The Poverty and Inequality Initiative’s (PII) curriculum seminar series aims to facilitate meaningful discussion and debate on how departments and programmes at UCT engage with matters relating to poverty and inequality in South Africa through their curricula. In 2014, the seminars reflected on blind-spots within our undergraduate curricula, and in 2015 the PII took this further by focusing on ways to prepare the next generation of professionals to engage with issues relevant for our context.

Extending this focus on contextual relevance, the Psychology Department of UCT has been employing innovative practices impacting the Psychology curriculum to make it more responsive to and grounded in the South African context. Growing from their work with, and the success of the Child Guidance Clinic profiled in the 2006 Social Responsiveness Report, the PII has invited Dr. Wahbie Long and Dr. Nokuthula Shabalala both from the Department of Psychology, to present a lunch seminar to the PII community. Dr. Wahbie Long will examine questions of relevance, decolonization, and transformation in the undergraduate teaching of clinical psychology at UCT and Dr. Nokuthula Shabalala will talk on training professionals to serve the South African majority.

Dr. Wahbie Long currently convenes a third year course in clinical psychology, an Honours module on philosophical and theoretical issues in psychology, and a Masters module on adult psychopathology. He is a Mandela Mellon Fellow of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, and a member of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Indigenous Psychology. Wahbie’s general research interests include history, theory and indigenization of psychology.  He is a specialist in discourse analysis and is particularly interested in the growing phenomenon of co-option in psychology. His current work focuses on the field of African psychology, in which he attempts to replace cultural questions with an analysis of the interpersonal, institutional and structural violence that pervades life in South Africa. Wahbie's new book, "A history of ‘relevance’ in psychology" – published by Palgrave Macmillan – traces the emergence of questions about ‘relevance’ in the discipline since the 1960s, with a special focus on psychology in South Africa. 

Dr. Nokuthula Shabalala  completed her PhD at UWC and is now based in the Department of Psychology at UCT. Her research interests include Psychopathology and race, Psychodynamic theories of personality development, HIV/AIDS, Public Health Care provisioning, and Mental handicap and psycho-legal issues. Nokuthula is involved with various courses in the M.A. Clinical Psychology programme.