in South Africa. To do so, we empl...

This article provides a conceptual introduction to the second installment of a two‐issue collection of work on decolonial approaches to the psychological study of social issues. Whereas papers in the first installment consider decoloniality as a social issue for psychological study, papers in this second installment consider psychology as a site fo...

This edited collection was inspired by the presentations given at the sixth International Conference on Community Psychology (ICCP) held in Durban, South Africa in 2016. The conference was co-hosted by two of the editors of this collection, Shahnaaz Suffla and Mohamed Seedat. The 2016 conference was the first ICCP to be hosted on African soil and a...

This edited volume in the Community Psychology Book Series emphasizes applications of community psychology for disrupting dominant and hegemonic power relations. The book explores domains of work that are located within critical community psychology, as well as work that is conventionally not self-defined as community psychology but which draws on...

We offer a critical reading of Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech to illustrate how he foregrounded humaning, namely onto-epistemological recovery, as a key dimension of psycho-political reconstruction. Mbeki’s speech, delivered on the occasion of the adoption of South Africa’s democratic Constitution, was inherent to the larger quest to (re)im...

Our analysis of the state of violence prevention in the country is based on a thematic content analysis of abstracts submitted for the First South African National Conference on Violence Prevention. A description of the constituent features of interventions, as well as the theoretical and evaluative assumptions that underlie them, is useful for ide...

Against the backdrop of the global pandemic, which has deepened existing global struggles against coloniality and racist, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist social formations, this special issue focuses on Fanon, Southern Theory, and Psychoanalysis: Dialogues on Race, Gender, and Sexuality. In dialogue with the work of Frantz Fanon—a key figure in t...

Coloniality continues to invade the psychomaterial lives of the condemned. Invoking psychoanalysis and phenomenology to engage with modern psychopathologies and race, gender, and sexuality, Fanon developed seminal ideas on social suffering in the context of colonial violence on psychic life. In reading Fanon, we discern two challenges: the decoloni...

In this chapter, we argue that the quest for decolonised community psychologies must necessarily engage with multiple knowledge archives. We draw on select historiographic accounts of Africa to invoke Africa’s archives and their attendant paradigmatic traditions. Our engagements with these archives signify at once onto-epistemic rupture as a counte...

Home visitation is an intervention approach for families at risk of poor child outcomes. Negative outcomes include malnutrition, the risk of unintentional injuries, and child maltreatment, to mention a few. The effectiveness, appropriateness, and feasibility of Home Visitation Programmes (HVPs) remain under-researched in middle-to low-income settin...

Critical realism can unsettle a number of orthodoxies that surround the study of community violence within community psychology. This is to say, because critical realism is embraced so rarely by community psychologists, it can institute a parallax shift within the discipline, whereby we are granted alternative ways of perceiving violence within com...

Coloniality represents the contemporary patterns of power and domination that emerged in the late 15th century during the so-called classic era of colonialism. Although much of psychology and psychological thought has adhered to the logic of coloniality, there is also a considerable body of work that has sought to decolonize psychology. It is withi...

Politically violent women are regularly muted or made exceptional. Yet, underplaying women’s involvement in political violence obscures the systemic nature of such violence. We employ a discursive psychology analysis of an in-depth interview with a South African woman who has been involved in decades of political activism, and identified two discou...

The manner by which power is reified through newspaper reporting can assist community psychologists in getting a handle on the complex, often contradictory, ways by which ideology and power are constituted in relation to particular communities. Accordingly, the present study draws on discursive psychology to analyse how 377 newspaper articles const...

Departing from the position that critical African psychology is an endeavour whose objective is to harness psychological knowledge in, by, for, and with Africa, as well as the world, but also to critically think Africa into psychology, this article considers space as a key idea to consider in the further development of African psychology, and more...

The universalization of Western peace frameworks, which remain discursively tethered to liberal notions of freedom, markets, democracy and justice, continues to be the subject of critique in the peace and conflict literature. These critiques lay bare the imposition of Western power at the ideological and instrumental levels, patent disregard for lo...

Background: There is a paucity of research on homicidal strangulation by gender. Objectives: A sex-disaggregated and comparative research approach was used to investigate individual-level risk factors for female and male homicidal strangulation in Johannesburg, South Africa (2001 - 2010). Methods: Data were drawn from the National Injury Morta...

In a previous article we sought to clear up some of the conceptual confusion on African psychology whilst simultaneously engaging with what it entails to do a decolonising African psychology. We dealt with questions such as: Is African psychology identical to psychology in Africa? What is the main dispute between Africa(n)-centred psychology and Eu...

Oral history presents an especially effective way of exploring the multitudinous, contradictory, and contextual meanings that are attached to the notion of community. In this study, we argue for narrative‐discourse analysis as a critical means of studying contested community memories. We rely on focus group discussions and individual interviews to...

Protests, despite being democratically reified modes of civic participation, are often positioned as being at odds with the state’s policing and regulatory networks. In seeking to develop an understanding of the constitution of peaceful protests (which, despite being more common than those understood as violent, remain understudied) as well as so-c...

The racialised, classed and patriarchal coordinates of coloniality are observed in the various ways that social, material and psychological life in South Africa are articulated, enacted and understood. Accordingly, praxes for decolonial feminist community psychologies must consider not only the persisting symbolic and discursive iterations of colon...

South Africa has a considerable history of public protest from which a contemporary “culture of protest” has emerged. Despite the wide-ranging body of research on protest in South Africa, few studies have considered critically the discursive space in which researchers and participants are embedded. In this article, we use discursive psychology to e...

Public protests in (un)democratic polities, reflective of discursive articulations of resistance and material expressions of struggle, seek to disrupt prevailing unjust societal, political and cultural practices. The insurrectionist purposes of protests are often in contravention of public order regimens, which seek to regulate enactments of public...

Despite social consciousness-raising being a central tenet of Photovoice methodology, very little attention has been extended toward participants' capacities in this respect, beyond their engagement with their photo-stories. By drawing on an Egyptian case example, the chapter argues that by centering marginalized youth voice, Photovoice is able to...

Contemporary peace psychology is based on a consensus that the pursuit of sustainable peace requires the continuous crafting of harmonious and equitable human interactions and relations. The chapters in this volume are based on the 14th Biennial International Symposium on the Contributions of Psychology to Peace and address these twin foci of peace...

Through its thematic focus on Engaging Invited and Invented Spaces for Peace, the 14th International Symposium on the Contributions of Psychology to Peace sought to privilege voices from cultures and situations that are typically not included in dominant peace discourses and interrogate the hegemonic position of Western scholars as the principal ar...

This article serves as the introduction to the Special Issue on Liberatory and Critical Voices in Decolonising Community Psychologies. The Special Issue was inspired by the Sixth International Conference on Community Psychology, held in South Africa in May 2016, and resonates with the call for the conscious decolonisation of knowledge creation. We...

Inasmuch as stories have transformative potential through fostering a sense of agency, voice and mutual recognition, they also have destructive power by fuelling divides and restating otherness. What then gives a story, and by extension, the processes of storytelling and story listening the potential for healing, transformation, and (re)conciliatio...

Photovoice methodology has in recent years become an increasingly popular form of liberatory engagement within community-based participatory research (CBPR), especially in applications involving young people. In this chapter, we illustrate the liberatory potential of Photovoice as a praxis of epistemic correction and agency within contexts of domin...

This volume brings together pluriversal readings of emancipatory approaches to community and other reflexive engagements. In so doing, the book recognises the confluences between critical peace psychology and other critically derived psychologies. As an intersected collection of chapters on emancipatory engagements, the volume evokes what Pelias (2...

Dynamic violence and injury prevention interventions located within community settings raise evaluation challenges by virtue of their complex structure, focus, and aims. They try to address many risk factors simultaneously, are often overlapped in their implementation, and their implementation may be phased over time. This article proposes a statis...

Offering a unique set of case studies that invites readers to question and reimagine the concept of community engagement, this collected work provides an overview and analysis of numerous, creative participatory research methods designed to improve well-being at both the individual and societal level. In a world where there are enormous differences...

With the major goal of building an inclusive international community that promotes peace-related research and action, this volume reflects on local, national and global peace engagement and works towards transdisciplinary understandings of the role of psychology in peace, conflict, and violence. Drawn primarily from the 14th Biennial International...

Despite the immense communicative potential of visual methodologies, surprisingly few community-based research studies have meaningfully considered participants’ visual meaning-making processes. When working with youth participants from contexts with which researchers are unfamiliar, the use of visual methodologies and analyses is able to transcend...

Background Research concerning child safety within Africa is dominated by adult-centric linguistic-based research. Such research has radically individualised child safety and denies children any kind of agency in conceptualising their protection. Despite the immense communicative potential inherent within visual methodologies, very few community-ba...

Studies that provide accurate descriptions of the occurrence of fatal strangulation events are limited, both in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. The current study describes the extent and distribution of female and male homicidal strangulation in the City of Johannesburg for the period 2001-2010. The study is a register-based cross sectiona...

In the context of a call for public health research to address social challenges and transform communities and society, research translation has increasingly become an imperative in South Africa. Research translation seeks to improve real-world settings and enhance quality of life by applying research-generated knowledge. These goals are shared by...

Visual methods, eliciting the sensory and aesthetic dimensions of meaning-making, are inherent to participatory enactments of peace psychology. Visual methods recognize and contest the exclusionary influences of language-based modalities, and simultaneously imagine the research and associated development process as a participatory one. They create...

The performance of critical community psychologies is always contextual, intersubjective, embodied, and politicized in nature. In this article, we draw from the epistemological standpoint that researcher and participant subjectivities are fully implicated in the (co)-construction of knowledge and should therefore be documented and made retrievable....

In the aftermath of the 1980s legislation introduced under the "total strategy" of the South African government under then president PW Botha, critical social scientist groupings reflected on the intellectual and programmatic responses required to counter the racist and undemocratic policies of the time. Since the formal demise of these polices and...

The assessment of family functioning in child maltreatment prevention has led to a renewed emphasis on measures that are suitable for the assessment of this construct across contexts. Existing measures, predominantly developed and validated in Western countries, do not consistently conform to the South African context, which is typified by a range...

Background The development, implementation and evaluation of community interventions are important for reducing child violence and injuries in low- to middle-income contexts, with successful implementation critical to effective intervention outcomes. The assessment of implementation processes is required to identify the factors that influence effec...

South Africa’s unprecedented levels of violence, which trigger significant health, economic, and social consequences, are marked by pronounced gendered, age-related, and socio-economic features. Extensive poverty, prolonged unemployment and income inequality, gender inequality, patriarchal notions of masculinity, exposure to abuse in childhood and...

This article reviews community conversations as a community engagement tool within the South African context by exploring the perceptions of the conversation hosts. A focus group discussion was held with community conversation hosts to better understand the community conversation process and its community engagement value. Their reflections are rev...

Every child develops and grows at her/his own pace and in her/his own time through reaching the various developmental milestones. Children's growth and development do not occur in a linear fashion, but are influenced by each child's environment, nutrition and parental care. These factors play a critical role in a child reaching her/his full potenti...

Child maltreatment is a global problem with serious consequences. It affects the entire community as it does not only occur within the family context, but spills over into the community and broader society. Child maltreatment causes suffering to children and families and can have long-term negative consequences (WHO, 2010). These consequences inclu...

This article aims to describe Photovoice as a method and process of enacting community engaged research. The multi-dimensional nature of Photovoice is illustrated though a case application, focused on safety promotion in two South African low-income communities. Twenty youth, evenly distributed by gender and ranging in age from 13 to 15 years, were...

Safe Communities, representing a global activation of the public health logic, may be strengthened through theoretical, methodological and empirical support. In the spirit of this Special Issue that aims to analyse the achievements and challenges inherent to Safe Communities, we offer our contribution in the form of a methodology of a multi-country...

The public and academic focus on child maltreatment and neglect and their prevention has spawned a range of surveillance instruments and mechanisms intended to identify child maltreatment and measure its magnitude. While such surveillance responses are obviously important for the prevention and management of child maltreatment and neglect, there ap...

This article aims to describe Photovoice as a method and process of enacting community engaged research. The multi-dimensional nature of Photovoice is illustrated though a case application, focused on safety promotion in two South African low-income communities. Twenty youth, evenly distributed by gender and ranging in age from 13 to 15 years, were...

Community development is critical in South African and other low- to middle-income contexts characterised by unemployment, violence, poverty and poor infrastructure. The current asset-based trend in community research emphasises constructive community development and change through the mobilisation of existing and unrecognised community resources a...

The 9th Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion Conference was held in Melbourne, Australia, from 24 to 26 July 2009. This conference formed part of a series of conferences initiated in 1993 by the Monash University's Accident Research Centre (MOARC) in partnership with the Australian Injury Prevention Network and other agencies. Following collectiv...

The World Health Organization (WHO) designates 1 October each year as the International Day of the Older Person. As such, the University of South Africa (UNISA) Institute for Social and Health Sciences (ISHS) hosted two events - one in Eldorado Park and another in Lenasia, South Africa - to celebrate the day. Having recently developed and undertake...

The public and academic focus on child maltreatment and neglect and their prevention has spawned a range of surveillance instruments and mechanisms intended to identify child maltreatment and measure its magnitude. While such surveillance responses are obviously important for the prevention and management of child maltreatment and neglect, there ap...

Emerging out of a larger study whose main focus was to identify the risk and protective factors in male interpersonal violence, and based on analysis of local and global empirical and theoretical literature, the main aim of this article is to develop a conceptual foundation for understanding and preventing male interpersonal violence in South Afric...

The issue of peace and its drivers is central to erudition on Hind Swaraj and associated texts dealing with liberty, self-rule, world order and social integrity. In this article, we therefore aim to describe a specific articulation of peace, embedded in peace psychology and the Global Peace Index (GPI), which was first initiated in 2007 and subsequ...

In contemporary South Africa, collective violence remains a fundamental feature of the sociopolitical landscape. Sharing common characteristics with other forms of violence, collective violence is driven by specific social factors and is explicitly underpinned by a gendered dimension. In this article, we examine the dominant explanations that have...

Violence and injuries are the second leading cause of death and lost disability-adjusted life years in South Africa. The overall injury death rate of 157·8 per 100 000 population is nearly twice the global average, and the rate of homicide of women by intimate partners is six times the global average. With a focus on homicide, and violence against...

Violence and injuries are the second leading cause of death and lost disability-adjusted life years in South Africa. The overall injury death rate of 157.8 per 100,000 population is nearly twice the global average, and the rate of homicide of women by intimate partners is six times the global average. With a focus on homicide, and violence against...

based violence persists as a global public health problem. In 2000, there were an estimated 119 000 female homicides worldwide, for an overall age-adjusted rate of 8.8 per 100 000 population [1]. Of these, the majority of deaths occurred in low-to middle-income countries, with the highest number of female homicides reported for the African Region....

Female strangulation in South Africa occurs in a context of pervasive and often extreme violence perpetrated against women, and therefore represents a major public health, social and human rights concern. South African studies that provide accurate descriptions of the occurrence of strangulation incidents among female homicide victims are limited....

by D.J. Christie, R.V. Wagner and D. DuNann Winter (Editors) New Jersey, Prentice Hall Inc., 2001, 426 pp., ISBN 0-13-096821-8