In this article we sketch the development, current status and future prospects of critical psychology in South Africa. We review critical psychology initiatives across a number of domains, including professional and activist organisations, university courses and programmes, conferences, and publication initiatives. In each case we show how developments in critical psychology reflected and contributed to broader social processes as South Africa emerged from apartheid. We also trace the links between local critical psychology groupings and the international critical psychology movement. Finally, we draw attention to areas (such as mental health activism, forensic psychology and community psychology) where South African critical psychologists have been relatively inactive or have played a politically ambiguous role. We conclude with suggestions for making critical psychology theory and practice relevant, not only to academic psychologists, but also to all who have a stake in South African psychology.

This article discusses the materiality of language in relation to subjectivity, politics, and social psychology. Whereas social psychology has traditionally disregarded language, especially in its material dimension as voice, recent decades have seen important developments. The developing ''social psychology of language'' foregrounds subjectivity as constituted in relation to particular languages and particular ways of speaking these languages, and acknowledges that these particularities are politically encoded. However, an important dimension of the human voice is still being neglected in the social psychology of language, namely the way it is domesticated according to the dominant principle of political and cultural organization in modernity, the nation-state. It is argued that social psychology, through its own conceptual entanglement with the nation-state, is in historical collusion with ideologies that render language visible mainly in national terms, and thus reproduces rather than challenges contemporary constellations of language, subjectivity, and the political.

Postmodern critiques problematise the import of social psychology into non-western contexts on epistemological and ideological grounds. Yet, British approaches to the discipline remain popular with critical social psychologists in South Africa. One such import product is discourse analysis, which, as a “postmodern” social psychology, seemingly resolves challenges of “intellectual colonialism” by endorsing a constructionist understanding of social psychological phenomena. However, by extending a conception of language into a discursive ontology enables only a partial social psychological understanding of the often insidious nature of experience and social conduct even when discourses change. What is required is an understanding of these aspects of social agency as also pre-reflexively and non-propositionally patterned, making necessary a conception of culture that works, so to speak, directly on the body. This remains impossible in a theoretical system that has to fall back on the notions of reflexivity and ideology in order to explain the social and political determination of experience and meaningful conduct.

This article provides an analysis of sketch maps of a South African city drawn by local university students. The analysis is compared to previous sketch map studies in Psychology, and highlights the use and relative absence of the analytical concepts of race and class within these studies. An understanding of sketch maps as rhetorical moments is developed, that is, that these drawings represent characterisations of lived space that is ideologically embedded. Consequently, a quantitative and qualitative description and commentary is provided of the depictions and absences in these maps. From this a place identity is suggested and its implications for personal identity are discussed. In conclusion, it is argued that apartheid town planning continues to be successful in that it now accommodates a politically naïve consumerist culture.

This article reports a rhetorical discourse analysis of learner perspectives on language diversity in a contemporary South African high school. Based on four group discussions with Grade 12 isiXhosa, Afrikaans and Engli~h-speaking learners, the analysis traces two interrelated clusters of argument. In the first, a liberal discourse of individual freedom and human rights is mobilised to argue against a language order where languages are made compulsory, or forced upon people. We show that this argument was employed inconsistently: it only extended to languages other than English. To understand how this dilemmatic use of liberal ideas was justified, we trace a second line of argument. This is the construction of English as a universal language and, consequently as neutral, necessary and unifying; a language of 'rational choice' for all South Africans. Based on these arguments, language diversity -or the formal recognition and empowerment of languages other than English -was problematised as both violating individual rights of choice and a public order characterised by the mutual and universal understanding afforded by the universality of English. Supporting English-only practices in the school was thus presented as itself a liberal gesture, allowing not only the continued racialisation of isiXhosa, but also a rhetoric of racial blame: isiXhosa speakers, when they use their language in public, were blamed for instigating racial tension and misunderstanding in the school.