Papers by Anthony Collins
Health SA Gesondheid, 2023
Background: Oncology nurses are involved through the often protracted and potentially traumatic c... more Background: Oncology nurses are involved through the often protracted and potentially traumatic continuum of diagnosis and treatment of their patients, which places them at high risk of developing compassion fatigue.
Aim: The aim of the study was to develop and implement an in-facility intervention to manage compassion fatigue among oncology nurses in Durban, South Africa.
Methods: The Self-Care Intervention for Oncology Nurses was developed and implemented using action research with a mixed methods sequential explanatory design. It involved an integrative review, Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) v 5 questionnaires (n = 83) and indepth individual interviews (n = 8).
Results: Developed from the fndings of the integrative review, quantitative and qualitative data, the Self-Care Intervention for Oncology Nurses comprised three components, namely psycho-education on risks (booklet), practices of remembrance (remembrance tree) and
support structures (support group and follow-up family call). Overall, the participants enjoyed reading the booklet and engaging in the support group. There were varied responses to the remembrance tree and hesitancy to partaking in the follow-up phone call.
Conclusion: The developed intervention could encourage awareness of compassion fatigue amongst oncology nurses’ engagement in self-care practices such as symbolic remembrance of patients and recognition of the value of support structures.
Contribution: The intervention may assist oncology nurses in the provision of compassionate caring for their patients and potentially minimise compassion fatigue.
Keywords: compassion fatigue; compassion satisfaction; oncology nurses; self-care; intervention.
While the deaths of Mlungisi Nxumalo and Lucky Sefali barely registered in the media and public c... more While the deaths of Mlungisi Nxumalo and Lucky Sefali barely registered in the media and public consciousness, they can be read as an exemplar of South African violence. The more closely we examine this incident, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between those fighting for justice, and those undermining it. The imagined boundaries between law-abiding citizen and criminal become unclear, as does the distinction between the use of force to protect citizens, and the use of violence to damage the social fabric. This leads to a critique of the conventional attributions of criminality and ideas about effective criminal justice, and instead reframes the problem of violence as one of the constructions of certain kinds of subjects, persons for whom the normalised exercise of various forms of unrecognised or legitimated violence is part of the texture of everyday life.
Journal of Consumer Culture
From 19th century romanticism to contemporary self-help culture, a popular philosophical thread h... more From 19th century romanticism to contemporary self-help culture, a popular philosophical thread has asserted, in apparent opposition to the rise of consumer culture, that it is better to focus on who you “really” are, rather than what you have. This paper uses a qualitative research design, social constructionist theoretical framework, and discourse analytic method, to critically discuss the discursive constructions of authenticity deployed by 15 South African artisanal/craft brands. This exploration highlights the tension between a purportedly critical version of authenticity- ostensibly offering an alternative to materialist hierarchies of social status and the manipulations of marketing (James, 2007) – and the increasing appearance of these discourses in lifestyle and marketing media. Here authenticity is offered precisely through personalised consumer options and participation in the dominant regime of consumption. The paper highlights the role that these contradictory discursiv...
SN Social Sciences
Social science research on health in South Africa tends to focus on illness and how to address he... more Social science research on health in South Africa tends to focus on illness and how to address health problems. Qualitative empirical research focussing on lay understandings and experiences of healthiness, or health discourses, in South Africa is fairly limited. This article addresses this gap by critically exploring how young South African adults used discourses of balance to make sense of what it means to be a healthy person and highlights the implications of these discourses for identity. Foucault's concepts of 'technologies of the self' and 'techniques of discipline' are discussed as a theoretical grounding for this paper. Data were collected from 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews, and analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis. This paper will specifically explore a key discourse identified through the analysis: 'health as balance' and 2 interrelated sub-discourses which fall within it. Through this discourse, healthiness was constructed as requiring a broad focus on improving all aspects of one's life ('health as holistic') and the avoidance of any behaviours or emotions which could be classified as extreme ('health as moderation'). Constant, careful management of the self, or 'calibration', functions to both perpetuate a cycle of 'anxiety and control' and to obscure ways in which health discourses can be harmful or problematic.
I declare that this dissertation is my own unaided work. All citations, references and borrowed i... more I declare that this dissertation is my own unaided work. All citations, references and borrowed ideas have been duly acknowledged. None of the present work has been submitted
Research and theory for nursing practice, 2018
In 1994, the Rwandan genocide claimed the lives of approximately 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hut... more In 1994, the Rwandan genocide claimed the lives of approximately 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutu citizens. Systematic rape was a strategic component of the Hutu extremist plan to eradicate the Tutsi minority population. This involved collective and repeated sexual assaults with brutal violence, public humiliation, and torture. This article maps the ongoing psychological impact on Rwandan genocide rape survivors and identifies implications for international nursing practice. The research formalizes their narratives, identifying a number of interconnected elements that combine to produce myriad forms of chronic psychological suffering in the Rwandan context. This work in turn reveals the specific needs of these survivors that may be addressed by nursing. It allows nurses, as experts in managing the human responses to health and illness, to develop a more complete understanding of psychological suffering as it pertains to vulnerable populations during and in the wake of extreme socia...
Critical Psychology, 2004
... London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (2000). Language and neo-liberalism. Discourse and society, 1... more ... London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (2000). Language and neo-liberalism. Discourse and society, 11, 147-149. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. ... (Trans. R. Hurley). London: Penguin. (Original work published 1979). Foucault, M. (1991). In. ...
South African Journal of Psychology, 1997
Institutions tend to perpetuate themselves. In this, social psychology is certainly no different.... more Institutions tend to perpetuate themselves. In this, social psychology is certainly no different. We might then ask how the institutionalization of social psychology perpetuates the discipline in a particular form, and what alternatives are obscured, marginalized or excluded in that process. Social psychology: a critical agenda addresses precisely this question. From the outset it rejects the assumption that social psychology is simply a neutral enquiry into a particular aspect of human existence. It follows the poststructuralist technique of showing how the scientific ideal of the objective fact, untainted by the researcher's hand, collapses under scrutiny, and instead argues that knowledge only exits within discourses narratives that organize meaning so as to produce what then show up as facts. The authors argue that social psychology should then be analysed not in terms ofthe scientific truth or falsity of any of its individual claims, but rather as a series of narratives that rely on certain rules and conventions, and exploit identifiable rhetorical tactics, in order to produce its meaningfulness. Social psychology relies on a set of concepts so completely naturalized that it is hard at first to think of them as emerging only within a specific cultural and historical context. Concepts such as the self, society, mind, body, biology and psychology emerge in the west at particular, and historically quite recent, points. Yet they have become so fundamental to our thought that it may seem impossible to think in different terms. The first step would be to acknowledge that these apparently obvious and universally valid concepts are in fact both historically specific and deeply problematic.
... psychology is interested in the theories themselves, exploring the effects of different assum... more ... psychology is interested in the theories themselves, exploring the effects of different assumptions,ideas, concepts and interpretations ... to traditional knowledge is a challenge to those in power, and the questioning of ideas is the first step in asserting new values, new freedoms ...
African Safety Promotion, 2013
This study explores how female residence students at a South African university understand and ex... more This study explores how female residence students at a South African university understand and experience gender-based violence. This article examines how women’s identities and social interactions are affected by the presence of gender-based violence in their communities, and specifically the issue of violence in higher education institutions. Social constructionist theory framed this study as it focuses on how these women’s ‘talk’ constructed their understanding of gender-based violence. Unstructured interviews were conducted with 12 female residence students and discourse analysis was used to analyse the interview material. Findings revealed that the fear of becoming a victim of gender-based violence serves to constrict the daily activities of these women. This research maps these ongoing discourses of fear which are present in all aspects of women’s lives. It provides a formal articulation of women’s experiences that are significant but frequently marginalised and normalised, sh...
In his book, A Country at War with Itself, Antony Altbeker has highlighted that the extraordinary... more In his book, A Country at War with Itself, Antony Altbeker has highlighted that the extraordinary and dis tressing feature of crime in South Africa is not how common it is, but how violent. This analysis moves on from that point, arguing that rather than focusing on violent crime as a specific type of criminality, we should examine violence as a separate category that sometimes overlaps with crime and sometimes does not. This shift in focus reveals that it is not South African crime that is so violent, but South African society in general. It shows that many of these forms of violence are both legal and socially acceptable. This includes violence in childrearing, intimate relationships, education, sport, film and television, establishing social identities, and political negotiation, to name but a few significant areas. An examination of these popular and accepted forms of violence provides a revealing analysis of how these patterns are reproduced socially and psychologically, explai...
Psychology in Society, 2015
International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being
Purpose: Healthiness is constructed, in Western culture, as a moral ideal or supervalue. This pap... more Purpose: Healthiness is constructed, in Western culture, as a moral ideal or supervalue. This paper will interrogate the assumption that health and the pursuit of healthiness is always and unquestionably positive, by exploring how discourses of health and freedom interact to reinforce the current inequalities and detract from social transformation. Method: Twenty young South African adults were interviewed about their understandings and experiences of health. These discussions were analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis. Results: Participants constructed healthiness as facilitating the experience of freedom, while at the same time being dependent on a personal orientation towards freedom (as opposed to merely submitting to dominant health authorities). Freedom discourses also played a role in connecting health to neoliberal discourses idealizing economic productivity and hard work. Participants were able to construct a self that is active, productive, valuable, hopeful, and self-assured when talking about health using discourses of freedom. However, these discourses also functioned to moralise and idealise healthiness, which contributed to blaming poor health on its sufferers. Conclusion: Health/freedom discourses can further reinforce the neoliberal value of individual responsibility by constructing self-improvement and self-work as the solution to ill-health, thereby contributing to victim-blaming and weakening support for public health interventions.
Acta Academica
This article explores young South African women's constructions of the relationship between love ... more This article explores young South African women's constructions of the relationship between love and physical attractiveness. How these discourses are facilitated by an emerging South African consumer culture and the proliferation of mass media images which has accompanied this cultural change will also be discussed. This research took place among South African women between the ages of 18 and 25. Data was collected using focus groups and semistructured interviews and was analysed using discourse analysis. One of the common ideas structuring the young women's speech in the interviews and focus groups was the importance of physical attractiveness in romantic relationships both as a prerequisite for feelings of sexual desire and for subjective experiences of self-worth.
South African Crime Quarterly
In his book, A Country at War with Itself, Antony Altbeker has highlighted that the extraordinary... more In his book, A Country at War with Itself, Antony Altbeker has highlighted that the extraordinary and distressing feature of crime in South Africa is not how common it is, but how violent. This analysis moves on from that point, arguing that rather than focusing on violent crime as a specific type of criminality, we should examine violence as a separate category that sometimes overlaps with crime and sometimes does not. This shift in focus reveals that it is not South African crime that is so violent, but South African society in general. It shows that many of these forms of violence are both legal and socially acceptable. This includes violence in childrearing, intimate relationships, education, sport, film and television, establishing social identities, and political negotiation, to name but a few significant areas. An examination of these popular and accepted forms of violence provides a revealing analysis of how these patterns are reproduced socially and psychologically, explain...
ANS. Advances in nursing science, Jan 13, 2017
During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, rape was widely used as a strategic weapon against Tutsi women.... more During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, rape was widely used as a strategic weapon against Tutsi women. More than 20 years later, many of these women are still suffering devastating psychological, social, and physical effects of these experiences and remain in need of effective interventions that address their complex trauma. This article develops the theory of genocide rape trauma management as a conceptual framework for promoting the holistic health and recovery of female genocide rape survivors. A qualitative study using grounded theory explored the lived experiences of genocide rape survivors and led to the development of this model. The need for a contextually appropriate model is highlighted, with historical and current data regarding the Rwandan context and the experiences of genocide rape survivors. The research details the complex dynamics of emotional, physical, existential, and psychosocial sequelae related to genocide rape trauma, and how these interact with both local communi...
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Papers by Anthony Collins
Aim: The aim of the study was to develop and implement an in-facility intervention to manage compassion fatigue among oncology nurses in Durban, South Africa.
Methods: The Self-Care Intervention for Oncology Nurses was developed and implemented using action research with a mixed methods sequential explanatory design. It involved an integrative review, Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) v 5 questionnaires (n = 83) and indepth individual interviews (n = 8).
Results: Developed from the fndings of the integrative review, quantitative and qualitative data, the Self-Care Intervention for Oncology Nurses comprised three components, namely psycho-education on risks (booklet), practices of remembrance (remembrance tree) and
support structures (support group and follow-up family call). Overall, the participants enjoyed reading the booklet and engaging in the support group. There were varied responses to the remembrance tree and hesitancy to partaking in the follow-up phone call.
Conclusion: The developed intervention could encourage awareness of compassion fatigue amongst oncology nurses’ engagement in self-care practices such as symbolic remembrance of patients and recognition of the value of support structures.
Contribution: The intervention may assist oncology nurses in the provision of compassionate caring for their patients and potentially minimise compassion fatigue.
Keywords: compassion fatigue; compassion satisfaction; oncology nurses; self-care; intervention.
Aim: The aim of the study was to develop and implement an in-facility intervention to manage compassion fatigue among oncology nurses in Durban, South Africa.
Methods: The Self-Care Intervention for Oncology Nurses was developed and implemented using action research with a mixed methods sequential explanatory design. It involved an integrative review, Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) v 5 questionnaires (n = 83) and indepth individual interviews (n = 8).
Results: Developed from the fndings of the integrative review, quantitative and qualitative data, the Self-Care Intervention for Oncology Nurses comprised three components, namely psycho-education on risks (booklet), practices of remembrance (remembrance tree) and
support structures (support group and follow-up family call). Overall, the participants enjoyed reading the booklet and engaging in the support group. There were varied responses to the remembrance tree and hesitancy to partaking in the follow-up phone call.
Conclusion: The developed intervention could encourage awareness of compassion fatigue amongst oncology nurses’ engagement in self-care practices such as symbolic remembrance of patients and recognition of the value of support structures.
Contribution: The intervention may assist oncology nurses in the provision of compassionate caring for their patients and potentially minimise compassion fatigue.
Keywords: compassion fatigue; compassion satisfaction; oncology nurses; self-care; intervention.
Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.
As part of the ongoing Representing Violence project, is reflects on what this article does (rather than what it says) in terms of gender-based violence, colonial occupation, and genocide.
Its about angle-of-attack sensors, postcolonial inequalities in human life, the managerial logic neoliberal corporate culture, the luxury of flying, the arms industry, and you.
These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness And in the taste confounds the appetite. Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so. Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow. William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
While the tragic death of Mlungisi Nxumalo barely registered in the media and public consciousness, it provides a potentially significant exemplar of South African violence - and not just because of its particular ghastliness. The disastrous unfolding of an attempt by concerned citizens to protect a child at risk provides both a useful case study for analysis, and a cautionary tale. The more closely we examine this incident, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish those fighting for justice, and those undermining it. The imagined boundaries between law-abiding citizen and criminal become unclear, as does the distinction between the use of force to protect citizens, and the antisocial use of violence to damage the social fabric.
Rather, what comes into focus is how everyday life is imbued with physical violence as an intuitively available resource to execute a variety of intentions, good or bad. And more distressingly, what follows is how after a certain point, the good or bad intentions are not necessarily significant determinants of the social harms that are finally produced.
It is precisely here that the explanatory value of this case may lie. This presentation reframes the problem of violence in South Africa not as an insurgent criminality in the face of failing social regulation, but as a pervasive and normalised resource readily available to negotiate many everyday situations. If this is to be understood as the problem, then it requires an entirely different range of interventions from the widespread appeal for more effective law enforcement.
This presentation explores the meanings of transformation in South African universities. Transformation is a
crucial and contested term, and in recent weeks vigorous debates have emerged on issues ranging from
whether it is more important that universities reflect national demographics in their teaching staff or their
student body, to the place of symbols of historical violence and exploitation such as Cecil John Rhodes.
Rather than focusing on university transformation from a managerial standpoint, this talk considers it from
the side of teaching. It reflects on experiences of implementing critical and transformative teaching, and how
these have provided as much of a learning experience for the lecturer as for the students. These insights are
then shown to offer us ways of thinking more deeply about possibilities of transformation in higher
education by imagining it as something that is at the heart of teaching and learning rather than a managerial
or political goal that is imposed on the university.
The PSYC350 Understanding Violence module was designed to assist students to understand and intervene in the problem of ongoing violence in South Africa. This was not a traditional core area of Psychology curriculum, so the course had to develop its own terms of reference and academic scope. In order to meet institutional approval the course was required to show that it would require few new resources, while significantly contributing to graduation rates and dovetailing with the specific conceptualisation of Psychology as a technical professional qualification. Not only was violence reduction not a traditional area of curriculum, it also did not fit with any clearly pre-existing category of professional employment. Despite these limitations, there was also a clear recognition that the module addressed a serious social problem, and that expertise could be of considerable social benefit. Here the conflict between the new technocratic managerial requirements of introducing new modules, and the traditional progressive social values of the humanities clearly existed in an uneasy tension.
Another fundamental tension that unexpectedly emerged in the implementation of this module was been the acquisition of intellectual knowledge and skills, and the processes of personal change. It became clear that topic of violence had profound emotional significance for many of the students, who had themselves experienced childhood abuse, criminal attacks, sexual assaults, hate crimes or other forms of violent victimization. Further than that, understandings of threats of violence were increasingly revealed to be deeply linked to negative ideas around race, economic class and nationality. The academic exploration of violence thus became inextricably linked to experiences personal trauma and important aspects of identity and social values. This created substantial unanticipated institutional challenges and transformative opportunities in developing this module.
It became clear that an essential part of teaching process would entail managing the emotional reactions of students for whom the course invoked unresolved emotions linked to prior traumatic victimization. While traditional psychological guidelines suggested that this would be best done offering individual and small group support, the existing institutional resources did not allow for this. Instead a system of integrating active class participation with collective debriefing and emotional containment techniques was developed to manage these reactions and allow the students to achieve self-insight and emotional mastery as part of the learning process. Thus the risk of secondary emotional traumatisation was turned into an essential transformative aspect of the module, where self-understanding and emotional integration increasingly developed as pedagogical goals of the module.
At the same time the deep social significance of fears of violence and their link to personal identity because a focal topic. It became clear how these fears functioned to sustain prejudices around race, class, gender and nationality. Providing academic analytic frameworks explaining the emergence and nature of violence in society challenged these beliefs, and allowed students to critically reassess their own social prejudices and the harm that these caused. In addition, a critical analysis of intimate forms of violence challenged ideas around masculinity, sexual entitlement and normalised forms of violence against children, showing how received ideas of acceptable social behaviour contributed to harmful social behaviour. Here again the impetus of the teaching shifted from understanding the intellectual analysis, to the working with profound implications for personal identity and social relationships. The process of personal transformation became an inextricable aspect of teaching about violence.
The shift in emphasis from imparting content knowledge to facilitating personal transformation provides an illuminating model for understanding the tensions in social science education. It highlights the problems of effectively and ethically managing the difficulties in teaching sensitive topics to large numbers of students in a context of limited resources. At the same time it foregrounds the considerable social value of engaging in a transformative pedagogy which allows students to become insightful agents in contributing to a democratic society in which social co-operation and mutual respect emerge as dominant cultural forms.
Contents:
* Liberation psychology
* Critical reflections on community and psychology in South Africa
* Social psychology and research methods
* Psychology: an African perspective
* Sociocultural approaches to psychology: dialogism and African conceptions of the self
* Frantz Fanon and racial identity in postcolonial contexts
* Feminist critical psychology in South Africa
* Heterosexuality
* Activity theory as a framework for psychological research and practice in developing societies
* Participatory action research and local knowledge in community contexts
* Street life and the construction of social problems
* The role of collective action in the prevention of HIV/Aids in South Africa
* Understanding and preventing violence
This book is also a response to the need to rethink a more politically aware and participant psychology in South Africa; it hence features focus chapters on racism, community development, HIV/Aids and participatory action forms of research.
Contents:
* Section 1: Theoretical resources
* Psychology: an African perspective
* Dialogism and African conceptions of the self
* Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, psychopolitics and critical psychology
* Fanon and the psychoanalysis of racism
* Psychoanalysis and critical psychology
* Marxism and critical psychology
* Psychology and the regulation of gender
* Foucault, disciplinary power, critical psychology
* Governmentality and technologies of subjectivity/self
* Section 2: The South African context
* Feminist critical psychology in South Africa
* Criticial reflections on community and psychology in South Africa
* Theorising the role of collection action management of HIV/AIDS in South Africa
* South African psychology and racism
* About black psychologies
* Section 3: Forms of practice
* Activity theory as a framework for psychological research and practice in developing societies
* Participatory action research in community contexts
* Community psychology: emotional processes in political subjects
* Discursive practice: analyzing a Lovelines text on sex communication for parents
* Writing into action: the critical research enterprise
* Liberation psychology
* Human development in ‘under-developed’ contexts
Contents:
* Liberation psychology
* Critical reflections on community and psychology in South Africa
* Social psychology and research methods
* Psychology: an African perspective
* Sociocultural approaches to psychology: dialogism and African conceptions of the self
* Frantz Fanon and racial identity in postcolonial contexts
* Feminist critical psychology in South Africa
* Heterosexuality
* Activity theory as a framework for psychological research and practice in developing societies
* Participatory action research and local knowledge in community contexts
* Street life and the construction of social problems
* The role of collective action in the prevention of HIV/Aids in South Africa
* Understanding and preventing violence
This book is also a response to the need to rethink a more politically aware and participant psychology in South Africa; it hence features focus chapters on racism, community development, HIV/Aids and participatory action forms of research.
Contents:
* Section 1: Theoretical resources
* Psychology: an African perspective
* Dialogism and African conceptions of the self
* Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, psychopolitics and critical psychology
* Fanon and the psychoanalysis of racism
* Psychoanalysis and critical psychology
* Marxism and critical psychology
* Psychology and the regulation of gender
* Foucault, disciplinary power, critical psychology
* Governmentality and technologies of subjectivity/self
* Section 2: The South African context
* Feminist critical psychology in South Africa
* Criticial reflections on community and psychology in South Africa
* Theorising the role of collection action management of HIV/AIDS in South Africa
* South African psychology and racism
* About black psychologies
* Section 3: Forms of practice
* Activity theory as a framework for psychological research and practice in developing societies
* Participatory action research in community contexts
* Community psychology: emotional processes in political subjects
* Discursive practice: analyzing a Lovelines text on sex communication for parents
* Writing into action: the critical research enterprise
* Liberation psychology
* Human development in ‘under-developed’ contexts
In March of 2018, the Australian Minister of Home Affairs announced his intention to fast track visas for white South African farmers, apparently believing them to be victims of a racial genocide and deserving the ‘special attention’ of a ‘civilised country.’ This raises several questions: Is there, in some identifiable empirical sense, a campaign of violence against white South African farmers? If not, how did the narrative of white genocide arise and come to shape the minster’s understanding? In what sense do these specific victims deserve the urgent response of a ‘civilised country’? This presentation pursues these questions, exploring lay criminologies, representations of victimisation, postcolonial networks of race, and populist politics in the global South. Here it attempts to understand the constructions of humanitarian responsibility, national security and personal safety, and show how these assign value to life and suffering in ways that either reinforce or disrupt global relations of inequality.
Keywords: White genocide, South Africa, Southern Criminology.
Keywords: aggression, violence, postcolonial psychology, South Africa
Symposium on Conspicuous Consumption in Africa
Explanations of crime in South Africa often emphasise widespread material poverty as an underlying social cause of this problem. These accounts remain incomplete insofar as they do not account for African countries with greater poverty but less criminality, nor do they theorise the social performances of conspicuous consumption associated with young male gangster lifestyles. Interviews with these young men have revealed a pervasive concern with the social status rather than material survival, which highlights the need to theorise the gendered identity work elaborated within these subcultures. This presentation explores how cultures of conspicuous consumption serve to further marginalise who are economically excluded by also eroding their social status. Exclusion from the traditional pathways of material advancement, combined with experimentation with risk taking and social dominance as performances in the achievement of manhood, converge in cultures of violent crime. These are shown to offer both the bravado and aggression required to stabilize a sense of masculine authority, and to fast track the acquisition of the material means to claim social status within cultures of conspicuous consumption.
Lessons from a course in understanding violence.
___________
This presentation explores the tension between market value and social value in tertiary social science teaching. The market highlights the need to for universities to graduate a maximum number of students with the minimum economic investment, ensuring that these graduates will be profitable resources for future employers. In contrast, the development of a democratic society which nurtures human rights, equality and mutual respect places a different emphasis on tertiary social science teaching. Here education is far broader than job training, and its value cannot be reduced to simple economic measures. This paper explores this tension in relation to an undergraduate social science course on violence in South Africa, showing the significance of transformative pedagogy and critical thinking in nurturing the skills of democratic social citizenship. It articulates the value and methods of facilitating changes in personal and social insight, allowing shifts in values, identity and social relationships that enable students to become active agents in the creating of a democratic society.
The PSYC350 Understanding Violence module was designed to assist students to understand and intervene in the problem of ongoing violence in South Africa. This was not a traditional core area of Psychology curriculum, so the course had to develop its own terms of reference and academic scope. In order to meet institutional approval the course was required to show that it would require few new resources, while significantly contributing to graduation rates and dovetailing with the specific conceptualisation of Psychology as a technical professional qualification. Not only was violence reduction not a traditional area of curriculum, it also did not fit with any clearly pre-existing category of professional employment. Despite these limitations, there was also a clear recognition that the module addressed a serious social problem, and that expertise could be of considerable social benefit. Here the conflict between the new technocratic managerial requirements of introducing new modules, and the traditional progressive social values of the humanities clearly existed in an uneasy tension.
Another fundamental tension that unexpectedly emerged in the implementation of this module was been the acquisition of intellectual knowledge and skills, and the processes of personal change. It became clear that topic of violence had profound emotional significance for many of the students, who had themselves experienced childhood abuse, criminal attacks, sexual assaults, hate crimes or other forms of violent victimization. Further than that, understandings of threats of violence were increasingly revealed to be deeply linked to negative ideas around race, economic class and nationality. The academic exploration of violence thus became inextricably linked to experiences personal trauma and important aspects of identity and social values. This created substantial unanticipated institutional challenges and transformative opportunities in developing this module.
It became clear that an essential part of teaching process would entail managing the emotional reactions of students for whom the course invoked unresolved emotions linked to prior traumatic victimization. While traditional psychological guidelines suggested that this would be best done offering individual and small group support, the existing institutional resources did not allow for this. Instead a system of integrating active class participation with collective debriefing and emotional containment techniques was developed to manage these reactions and allow the students to achieve self-insight and emotional mastery as part of the learning process. Thus the risk of secondary emotional traumatisation was turned into an essential transformative aspect of the module, where self-understanding and emotional integration increasingly developed as pedagogical goals of the module.
At the same time the deep social significance of fears of violence and their link to personal identity because a focal topic. It became clear how these fears functioned to sustain prejudices around race, class, gender and nationality. Providing academic analytic frameworks explaining the emergence and nature of violence in society challenged these beliefs, and allowed students to critically reassess their own social prejudices and the harm that these caused. In addition, a critical analysis of intimate forms of violence challenged ideas around masculinity, sexual entitlement and normalised forms of violence against children, showing how received ideas of acceptable social behaviour contributed to harmful social behaviour. Here again the impetus of the teaching shifted from understanding the intellectual analysis, to the working with profound implications for personal identity and social relationships. The process of personal transformation became an inextricable aspect of teaching about violence.
The shift in emphasis from imparting content knowledge to facilitating personal transformation provides an illuminating model for understanding the tensions in social science education. It highlights the problems of effectively and ethically managing the difficulties in teaching sensitive topics to large numbers of students in a context of limited resources. At the same time it foregrounds the considerable social value of engaging in a transformative pedagogy which allows students to become insightful agents in contributing to a democratic society in which social co-operation and mutual respect emerge as dominant cultural forms.
"
Identification with the aggressor and the reproduction of violence in everyday life.
Beneath the explicit claims of research, policy and intervention, there are always systems of unacknowledged assumptions guiding these practices. Ideas about reducing violence in South Africa often include the assumptions that there is a distinction between violent offenders and ordinary, decent, law-abiding citizens; and that most South Africans’ would prefer to live in a less violent society. This presentation challenges these assumptions, and instead argues that one of the reasons why South Africa continues to be an extremely violent society, despite the shift to a human-rights based democracy, is that most people are deeply invested in the use of violence for everyday problem solving and social negotiation. A variety of forms of violence are widely practiced in areas as diverse as parenting, public education, sexual negotiation, intimate relationships, labour disputes, political contestation, asserting social identities and defending against personal humiliation. Several theories can be used to account for the historical emergence, learning and normalization of this everyday violence, but this presentation explores just one relatively neglected theoretical model: the psychodynamic notion of identification with the aggressor. It shows how this framework can effectively add to a broader understanding of the ways in which systems of violence are reproduced by foregrounding not only ways in which victims become perpetrators, but also how people come to simultaneously vilify certain kinds violence while practicing other forms within their own lives. This analysis shifts us away from the popular focus on punitive deterrence as a way of reducing criminal violence, and instead leads us to pay closer attention to particular aspects of the reproduction of violence in everyday social life.
Colloquium paper abstract for:
Understanding and Preventing Violence in Africa, SAVI, Cape Town, Nov 1-2 2013
Dr. Anthony Collins
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Popular accounts of violence are often based on two similar theories of crime: antisocial behaviour as arising from a lack of respect for authority, and a ‘crime pays’ view that laments the lack of sufficient punishment to deter offenders. This paper explores a possible alternative to these lay theories, moving away from the ideas that fear of punishment or obedience to authority are the most effective ways to reduce criminal violence. Instead it proposes conceptualising violence less as a pursuit of self-interest and more as a kind of risk-taking. It suggests that violent acts have more in common with dangerous activities like unprotected sex and reckless driving than with self-interested criminal acts such as stealing property. It thus becomes useful to explore how the capacity for self-protection develops, or fails to develop, and this then raises some new possibilities for systematically reducing violence in South Africa.
This work emerges from the teaching a tertiary course on violence in South Africa for students of social sciences and journalism. It raises problems with the traditional research and reporting focus on the facts of violence, and instead explores the relationships between empirical data and the explanatory accounts in which they are is presented. Here particular attention is given to the implicit theories that are often hidden within attempts to present the facts, and how these theories shape understandings of the causes of violence and thus also the possible violence reduction interventions that are developed in response to them. These relationships between facts, theories and interventions are further mapped in interactions between information media, popular culture and scientific understandings. This conceptual framing is not new: what is has been interesting is this work is the ways in which South African students exposed to this analysis have experienced fundamental changes in the way they react to living in a violent society in ways that not only shape their professional research and media practice, but also their experience of themselves as citizens in society. This process is thus discussed as the basis for an educational model of violence prevention.