Kopano Ratele

"Covering a range of topics, from clothes and violent death, through a better sexual life and tradition, to race and feminism, Liberating Masculinities presents ways to understand the contestations around masculinity and gender relations. Kopano Ratele offers both theoretically rich and psychologically insightful analyses to liberate men, as well as those who are involved in the making of men, from oppressive and injurious models of masculinity."--Back cover.

Liberating Masculinities

Using conversations, observations, and reflections, psychologist Kopano Ratele meditates on love, violence and masculinity This book seeks to imagine the possibility of a more loving masculinity in a society where structural violence, failures of government and economic inequality underpin much of the violent behavior that men display. Enriched with personal reflections on his own experiences as a partner, father, psychologist and researcher in the field of men and masculinities, Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity is Kopano Ratele’s meditation on love and violence, and the way these forces shape the emotional lives of boys and men. At the core of these critical and deeply insightful texts is the question of why men hurt women they love. Ratele contends that many men in our society suffer from a painful, unrecognized, yet consequential love hunger that sets in during boyhood. This need for love may lie at the root of some of the male violence that damages the lives of women, children and men themselves. Blending academic analysis and rigor in a readable narrative style, Ratele illuminates the complex nuances of gender, intimacy and power in the context of the human need for love and care. While unsparing in his analysis of men’s inner lives, Ratele lays out a path for addressing the hunger for love in boys and men. He argues that just as the beliefs and practices relating to gender, sexuality and the nature of love are constantly being challenged and revised, so our ideas about masculinity, and men’s and boys’ capacity to show genuine loving care for each other and for women, can evolve.

Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Eric Ndushabandi

How wounds from a previous generation may weigh on children and grandchildren contain much of interest. Yet if we unpack the ghostly, the eerie, and the spectral in transgenerational hauntings, if we allow for the suffering or the disturbed to forge social links, such contacts may enable breaking into reconnections and afterlives. … One only needs to think of the near epidemic of rape in South Africa to sense violent hypermasculinity erupting as madness, mediated by a history of brutal, racialised reduction. But it is also important to move beyond the brutalities and madness, to consider the individual and collective refigurations surfacing out of layers of catastrophe. Nancy Rose Hunt: Conference Keynote Address, “Beyond Trauma? Notes on a Word, a Frame, and a Diagnostic Category.” Historical Trauma and Memory: Living with the Haunting Power of the Past is based on essays presented at a conference with the same name which was held in Kigali, Rwanda in April 2019. The book gives readers front row seats as an interdisciplinary group of scholars from law, psychology, history, the arts, anthropology, theology, and philosophy address the complex matrix of the emotional legacies of historical trauma, cultural legacies, people interacting with their social and political environment, and the interplay of these factors in different post-conflict societies.

Living with the haunting power of the past: Conference Proceedings

Historical trauma and memory

Jeff Hearn

Floretta Boonzaier

Tamara Shefer

Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race offers critical perspectives on contemporary research and practice directed at young people across the global north and south. Drawing upon pedagogical, programmatic, and activist work with respect to challenging inequalities and injustices for young people, the authors interrogate the dominant discourses of sexuality, gender, race, class, age and other social categories. Emerging out of a Finnish-South African collaboration, this volume does not take a comparative approach but rather a transnational one by embracing the intersections of local and global knowledges. We draw on this transnational and transdisciplinary framework and these various contexts to generate a critique of mainstream theory and pedagogical practice, as well as to subvert and disrupt such research and practice so as to speak more directly to young people's agentic and activist engagements in social justice, specifically inequalities of class, race, gender, age, sexuality, ability, and health.

Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race

Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis

Reflecting on the problematics of psychology as a colonial, Euro-American discipline, this book builds a compelling case for thinking and doing psychology differently in and for Africa. This book sets out a situated, pluralising framework for researching, teaching and practising African psychology. What does the world look like from Africa? What does it mean to think, feel, express without apology for being African? How does one teach society and children to be African – with full consciousness and pride? In institutions of learning, what would a textbook on African-centred psychology look like? How do researchers and practitioners engage in African social psychology, African-centred child development, African neuropsychology, or any area of psychology that situates African realities at the centre? Questions such as these are what eminent professor of psychology Kopano Ratele grapples with in this lyrical, philosophical and poetic treatise on practising African psychology in a decolonised world view. Employing a style common in philosophy but rarely used in psychology, the book offers 101 thoughts about the ideas, contestation, urgency and desire around a psychological praxis in Africa for Africans. Writing against the universal application of a Western model of psychology, which is unreflective about its locatedness even as it pushes Africa to the margins, Ratele urges readers to engage and think deeply about new ways of seeing and thinking about the self and others. He asserts that the deliberate attempt to see the world from Africa – to look at everything with the whole self from here – leads to heightened consciousness about ways of being in the world, and enhances the capacity for healing. While setting out a framework for researching, teaching and practicing African psychology, the book in part coaxes, in part commands and in part urges students of psychology, lecturers, researchers and therapists to reconsider and reach beyond their received notions of African psychology.

Thoughts on African Psychology

The World Looks Like This From Here

Following the undoing of the racist, apartheid government, this study critically examines the social and psychological issues that continue to trouble South Africans. Topical concerns include language barriers, homelessness, stereotyping and racism, HIV/AIDS, social influence and dominance, as well as different ways of understanding intergroup conflict and cooperation.

Kopano Ratele

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