Flocking Together: An Indigenous Psychology Theory of Resilience in Southern Africa

This book describes how those individuals who are often most marginalised in postcolonial societies draw on age-old, non-western knowledge systems to adapt to the hardships characteristic of unequal societies in transformation. It highlights robust indigenous pathways and resilience responses used by elders and young people in urban and rural settings in challenging Southern African settings (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland) to explain an Indigenous Psychology theory. Flocking (rather than fighting, fleeing, freezing or fainting) is explained as a default collectivist, collaborative and pragmatic social innovation to provide communal care and support when resources are constrained, and needs are par for the course. Flocking is used to address, amongst others, climate change (drought and energy use in particular), lack of household income and securing livelihoods, food and nutrition, chronic disease (specifically HIV / AIDS and tuberculosis), barriers to access services (education, healthcare, social welfare support), as well as leisure and wellbeing. The book further deliberates whether the continued use of such an entrenched socio-cultural response mollifies citizens and decision-makers into accepting inequality, or whether it could also be used to spark citizen agency and disrupt longstanding structural disparities.

Professor Liesel Ebersöhn is widely regarded as a leading scholar and teacher in connection with resilience and resilience-promoting interventions in settings plagued by the structural disparity characteristic of emerging economies, and of Global South countries in transformation. She combines emancipatory and intervention methodologies to investigate pathways to resilience as adaptive socio-cultural responses to chronic and cumulative adversity. Her research focus has had a decided impact on curricula for teacher training at several higher education institutions in South Africa. Her teaching and research outputs demonstrate that higher education can effectively integrate research, teaching and learning, and community engagement. Her pedagogy aligns with global citizenship and education as key strategies for restructuring postcolonial conditions an example being an intervention-partnership she designed which provided educational psychology services to more than 1 000 young people in marginalised rural settings, and trained 118 MEd (Educational Psychology) students to be socially responsive professionals.

Professor Ebersöhn is Director of the Centre for the Study of Resilience and a Full Professor at the Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education, University of Pretoria. She is the Secretary-General of the World Education Research Association (WERA), serves on multiple Editorial Boards (including the prestigious Review of Education Research), is a member of international research panels (such as the International Research and Scholarship Committee (Division C, Learning and Instruction, of the American Educational Research Association), and the Building Resilience in Teacher Education (BRITE) Project Reference Group, Murdoch University). She is a National Research Foundation-rated researcher, and registered educational psychologist. She has received several awards for her research in Education and Educational Psychology. She has held international appointments, including visiting professor at Yale University and Edith Cowan University.