Apartheids of Mind: effects of injustice on remembering and aspiring

A one day workshop sponsored by the MacquarieUniversity Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics (CAVE) and the Agency and Moral Cognition Network

Date: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 from 1pm to 5:30pm

Location: TBA

Description

While media accounts of criminality, corruption and immoral action often target single individuals as perpetrators, injustice does not only hinge on the actions of a single personality operating in isolation. In fact, this is perhaps the less common variety. This workshop addresses how injustice becomes embedded in cultural and institutional practices to such a degree that it is normalised even as it powerfully shapes our subjectivities, our recollections, perceptions and aspirations – how in short it sets up ‘apartheids of mind’ (Straker, 2011).

In describing how institutionalised corruption arises within organizations, Ashforth and Anand (2003) outline three processes: institutionalization whereby corrupt processes become embedded in structures of decision-making; rationalization, where ideologies arise that legitimize, valorize and render desirable discriminatory practices; and socialization whereby newcomers are initiated into those practices.

Collectively practiced injustice is perhaps hardest to notice when it intrudes and permeates textural fabric of everyday life; even the artifacts of living; objects, street signage, images, habits of movement and personal address perpetuate a certain taken-for-granted inequality that would startle if it were transposed to another context, or reversed. It can promote a kind of perverse innovation whereby those affected by collectively practiced injustice extemporize to produce new variants of it in excess of what is strictly required. Being subjected to collective injustice can be traumatizing because its effects pass below the radar of what is noticed, commented upon, or represented in language. Thus these effects are long-lived in their consequences for memory, sense of self and future aspirations.

Yet becoming aware of the effects is a necessary first step to preventing intergenerational transmission of both the tacit worldviews that support injustice, and the traumatic failure fully to remember arising from having endured and survived (or benefitted) from injustice.

The broad aim of this workshop is to explore the effects of institutional and cultural injustice on memory of the past and aspirations for the future of those who are positioned as victims/survivors, bystanders, beneficiaries and perpetrators of injustice (Straker, 2011).

Professors Gill Straker and Norman Duncan will speak to the issue specifically from the point of view of Apartheid. They bring to this workshop vast and intimate experience of living under Apartheid, and their experience of working on the Apartheid archives.

Professor Gill Straker will speak to her keynote address at the launch of the Apartheid Archives in South Africa in 2009. This Archive is intended to be an Archive of personal experiences of racism in everyday life. In her paper Gill offers psycho-analytically inflected readings of narratives of victims, perpetrators, bystanders and beneficiaries to provide understandings of how apartheid shaped subjectivities. These narratives constitute an archive of traumatic affect generated by everyday experiences of racism. They illustrate how racism was promoted by enactments of power differentials in the intimate spaces of home and work. In presenting her paper Gill of necessity speaks as a White and from a personal perspective addresses the complex affects and ethical dilemmas that this positioning implies.

Professor Norman Duncan, (Professor Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) will have the following two foci in his input to the workshop:

  1. A description of the Apartheid Archive Project, including the objectives and vision of the project as well as some of the more salient features of the material contained in the archive
  2. A focused engagement with the material in the archive through an examination of everyday experiences of racism during the apartheid era recounted in a selection of narratives

The Apartheid Archive: Unmasking the Past in the Narratives of Everyday Apartheid Racism

After providing a brief description of the Apartheid Archive project, the presentation will focus on an examination of a set of 150 narratives collected as part of the Apartheid Archive Project. The narratives recount a group of research respondents’ experiences of everyday racism during the Apartheid period. Based on an analysis of this corpus of narratives, the presentation will endeavour to engage with a relatively neglected area in social scientific research in South Africa, namely the micro-ecologies and interpersonal politics of life in Apartheid-eraSouth Africa. Importantly, however, the presentation will endeavour to go beyond simply surfacing the features of these ecologies and interpersonal politics (however important these may be in arriving at a more comprehensive understanding of the diverse ways in which Apartheid-era racism fashioned the daily functioning of South Africans), by also exploring the ways in which South Africans, as reflected in the narratives analysed, in their everyday lives during the Apartheid period, attempted to subvert, destabilise and resist the (il)logic of apartheid racism. Thus, the presentation will set for itself the objective of also examining issues of agency and transformative potential as reflected in the narratives analysed. Importantly too, the presentation will endeavour to reflect on the ways in which the micro-ecologies and interpersonal politics of life in Apartheid-era South Africa continue to mediate spatial and interpersonal politics in contemporary South Africa.

Janaki Kozeluh is an Early Years/ESL educator working at SandoverGroupSchool in Alice Springs. She has experience in working with young Aboriginal people, in addressing at an educational level their personal and structural needs to optimize their contributions to culture.

Janaki Kozeluh will share a personal account of her family’s experience of living and working with the Alyawarra people of Central Australia. She will talk about the challenges and joys of teaching in a remote primary school where cultures meet and ideologies sometimes clash. Janaki will reflect on some classroom practices she has seen succeed in remote schools. Forty years ago many Alyawarra people were working on Stations and the land claims movement had just come to the Sandover. Janaki will compare today with then by sharing extracts from letters written by Rose Chalmers, a pastoralist’s wife, who corresponded with the anthropologist, Woodrow W. Denham at that time, (from 1972 to 1975.) She will show a snippet of a relatively recent interview with Donald Thomson, an elder who joined 300 other Alyawarra people to walk away from their homes in protest of the Federal Government’s Intervention strategy. Some photos and videos will accompany the talk.

Pre-readingOne or two papers will be provided for pre-reading for each of the presenter’s sessions

Program

Speakers will introduce the notions of how experiences of injustice might shape subjectivities, and how interventions might be able to address some of the effects of this collective formation at the level of memory and aspirations for the future.

Schedule:
1pm - Welcome - Doris
1:15 – 1:55pm–Professor Gill Straker's paper
1:55 - 2:15 pm – responses to Prof Straker's paper by Doris McIlwain and questions
2:15 – 2:55pm–Professor Norman Duncan’s paper
2:55 - 3:15pm - responses to Prof Duncan's paper by Associate Professor Andrea Durbach and questions
3:15 - 3:45pm - afternoon tea.
3:45 - 4:25pm– Janaki Kozeluh's presentation
4:25 - 4:45pm - responses to Janaki's presentation by Dr Anne Monchamp and questions
4:45 - 5:15pm - plenary issues summarised by Professor Catriona McKenzie and open questions
5:15pm - champagne and nibbles
Dinner to follow for speakers and those interested.

Travel and Accommodation Costs

This workshop has a small funding provided to the Agency and Moral Cognition Network by CAVE. As such, we can only cover location costs, food and contribute to the travel costs of speakers.

Registration

Registration is free, but please register in advance so that we can know numbers to select a room and for catering purposes. Please email your intent to attend to Doris [ by March 31st.

About the Speakers (alphabetically):

Professor Norman Duncan holds a professorship in Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he currently also serves as the Head of the School of Human and Community Development. He obtained his qualifications in Psychology from the University of the Western Cape and the Universite Paul Valerie (Montpellier III, France). His research and publications are primarily in the fields of racism and community psychology. He has co-edited a range of volumes, including 'Race', racism, knowledge production and psychology in South Africa (Nova Science Publications, 2001).

Janaki Kozeluh (BA in English, University of Otago, Diploma in Drama, University of Auckland, Diploma in Early Childhood Education, Auckland College of Education)

Janakiis an Early Years ESL teacher supporting educators in remote schools of the Sandover area in Central Australia. She has many years of experience as an ESL teacher at Gillen Primary School in Alice Springs and a classroom teacher on remote communities in the NT. She is currently the Early Years Curriculum & EAL ILSS Officer with Sandover Group School.

Professor Gill Straker is the director of Center for Advanced Studies in Psychotherapy and Counseling. Gill is a clinical professor in the departments of psychiatry and psychology in the Faculties of Medicine and Science at the University of Sydney. She is a distinguished Mellon Foundation Scholar and a visiting research professor at the University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg. She is a chartered clinical psychologist with the British Psychological Society and a member of the clinical college of the Australian Psychological Society.

Gill is a practicing Lacanian analyst and a member of the Australian Center for Psychoanalysis. She is a member of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and member of the New South Wales Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She is also a member of Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychotherapy. She is an honorary Member United Kingdom Association for Psychotherapy Integration (in recognition of service to the psychotherapy profession teaching/ training).

Gill has published widely in the area of psychotherapy and psychology and has specialized in the treatment of traumatic stress. She coined the term continuous stress to refer to situations of ongoing stress e.g. domestic violence, child abuse and political turmoil and differentiates this from post traumatic stress and complex traumatic stress. Gill is currently involved in the establishment of the Apartheid Archives in South Africa and is involved in research studying the dissociation and the production of ignorance that allowed white South Africans to support apartheid.

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