Introduction to the Special Issue: In Dialogue with Fanonian and Southern Thought

Professor of psychology at the University of Stellenbosch and Head of the Stellenbosch Centre for Critical and Creative Thought. He has published extensively, and his books include There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (2009, co-authored with Antjie Krog and Nosisi Mpolweni, Liberating Masculinities (2016), Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, Race (2018, co-edited with Jeff Hearn, Tammy Shefer, and Floretta Boonzaier), and The World Looks Like This From Here: Thoughts on African Psychology (2019).

Associate professor at the University of South Africa, senior researcher affiliated with the South African Medical Research Council, and President-Elect of the Psychological Society of South Africa. Her thinking and scholarship are influenced by the vision of research as a transforming, humanizing, and decolonizing enterprise. Her research interests include a focus on community-engaged interventions in contexts of structural and epistemic violence, participatory engagement as a site of activism, resistance, and social change, and Africa-centered knowledges and knowledge-making. Shahnaaz has numerous publications in her areas of interest. She is a reviewer and editorial team member for select journals, including Journal of Community Psychology, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Community Psychology in Global Perspective, Feminism and Psychology, and Social and Health Sciences.

Heads the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA). He directed the Violence, Injury and Peace Promotion Research Unit, a national UNISA and South African Medical Research Council initiative, for 19 years. His current scholarship revolves around liberation, critical and decolonial community-social psychology, the social anatomy of protests, emancipatory approaches to health, safety, and peace promotion, psychologies underlying large-scale sociopolitical transformation in “postcolonial” contexts, transdisciplinary knowledge architectures, and indigenous knowledge-making spaces. Mohamed continues to support community-engaged research, the capacitation of next generation socially engaged researchers and academic leaders, and the transformation of writing cultures in the academy. Mohamed is a member of numerous professional bodies, including the Academy of Science of South Africa.

Co-chair of the Frantz Fanon Foundation.

Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, Chair of the Comparative Literature Program, faculty affiliate in the Graduate Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Director of the Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is also Professor Extraordinarious at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa, an honorary professor at the University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, and co-chair of the Frantz Fanon Foundation. He specializes in transdisciplinary decolonial thought, race theory, and the work of Frantz Fanon. His publications include several book projects, journal articles, essay collections, and guest-edited journal special issues. He also collaborates with the Blackhouse Kollective in South Africa on Black consciousness and decoloniality.