Healing and Change in the City of Gold

I am delighted to announce that my new book, edited with Ingrid Palmary and Lorena Nunez is now out. It is entitled Healing and Change in the City of Gold: Case Studies of Coping and Support in Johannesburg.

This book offers radically new ways of thinking about precarious life in the city of Johannesburg. Using case studies as varied as Pentecostal and Zionist churches, brothels, shelters, political movements for change in Zimbabwe, ex-soldiers groups, counseling services and art projects, this volume grapples with the way its predominantly migrant residents navigate the opportunities, challenges, moral orders and relationships in this iconic and complex city.

Taking seriously how context shapes meaning the authors use participatory and ethnographic techniques to understand people’s everyday responses to the violence, insecurity and possibilities for change that they face in contemporary Johannesburg. Read together, the case studies give us new insights into what it means to seek support, to cope and to heal, going beyond what mental health professionals traditionally consider support mechanisms or interventions for those in distress. They develop a notion of healing that sees it as a process and an outcome that is rooted in the world-view of those who live in the city.

Throughout the chapters in this book is a sense of everyday insecurity alongside an equally strong sense of optimism, care and a striving for change. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that this book deals very centrally with themes of the struggle for progress, mobility (geographic, material and spiritual), and the sense of possibility and change associated with the City of Gold. Ultimately, the volume demonstrates that coping and healing are both a collective and individual achievement, as well as a economic, psychological, spiritual and material phenomenon shaped by context.

Interested in a copy, you can buy from Amazon, or directly from Springer.

You can also get updates on the book by visiting the Facebook Page.

Brag post: Towards a Marxist community psychology

I have just read a review of Seedat, Duncan and Lazarus' book Community psychology. Theory, method and practice. This is what the reviewer (Kerry Frizelle) has to say about the chapter by Brandon Hamber, Thulani Masilela and Martin Terre Blanche:

"The most exciting chapter in this section, however, must be that of Hamber, Masilela and Terre Blanche (Towards a Marxist community psychology: radical tools for community psychological analysis and practice). It is exciting to see the resurrection of Marxist ideas despite the past and present "crisis" of Marxism. This chapter problematizes the theory and practice of psychology within a capitalist framework and encourages readers to "seek to understand the hidden mechanisms that produce individuality" (p. 54); primarily how social and economic realities construct individual and social relations, and subjectivities. The writers provide the reader with seven radical steps towards developing Marxist-oriented action within community psychology and encourage the reader to place an enlarged copy of these steps in a prominent position in one's university or workplace, in an attempt to actualise them. The issue of action is central to this entire volume and will undoubtedly be a welcomed text by those who are concerned with the passivity of conventional psychology to bring about substantial social change where and when it is most needed."

I remember when we wrote the chapter that we were determined to avoid producing yet another bland, obscure treatise on Marxism - but rather to convey something of its spirit in an exciting, polemical way that would at least make students take notice. It's nice that the reviewer responded positively to that. She also has many nice and useful things to say about the rest of the book of course.

The reference is Frizelle, K. (2002). Thinking critically about psychology in South Africa. Psychology in Society (PINS), number 28, p. 50-53. The book is Seedat, M., Duncan, N.,  Lazarus, S. (Eds.). Community psychology. Theory, method and practice. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. ISBN 019 571922 0