Floretta Boonzaier

Floretta Boonzaier is Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa and Co-Director of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa. She is noted for her work in feminist, critical qualitative and decolonial psychologies, her writing on intersectional subjectivities and on gendered and sexual violence. She is also noted for her expertise in qualitative methodologies, specifically in narrative, decolonial, feminist and participatory approaches. She has published widely and her selected recent publications include the book Pan-Africanism and Psychology in Decolonial Times (authored with Kessi and Gekeler) published by Springer (2022); Men, Masculinities and Intimate Partner Violence (with Gottzén & Bornholt) published by Routledge (2020) and Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology (with van Niekerk) published by Springer (2019). She is past president of the Psychological Society of South Africa, is current Associate Editor for the South African Journal of Science and has served on a number of journal editorial boards.

KEYNOTE TALK ABSTRACT

What kind of qualitative research does the world need right now? Reflections on the possibilities of Decolonial Feminist Research for advancing global justice.

Ongoing violence, injustice and global inequities demand a rethink on knowledge production and its implications. There are several urgent global injustices in the world right now that include increasing forms of discrimination, violence and hatred; ongoing militarised conflicts and human rights violations – including those based on gender, ethnicity and nationality; widening economic inequalities; and the detrimental effects of climate change that also disproportionately affect the most vulnerable causing displacement and suffering which includes food insecurity. In this pressing context we require research that does things differently. We need approaches to knowledge production that can offer us the tools to work against the status quo and that offers visibility (and justice) to the struggles of the most marginalised.
In this talk I attend to the growing body of research that calls itself decolonial and feminist, work that calls attention to the questions of injustice that are simultaneously historical and ongoing. I articulate decolonial feminist principles of collaboration and community participation; action-orientation; renewed attention to ethics; centering voice, positionality and self-determination; addressing dignity and healing; calling attention to historical and ongoing forms of power and injustice; and centering creativity and challenging dominant western scientific paradigms. In doing so, I outline the implications of decolonial feminist theorising for the practice of qualitative research – offering a model of the kind of qualitative research that we need in the world right now – towards the radical remaking of scholarship and knowledge production that advances global and social justice.