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Jean Piaget (1896–1980) is known for his contributions to developmental psychology and educational theory. His name is associated especially with Stage Theory. That we believe him to have focused solely on cognitive development, however, is not because he did. This is instead the result of the popularization of his writings in the United States during the Cold War. (A period of crisis and subsequent education reform.) The overpowering influence of those interests blinded us to his larger framework, which he called “genetic epistemology,” and of which his stages were just a part. To address the resulting and continuing misunderstandings, this entry essay presents original historical scholarship—distilling over a thousand pages of archival documents (correspondence, diary entries, budgets, and reports)—to provide an insider’s look at Piaget’s research program from the perspective of the Rockefeller Foundation: genetic epistemology’s primary funding agency in the United States from the mid-1950s through the early-1960s. The result is therefore an examination of how a group of interested Americans came to understand Piaget’s writings in French in the period just prior to their wider popularization in English, as well as of how Piaget presented himself and his ideas during the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. My goal, however, is not to summarize the whole of this misunderstood program. Instead, I aim to provide a source of archivally-grounded perspective that will allow for new insights about the Genevan School that are unrelated to American Cold War interests. In the process, we also derive new means to see how Piaget’s experimental examinations of the development of individual knowledge served to inform his team’s investigations of the evolution of science (and vice versa).

Hair is a physical characteristic laden with socio-political significance and, in the case of black women, it remains a complex symbol of racialization, othering and marginalization. In this study, we attempt to present black women's perspectives on their hair and, by extension, their positions in a historically White institution of higher education. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with fourteen full time staff members in various departments at the University of Cape Town. Key themes from the study revealed how black women used hair as a tool for negotiating and constructing multiple dimensions of their identity, and how-in the midst of institutional conversations about transformation and decolonization-they challenged dominant, ideologically-laden perspectives on hair.

The decolonisation movement that emerged from the ‘Fees Must Fall’ protests has become a home of hope for many seeking radical change in education. It has also, however, created unease among others, including students and faculty, as it has adopted a race-based rationale to press its demands. Prof Long walks us throughthe discipline of psychology to explain the ideas that guide this movement and why it has departed from the universal principles of a coalition of people working towards a just and humane society.

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Little is known about the first national association to be established for psychologists in South Africa: the South African Psychological Association (SAPA). While it is commonly assumed that Anglophone psychologists were politically enlightened in comparison with their Afrikaner counterparts, this paper attempts to illuminate the complexities of SAPA's intellectual project. Offering a critical discourse analysis of eight presidential and opening addresses delivered at national congresses between 1950 and 1962, the paper identifies among SAPA's Afrikaner presidents a preoccupation with a socially relevant psychology, enunciated in the form of a professionalist discourse that encouraged public service yet bore no trace of Christian-National influence. Among English-speaking psychologists, by contrast, social responsiveness was less of a priority in a discourse of disciplinarity concerned with fundamental debates in the field. It is suggested that these divergent conceptions regarding the role of psychology in society presaged the SAPA split of 1962 and provide, also, an important historical perspective from which to view a contemporary struggle within the discipline.

For several decades, psychology in South Africa has been accused of lacking "relevance" insofar as the country's social challenges are concerned. In this paper, the historical and discursive contours of this phenomenon known as the "relevance debate" are explored. Since the notion of "relevance" entails an assessment of the relationship between psychology and society, the paper presents the results of discursive and social analyses of forty-five presidential, keynote and opening addresses delivered at annual national psychology congresses between 1950 and 2011. These analyses reveal the close connection between discursive practices and social matrices, and, in particular, the post-apartheid emergence of a market discourse that now rivals a longstanding discourse of civic responsibility. This has created a potentially awkward juxtaposition of market relevance and social relevance in a nation still struggling to meet transformation imperatives.

Includes abstract., Includes bibliographical references., This thesis investigates the historical and discursive contours of the "relevance" debate in South African psychology. It begins by contextualizing the debate, detailing how appeals for "relevance" in the broader discipline proliferated during the sixties and seventies in American, European and "Third World" psychology. The thesis observes further how widespread conditions of social turmoil precipitated the development of this crisis over "relevance", which was encouraged also by traits peculiar to psychology. These include the discipline's indecisiveness regarding its cognitive interest, its reliance on a basic but rarefied science for its scientific eminence, and its longstanding difficulty accommodating sociality. Proponents of "relevance", that is, insist that psychology attend to "real world" concerns. However, since the thesis advances the position that materiality can only be accessed via language, it is asserted that the credentialing of "relevance" occurs rhetorically.