The systems psychodynamics of
Decolonising Minds, Workplaces & Curricula
for a better future
🔖 PRESENTATION
Paper (parallel)
📆 DATE
Wednesday 20 Nov 2024
⏰ MELBOURNE TIME
5.00 - 7.00 pm
⏰ LOCAL START TIME
time start
Professor Julian Manley
Professor of Social Innovation, University of Central Lancashire
Julian Manley is a Professor of Social Innovation at the University of Central Lancashire, UK and a Senior Associate Researcher at the University of Johannesburg. He is widely published and an experienced host of social dreaming matrices. His work includes a range of perspectives on the development of social dreaming in different contexts such as the visual arts, issues of race and climate change. He helped to develop the visual matrix method that emerged from his work in social dreaming. He is a founding Director of the Centre for Social Dreaming and a Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.
⏰ DURATION
120 minutes
Dr Neo Pule
Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Johannesburg
Neo Pule is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Johannesburg and a registered Counselling Psychologist with the Health Professions Council of South Africa. She is an experienced higher education and student development practitioner and researcher. Her areas of interest include decolonising research methodology, social justice, student leadership and scholarship of integration. Her work in social dreaming includes projects in South Africa and the UK. Dr Pule is currently one of the Directors of the Centre for Social Dreaming.
Decolonising the Mind and Higher Education: Exploring Decolonisation through Social Dreaming in South Africa and the UK
Decolonisation is a concept and task that has gained momentum in universities globally. The United Kingdom (UK) and South Africa (SA) both grapple with different versions of the scars of colonialism. Recently, both countries experienced eruptions of student movements such as the #Rhodes Must Fall which progressed as the #Fees Must Fall in SA and BlackLivesMatter in the UK. These movements are rooted in an outrage against inequality, racism and exclusivity in Higher Education (HE). In the UK , decolonisation is often focused on the curriculum by challenging Western paradigms. In SA, while decolonisation aims to transform the curriculum, it is also directed at reimagining institutional cultures and rethinking the African university.
System psychodynamics brings the ‘organisation in the mind’ to the fore, by bringing an understanding of the deep influences of unconscious processes, internalized relationships, and the interaction between internal and external systems. Our project uses Armstrong’s (2005) conceptualisation of the ‘organisation in the mind’ and Manley’s application of the concept to slavery (2010) as a lens for analysing and interpreting social dreaming in the context of decolonisation in HE.
Social dreaming looks beyond the individual by focusing on the shared unconscious acquired through a collage of images of shared dreams, associative thinking and affect. By hosting a series of 6 social dreaming sessions online, we were able to elicit a collective vision about decolonisation in HE across two countries and continents. As hosts, one based in SA, the other in the UK , we were able to bring together our understanding, experience and backgrounds in academia and heritage to weave together a rich synthesis of meaning regarding decolonisation in HE . Examples of the emerging dreams include the leadership conundrum of a female CEO who moves in fear in a male-minded university while seeking to assert her talent in a transformed society compared with the ‘forest of decolonisation’ and attempts to find alternatives through the trees. Through these matrices, we learnt about the feelings of loneliness, anger and helplessness that lead to the silence and disavowal of racism and colonialism. The difficult and complex nature of d ecolonization brings contradictions and tensions of change as shown by a dream image of a black stone and its potential transformation into diamond, where the university in the mind is the diamond and the reality sits somewhere between the black stone and the diamond.
The social dreaming matrix provides a safe container for the emergence of painful emotions – raw, undigested thoughts and feelings – intertwined in the exploration of decolonisation. The flow of sharing dreams and associations facilitates a processing space in a non-judgmental fashion by ‘cloaking’ the unpalatable truths in the guise of condensed images and metaphorical expression. Our working hypothesis suggests that social dreaming works beyond instrumental changes and towards psychosocial and affective transformations of HE to bring about an authentic, lasting difference, what we term transformative change. In this way, decolonising the mind becomes a possibility
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Session schedule
5 MINS
Introduction
30 MINS
Paper presentation
20 MINS
Small group discussion; impressions of the paper and developing questions for the presenter
20 MINS
Discussion forum with the presenter; moderated for the speaker to elaborate their ideas
10 MINS
Discussion forum with the presenter; themes from the discussions
5 MINS
Break
30 MINS
Whole symposium open reflection discussion
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DR LESLIE BRISSETT
At War against Nature - The Iceman Legacy
DR ALICIA KAUFMANN
Enough is enough: from humiliation to empowerment: the case of spanish sports women
PROF SUSAN LONG
Decolonising Nature: Consciousness and Unconsciousness beyond the human
