In this article, we present “retrospective autoethnographies” as a methodology for decolonial inquiry/intervention in the context of neoliberal settings, specifically the university. Autoethnography represents that epistemic and methodological space where the personal intersects with the political, historical, and cultural to critique everyday power structures. Instead of inserting the autobiographical past into the present, we write of our present and our desire for a utopian future to begin to create an image of the New University. Together, as people raised in the postcolony and within coloniality, we begin at the negative affect as neoliberal universities invisibilize, surveil, audit, and discipline—but then, we strive to imagine a New University characterized by radical hope, doing so alongside student movements pushing for decolonizing the university. This article is envisioned as an exhortation for a decolonial intervention of radically dreaming the New University into place.

Rage is under-theorised in South Africa. This absence is more pronounced in psychological scholarship. This is a remarkable oversight since we have gained infamy as the world’s epicentre of protest action. In this article, I read the landscape of scholarly production to conduct an analysis of how community rage and protests are made sense of. The analysis focuses on work from the past decade as it has been reported that this period has witnessed the greatest intensity of protest action within the post-apartheid period. I contend that protests are a form of community rage at sedimented oppressions. I demonstrate that the expression of community rage provides us the opportunity to work towards our collective decolonisation. In this analysis, I offer that affective meaning making in the theorisation of rage can craft a scholarship that enables praxis towards decolonial action.

In contexts of political instability and change, the value of disciplinary knowledges and the processes that constituted them is often questioned. Psychology is not exempt from this process. Little South African work has illustrated what teaching for decoloniality may mean in South African psychology. We draw on examples of curriculum design in community psychology from the Universities of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and Stellenbosch, three large South African public universities, in an attempt to surface what we regard as the decolonial frameworks that underpin their development and delivery. Capacities for reflexivity and the ability to hold multiple epistemologies encourage economies of knowledge that may prevent abyssal thinking, while contributing to cognitive justice and minimising opportunities for epistemicide. Some challenges to our pedagogy involve the potential for romanticising decoloniality.

Examining two sets of archived materials that include a corpus of narratives that reflect on the period of apartheid in South Africa and posters used by anti-apartheid activists, the paper teases out the operations of racism and the manifestations of rage on the Black body. Critical discourse analysis and affect as theory and method are applied to trace the work of racism and its affective consequences and resistances. Here affect is deployed to read the terrain of the corporeal and the discursive. Black rage is seen as a response to White supremacy and it has the following outcomes: it can have destructive consequences, can enable psychological release of pent up anger, and can simultaneously be an expression of self-love.

In this paper, we provide empirically informed reflections on the difficulty of undertaking critically inflected, decolonial praxis in community psychology within the overdetermined global order of neo-liberalism. Using interviews with 10 alumni of the Masters in Community-Based Counselling (MACC) psychology program at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, we extend what have hitherto been largely theoretical debates about the fundamental constraints on teaching decolonial theory as an important touchstone of criticality in the context of the constraining forces of the free-market economy. We focus on our participants' attempts to navigate the inevitable tensions between the tenets of decolonial critical community psychology and neo-liberal market pressures on employability. We analyze accounts of job-seeking and employment experiences of the program alumni to ask whether we may have to contemplate the imminent evacuation of critical community epistemologies within the context of a market-structured and professionally regulated psychology. We suggest that while the death knell of critical pedagogies and epistemologies has not yet quite arrived, more nuanced approaches to criticality may have to be adopted