Wednesday 22 July 11:25 - 12:55

Hall: 01 - Basilica

Chair: Meyer Ines

Division: Division 1: Work and Organizational Psychology

According to the United Nations (2017), by 2100 one in three people will reside in Africa. As many here have long lived with the turbulences increasingly common elsewhere, African contexts enable insights into how to address societal concerns such as political instability, declining "standard" forms of employment, inequality, poverty, or different forms of organizing, like solidarity-based systems. Yet, scientific methods and theories relevant to African contexts and data from African samples remain rare. This is despite a growing interest among European and North American scholars to conduct research in Africa and to collaborate with African colleagues. Implicit in much of this work is that Africa needs to be developed, that it must catch up: African researchers must adopt knowledge created elsewhere and benefit from capacity building led by scholars from outside Africa. Unintentionally, this reproduces colonial power structures. The five presentations by academics in work psychology from north, west and southern Africa encourage a mindset shift towards trust in African scholarship and its potential to create knowledge relevant beyond African borders.
Presenters:
(1) Professors Azouaghe and Khaoudi (Morocco): Psychological health of teachers and healthcare employees explored against the JD-R: The need to incorporate contextual and sociocultural factors
(2) Dr Makapela (Switzerland): The significance of hair as an identity marker in African female professionals in Nigeria and South Africa and the subtle but significant differences
(3) Dr Zungu (South Africa): South African workplaces as places of healing from intergenerational historical trauma through culturally grounded wellbeing initiatives
(4) Professors Ngueutsa and Tchagneno (France): The state of work psychology in francophone Africa: Shortcomings of existing models, especially in informal work contexts
(5) Karen Mkhithika (UK): How a study of social care workers in the UK revealed informal care networks resembling "Ubuntu" principles and the importance to center context, lived experience, and relational ethics in research