For a permanent critique of psychology: Reimagining psychology in society

Abstract

What is it about PINS that makes it important for us to mark and celebrate its three decades of publication? 30 years is not a particularly long period in the life of a journal; there are many that are older, even in South Africa. Yes, several of the small, independent journals, magazines and newspapers that were established in this country in the 1980s (often in explicit, programmatic opposition to apartheid) have since disappeared, adding to the impression that PINS is something of a battle-bruised but tenacious survivor – not only of apartheid’s censorship regime and often violent reprisals against critical intellectuals (McDonald, 2009; Keniston, 2013), but also of the rapid corporatisation of scholarship and the capitulation of erstwhile strong traditions of radical thought and praxis in South African universities – what Helliker and Vale (2012) refer to as an “age of retreat” – after 1994 (see also Jacklin & Vale, 2009). Indeed, in an editorial commemorating the twentieth anniversary of PINS in the early 2000s, founding and current editor Grahame Hayes referred to the journal’s “struggle to survive” and the difficulty, not only in South Africa but worldwide, “of sustaining a stance of critique and social engagement in psychology” (Hayes, 2003: 5).