Lindy Wilbraham | Rhodes University (original) (raw)

Papers by Lindy Wilbraham

Emerald Publishing Limited eBooks, Nov 16, 2022

Responsive to the perceived high risks of sexual coercion, unwanted pregnancy and HIV-infection o... more Responsive to the perceived high risks of sexual coercion, unwanted pregnancy and HIV-infection of girls in particular, several South African sexual health promotion campaigns have used media targeting parents (mothers in particular) to instruct them on how sex should be talked about with young people to ‘risk-proof’ them. Such an instrumentalist public health discourse posits this intergenerational communication as an ‘ongoing discussion’ of events, feelings, issues and risk-safe practices around heterosexual sex negotiation. A Foucauldian view finds these conversational imperatives pitched against much-talked-about resistances to talking about sex; and the saturation with risk of ambivalent mothers and silent daughters. Mother-daughter communication about sex and sexualities – as an uneasy western ideal of attachment parenting – has tangled roots in psychoanalytic theory and feminisms where sex as the core of modern subjectivity is normalized, capacities for intimacy are trained, ...

Agenda, Apr 20, 2011

Who reads sex advice columns? Why do we read them? Does sex information affect who we are expecte... more Who reads sex advice columns? Why do we read them? Does sex information affect who we are expected to be as women? LINDY WILBRAHAM explores these questions in light of ‘The Sexpert's Guide’ by Dr David Delvin, an advice column in Femina magazine, which is noted for its informative and entertaining approach to sex and sexuality

This discourse analytic study explores constructions of culture and illness in the talk of psychi... more This discourse analytic study explores constructions of culture and illness in the talk of psychiatrists, psychologists and indigenous healers as they discuss possibilities for collaboration in South African mental health care. Disjunctive versions of what ‘culture ’ is in relation to the illness of a person form an important site for the negotiation of power relations between mental health practitioners and indigenous healers. The results of this study are presented in two parts. Part I explores how a professionalist discourse structured western psychiatric and psychological practice as rational, pragmatic and effective. ‘Cultural differences ’ were variously deployed to support and subvert western psychiatric power. Part II explores the various constructions of ‘African culture ’ – as ‘collectivist ’ and ‘patho-genic ’ – and the ‘African mind ’ – as ‘primitive ’ and ‘irrational ’ – and how these formulations work to disqualify egalitarian positioning for indigenous healers within ...

Lovelines was a didactic textual series that appeared in Fairlady, a South African women's magazi... more Lovelines was a didactic textual series that appeared in Fairlady, a South African women's magazine, instructing mothers on how sex should be talked about with young people to inoculate them against the risk of HIV ! Aids. My reading of this media discourse, and mothers' appropriation of it, sought to examine how the primary target audience of middle classed mothers were persuaded to adopt particular communicative positions. Foucault's normative apparatus of familysexuality-risk concerns the distribution of expertise-epidemiological science of risk in populations, developmental psychology-inscribed micro-practices of childrearing in families-and self-responsibilization of disciplinary power. This finds mothers governmentally positioned as relay points between 'public' (health, economy) and 'private' (family, childrearing, sex) apparatuses, tasked with appropriately socializing a new generation of sexually responsible citizens. This governmental rationality of neo-liberalism is read against South African conditions of mass media persuasion, HIV! Aids risk and talking about sex in families. Several discourse analytical praxes of subject pOSltIoning-modeled on Foucault's approach to subjectivity-are established; and the study contrasts two praxes with different statuses of discourse relating to the Lovelines texts. Firstly, the texts themselves are read as 'addressors', hailing a particular audience into preferred positions (cf. Parker). Two readings are counterpoised-the discursivestructural or ideological positioning of 'experts', 'mothers' and 'adolescent girls', where the multivalent optics of surveillance between these positions hold them fast (Chapter 6); and the advocated psychological techniques of inter-subjective, mother-daughter communication about sex as micro-practices where powers and resistances run around (Chapter 7). A feature of these analyses was how multiple positions are offered to expose consequences of wrong action, and push positioning in preferred directions.

This dissenation applies the theoretical ideas of Michel Foucault viz. confession, surveillance a... more This dissenation applies the theoretical ideas of Michel Foucault viz. confession, surveillance and subjectivity-to advice columns from three South African women's magazines. An interpretative analysis of discourses is employed which, through exposure of the structuring effects of discourse, renders salient the relationship between knowledges, discursive practices, power and institutions. Using, as a staning point, Wendy Hollway's work on subject positioning of women in discourses concerning heterosexual relationship practice, the ways in which women are impelled to "work" in psychologized and medicalized ways to effect normalization in "crises" of "physical attractiveness" and "monogamy" are examined in advice texts. These technologies and practices produce rewards of power for subjection, and these powers are critically discussed in tenns of (a) "liberal" / "humanist", "feminist" and "Foucauldian" strategies of women's empowerment, and (b) the formal dynamics and constraints of advice columns.

Finding your way in qualitative research is not simply another qualitative research instruction m... more Finding your way in qualitative research is not simply another qualitative research instruction manual offering tools, techniques and tricks for coding, or quick fixes for methodological mayhem. The text is aimed at social science students and researchers, and while it offers some how-to basics, it mainly claims to attend to “positioning” an investigation within epistemological, theoretical and design logics, and the practice of writing in qualitative inquiry. As its title suggests, finding your way, the text itself is conceived to work inductively to scaffold qualitative inquiry as a process, culminating in “qualitative research design” as positioned methodological argumentation in writing proposals or reports – in the concluding chapter. As such, Finding your way in qualitative research is situated within an illustrious genre of qualitative research texts attending to paradigmatically situated, in-depth processes of inquiry, design, argument and writing for particular “audiences” ...

Psychology in Society, 2017

South African Journal of Higher Education, 2019

Sexual and reproductive health programmes with students in higher education in South Africa, are ... more Sexual and reproductive health programmes with students in higher education in South Africa, are a neglected area of intervention. We report on piloting the peer-facilitated Auntie Stella intervention material at two South African universities. This participatory methodology encourages critical thinking by opening discussion on managing relationships, sexual decision-making, gender-based violence and risk-safety. The format involves cards featuring a letter, a facilitated discussion, an answer-response and possible action points. Six focus groups of participants were facilitated by postgraduate students over four months. Using thematic analysis four tensions were identified in the student discussions: HIV awareness was in tension with relationship practices; awareness of risk was in tension with denial of vulnerability; awareness of individuals' rights was in tension with claims on these rights; and HIV knowledge was in tension with HIV stigma. The Auntie Stella material has the potential to open up discursive spaces amongst students, and to develop agency in sexual decision-making.

Psychology in Society, 2012

Genealogical accounts of the HIV/Aids epidemic document the historicized swells and riffs of atte... more Genealogical accounts of the HIV/Aids epidemic document the historicized swells and riffs of attention associated with particular risky populations or sexual practices, with effective prevention techniques or brands of responsible and caring citizenship, and with the politics of antiretroviral treatment. An unprecedented amount of attentionoften underscored by outrage, panic and hopelessness-has centred on the issue of access to antiretroviral treatments in Africa, and on the malaise of public health systems in Africa (Nguyen, 2010). Research writing about the African "treatment decade" between 1995 and 2005 finds antiretroviral treatment as a globally promised restitution nuanced with insurmountable hitches, varying degrees of support and resistance, and lucky breaks on the ground that govern living with or death from Aids (Robins, 2009).

This review article considers two local "formulae" of pedagogical developmental psychol... more This review article considers two local "formulae" of pedagogical developmental psychology textbooks. It reads Developmental psychology as deployment of formula two, "classical" theories with contexts hemmed into text-boxes, against (preferred) formula one, contextual issues spilled into thematic, empirical, theoretical, critical and/or historical arguments about interventions. The central interrogation of how (ex-colonized) contexts of development are made to dis/appear in relation

South African Journal of Psychology, 1996

This article explores the psychologized interstices between the appearance of women's bodies ... more This article explores the psychologized interstices between the appearance of women's bodies and their ‘inner selves’. Using a Foucauldian analysis with feminist undertones, several ways in which psychological discourses are deployed in ‘crises’ of ‘physical unattractiveness’ in advice texts, are examined. The work of Wendy Hollway on the positioning of women and men in heterosexual relationship practice is taken, critically, as a starting point. This positioning of women is situated within a web of psychologized knowledges and practices which labour to divide women's bodies from their inner psyches/selves. Psychologization is discussed in terms of the rewards of power offered women for subjection; and the ways in which it resists feminist arguments about the social, ideological or discursive framing of women's bodies, while holding conventional gendered positionings and heterosexual relationship practices in place.

Transcultural psychiatry, 2003

This discourse analytic study explores constructions of culture and illness in the talk of psychi... more This discourse analytic study explores constructions of culture and illness in the talk of psychiatrists, psychologists and indigenous healers as they discuss possibilities for collaboration in South African mental health care. Versions of 'culture', and disputes over what constitutes 'disorder', are an important site for the negotiation of power relations between mental health practitioners and indigenous healers. The results of this study are presented in two parts. Part I explores discourses about western psychiatric/psychological professionalism, tensions in diagnosis between cultural relativism and psychiatric universalism, and how assertion of 'cultural differences' may be used to resist psychiatric power. Part II explores how discursive constructions of 'African culture' and 'African madness' work to marginalize indigenous healing in South African mental health care, despite repeated calls for collaboration.

South African Journal of Psychology, 2009

Responsive to the perceived high risks of HIV-infection by sexually active youth, several South A... more Responsive to the perceived high risks of HIV-infection by sexually active youth, several South African sexual health promotion campaigns have used media targeting parents/mothers, instructing them on how sex should be talked about with their children/youth to ‘risk-proof’ them. In this paper I examine how conversations about sex between apparently unwilling parents and young people are fabricated in selected loveLife print-media texts. A Foucauldian analysis of subject positioning explores how expert communication techniques are offered to set up ‘discussions’. I examine the implications for intergenerational communication of loveLife's use of a youth-culture discourse about adolescent agency alongside the familiar storm-and-stress discourse about adolescent deficits. I also explore how power is masked in figuring ‘open’, ‘willing’ and ‘conflict-free’ conversations about sexual issues.

Race Ethnicity and Education, 2014

African universities have been called to respond to the social issues of trauma, adversity, injus... more African universities have been called to respond to the social issues of trauma, adversity, injustice and inequality that trouble their embedding communities, their staff and their students. The need for South African universities to respond to HIV/Aids (in particular) includes the opening up of new knowledge about and ways of managing the impacts of the epidemic; and shaping a young generation of socio-politically literate subjects and citizens, who would be equipped to respond appropriately and creatively to social problems and issues. This article reflects on my own feminist poststructuralist pedagogical practice in incorporating issues related to HIV/Aids into two developmental psychology courses – Childhood & Adversity and Youth Risk – I have taught at two ‘historically white’ South African universities. These courses drew on traditional (western) psychological theories of human development, and located critique by engaging these theories from South African social scientific research on lived realities in various at-risk communities in a time of HIV/Aids epidemic. Inclusion of HIV/Aids harnessed various categories of disempowerment and exclusion, particularly in the intersections between race, class, gender, locality and health-status. The article explicitly explores students’ resistances to this curriculum, by way of course evaluations, which were used to unpack discriminatory discourse in the classroom without simply seeing resistances as obstacles to learning. These racialized resistances included resistances to HIV/Aids in a ‘psychology’ course; resistances to the risk categories of the epidemic; and resistance to my authority as a white, feminist, woman professor.

Medical History, 2014

Recent scholarship has explored the dynamics between families and colonial lunatic asylums in the... more Recent scholarship has explored the dynamics between families and colonial lunatic asylums in the late nineteenth century, where families actively participated in the processes of custodial care, committal, treatment and release of their relatives. This paper works in this historical field, but with some methodological and theoretical differences. The Foucauldian study is anchored to a single case and family as an illness narrative that moves cross-referentially between bureaucratic state archival material, psychiatric case records, and intergenerational family-storytelling and family photographs. Following headaches and seizures, Harry Walter Wilbraham was medically boarded from his position as Postmaster in the Cape of Good Hope Colony of South Africa with a ‘permanent disease of the brain’, and was committed to the Grahamstown Asylum in 1910, where he died the following year, aged 40 years. In contrast to writings about colonial asylums that usually describe several patient cases...


Discourse & Society, 1994

In this study, we analyze a body of discourse concerning the government of space in South Africa,... more In this study, we analyze a body of discourse concerning the government of space in South Africa, employing the methodological framework developed by Wetherell and Potter (1992). Our data comprised a series of letters submitted to local newspapers by the white residents of a coastal town in the Cape Province. The letters protested, on various grounds, the development of a black `squatter' community within the town's environs. The present research focused upon residents' use of an ecological repertoire to warrant their arguments. In the first stage of analysis, we located several sites of contradiction at which the coherence of such arguments broke down. In the second, we delineated three moments wherein ecological discourse was employed to justify the racist division of space, while concealing overt racism. We conclude by underlining the value of Wetherell and Potter's model, which replaces a priori definitions of the content of racist ideology with a more fluid, con...

Psychology in Society, 2006

Agenda, 1996

Who reads sex advice columns? Why do we read them? Does sex information affect who we are expecte... more Who reads sex advice columns? Why do we read them? Does sex information affect who we are expected to be as women? LINDY WILBRAHAM explores these questions in light of ‘The Sexpert's Guide’ by Dr D...

Emerald Publishing Limited eBooks, Nov 16, 2022

Responsive to the perceived high risks of sexual coercion, unwanted pregnancy and HIV-infection o... more Responsive to the perceived high risks of sexual coercion, unwanted pregnancy and HIV-infection of girls in particular, several South African sexual health promotion campaigns have used media targeting parents (mothers in particular) to instruct them on how sex should be talked about with young people to ‘risk-proof’ them. Such an instrumentalist public health discourse posits this intergenerational communication as an ‘ongoing discussion’ of events, feelings, issues and risk-safe practices around heterosexual sex negotiation. A Foucauldian view finds these conversational imperatives pitched against much-talked-about resistances to talking about sex; and the saturation with risk of ambivalent mothers and silent daughters. Mother-daughter communication about sex and sexualities – as an uneasy western ideal of attachment parenting – has tangled roots in psychoanalytic theory and feminisms where sex as the core of modern subjectivity is normalized, capacities for intimacy are trained, ...

Agenda, Apr 20, 2011

Who reads sex advice columns? Why do we read them? Does sex information affect who we are expecte... more Who reads sex advice columns? Why do we read them? Does sex information affect who we are expected to be as women? LINDY WILBRAHAM explores these questions in light of ‘The Sexpert's Guide’ by Dr David Delvin, an advice column in Femina magazine, which is noted for its informative and entertaining approach to sex and sexuality

This discourse analytic study explores constructions of culture and illness in the talk of psychi... more This discourse analytic study explores constructions of culture and illness in the talk of psychiatrists, psychologists and indigenous healers as they discuss possibilities for collaboration in South African mental health care. Disjunctive versions of what ‘culture ’ is in relation to the illness of a person form an important site for the negotiation of power relations between mental health practitioners and indigenous healers. The results of this study are presented in two parts. Part I explores how a professionalist discourse structured western psychiatric and psychological practice as rational, pragmatic and effective. ‘Cultural differences ’ were variously deployed to support and subvert western psychiatric power. Part II explores the various constructions of ‘African culture ’ – as ‘collectivist ’ and ‘patho-genic ’ – and the ‘African mind ’ – as ‘primitive ’ and ‘irrational ’ – and how these formulations work to disqualify egalitarian positioning for indigenous healers within ...

Lovelines was a didactic textual series that appeared in Fairlady, a South African women's magazi... more Lovelines was a didactic textual series that appeared in Fairlady, a South African women's magazine, instructing mothers on how sex should be talked about with young people to inoculate them against the risk of HIV ! Aids. My reading of this media discourse, and mothers' appropriation of it, sought to examine how the primary target audience of middle classed mothers were persuaded to adopt particular communicative positions. Foucault's normative apparatus of familysexuality-risk concerns the distribution of expertise-epidemiological science of risk in populations, developmental psychology-inscribed micro-practices of childrearing in families-and self-responsibilization of disciplinary power. This finds mothers governmentally positioned as relay points between 'public' (health, economy) and 'private' (family, childrearing, sex) apparatuses, tasked with appropriately socializing a new generation of sexually responsible citizens. This governmental rationality of neo-liberalism is read against South African conditions of mass media persuasion, HIV! Aids risk and talking about sex in families. Several discourse analytical praxes of subject pOSltIoning-modeled on Foucault's approach to subjectivity-are established; and the study contrasts two praxes with different statuses of discourse relating to the Lovelines texts. Firstly, the texts themselves are read as 'addressors', hailing a particular audience into preferred positions (cf. Parker). Two readings are counterpoised-the discursivestructural or ideological positioning of 'experts', 'mothers' and 'adolescent girls', where the multivalent optics of surveillance between these positions hold them fast (Chapter 6); and the advocated psychological techniques of inter-subjective, mother-daughter communication about sex as micro-practices where powers and resistances run around (Chapter 7). A feature of these analyses was how multiple positions are offered to expose consequences of wrong action, and push positioning in preferred directions.

This dissenation applies the theoretical ideas of Michel Foucault viz. confession, surveillance a... more This dissenation applies the theoretical ideas of Michel Foucault viz. confession, surveillance and subjectivity-to advice columns from three South African women's magazines. An interpretative analysis of discourses is employed which, through exposure of the structuring effects of discourse, renders salient the relationship between knowledges, discursive practices, power and institutions. Using, as a staning point, Wendy Hollway's work on subject positioning of women in discourses concerning heterosexual relationship practice, the ways in which women are impelled to "work" in psychologized and medicalized ways to effect normalization in "crises" of "physical attractiveness" and "monogamy" are examined in advice texts. These technologies and practices produce rewards of power for subjection, and these powers are critically discussed in tenns of (a) "liberal" / "humanist", "feminist" and "Foucauldian" strategies of women's empowerment, and (b) the formal dynamics and constraints of advice columns.

Finding your way in qualitative research is not simply another qualitative research instruction m... more Finding your way in qualitative research is not simply another qualitative research instruction manual offering tools, techniques and tricks for coding, or quick fixes for methodological mayhem. The text is aimed at social science students and researchers, and while it offers some how-to basics, it mainly claims to attend to “positioning” an investigation within epistemological, theoretical and design logics, and the practice of writing in qualitative inquiry. As its title suggests, finding your way, the text itself is conceived to work inductively to scaffold qualitative inquiry as a process, culminating in “qualitative research design” as positioned methodological argumentation in writing proposals or reports – in the concluding chapter. As such, Finding your way in qualitative research is situated within an illustrious genre of qualitative research texts attending to paradigmatically situated, in-depth processes of inquiry, design, argument and writing for particular “audiences” ...

Psychology in Society, 2017

South African Journal of Higher Education, 2019

Sexual and reproductive health programmes with students in higher education in South Africa, are ... more Sexual and reproductive health programmes with students in higher education in South Africa, are a neglected area of intervention. We report on piloting the peer-facilitated Auntie Stella intervention material at two South African universities. This participatory methodology encourages critical thinking by opening discussion on managing relationships, sexual decision-making, gender-based violence and risk-safety. The format involves cards featuring a letter, a facilitated discussion, an answer-response and possible action points. Six focus groups of participants were facilitated by postgraduate students over four months. Using thematic analysis four tensions were identified in the student discussions: HIV awareness was in tension with relationship practices; awareness of risk was in tension with denial of vulnerability; awareness of individuals' rights was in tension with claims on these rights; and HIV knowledge was in tension with HIV stigma. The Auntie Stella material has the potential to open up discursive spaces amongst students, and to develop agency in sexual decision-making.

Psychology in Society, 2012

Genealogical accounts of the HIV/Aids epidemic document the historicized swells and riffs of atte... more Genealogical accounts of the HIV/Aids epidemic document the historicized swells and riffs of attention associated with particular risky populations or sexual practices, with effective prevention techniques or brands of responsible and caring citizenship, and with the politics of antiretroviral treatment. An unprecedented amount of attentionoften underscored by outrage, panic and hopelessness-has centred on the issue of access to antiretroviral treatments in Africa, and on the malaise of public health systems in Africa (Nguyen, 2010). Research writing about the African "treatment decade" between 1995 and 2005 finds antiretroviral treatment as a globally promised restitution nuanced with insurmountable hitches, varying degrees of support and resistance, and lucky breaks on the ground that govern living with or death from Aids (Robins, 2009).

This review article considers two local "formulae" of pedagogical developmental psychol... more This review article considers two local "formulae" of pedagogical developmental psychology textbooks. It reads Developmental psychology as deployment of formula two, "classical" theories with contexts hemmed into text-boxes, against (preferred) formula one, contextual issues spilled into thematic, empirical, theoretical, critical and/or historical arguments about interventions. The central interrogation of how (ex-colonized) contexts of development are made to dis/appear in relation

South African Journal of Psychology, 1996

This article explores the psychologized interstices between the appearance of women's bodies ... more This article explores the psychologized interstices between the appearance of women's bodies and their ‘inner selves’. Using a Foucauldian analysis with feminist undertones, several ways in which psychological discourses are deployed in ‘crises’ of ‘physical unattractiveness’ in advice texts, are examined. The work of Wendy Hollway on the positioning of women and men in heterosexual relationship practice is taken, critically, as a starting point. This positioning of women is situated within a web of psychologized knowledges and practices which labour to divide women's bodies from their inner psyches/selves. Psychologization is discussed in terms of the rewards of power offered women for subjection; and the ways in which it resists feminist arguments about the social, ideological or discursive framing of women's bodies, while holding conventional gendered positionings and heterosexual relationship practices in place.

Transcultural psychiatry, 2003

This discourse analytic study explores constructions of culture and illness in the talk of psychi... more This discourse analytic study explores constructions of culture and illness in the talk of psychiatrists, psychologists and indigenous healers as they discuss possibilities for collaboration in South African mental health care. Versions of 'culture', and disputes over what constitutes 'disorder', are an important site for the negotiation of power relations between mental health practitioners and indigenous healers. The results of this study are presented in two parts. Part I explores discourses about western psychiatric/psychological professionalism, tensions in diagnosis between cultural relativism and psychiatric universalism, and how assertion of 'cultural differences' may be used to resist psychiatric power. Part II explores how discursive constructions of 'African culture' and 'African madness' work to marginalize indigenous healing in South African mental health care, despite repeated calls for collaboration.

South African Journal of Psychology, 2009

Responsive to the perceived high risks of HIV-infection by sexually active youth, several South A... more Responsive to the perceived high risks of HIV-infection by sexually active youth, several South African sexual health promotion campaigns have used media targeting parents/mothers, instructing them on how sex should be talked about with their children/youth to ‘risk-proof’ them. In this paper I examine how conversations about sex between apparently unwilling parents and young people are fabricated in selected loveLife print-media texts. A Foucauldian analysis of subject positioning explores how expert communication techniques are offered to set up ‘discussions’. I examine the implications for intergenerational communication of loveLife's use of a youth-culture discourse about adolescent agency alongside the familiar storm-and-stress discourse about adolescent deficits. I also explore how power is masked in figuring ‘open’, ‘willing’ and ‘conflict-free’ conversations about sexual issues.

Race Ethnicity and Education, 2014

African universities have been called to respond to the social issues of trauma, adversity, injus... more African universities have been called to respond to the social issues of trauma, adversity, injustice and inequality that trouble their embedding communities, their staff and their students. The need for South African universities to respond to HIV/Aids (in particular) includes the opening up of new knowledge about and ways of managing the impacts of the epidemic; and shaping a young generation of socio-politically literate subjects and citizens, who would be equipped to respond appropriately and creatively to social problems and issues. This article reflects on my own feminist poststructuralist pedagogical practice in incorporating issues related to HIV/Aids into two developmental psychology courses – Childhood & Adversity and Youth Risk – I have taught at two ‘historically white’ South African universities. These courses drew on traditional (western) psychological theories of human development, and located critique by engaging these theories from South African social scientific research on lived realities in various at-risk communities in a time of HIV/Aids epidemic. Inclusion of HIV/Aids harnessed various categories of disempowerment and exclusion, particularly in the intersections between race, class, gender, locality and health-status. The article explicitly explores students’ resistances to this curriculum, by way of course evaluations, which were used to unpack discriminatory discourse in the classroom without simply seeing resistances as obstacles to learning. These racialized resistances included resistances to HIV/Aids in a ‘psychology’ course; resistances to the risk categories of the epidemic; and resistance to my authority as a white, feminist, woman professor.

Medical History, 2014

Recent scholarship has explored the dynamics between families and colonial lunatic asylums in the... more Recent scholarship has explored the dynamics between families and colonial lunatic asylums in the late nineteenth century, where families actively participated in the processes of custodial care, committal, treatment and release of their relatives. This paper works in this historical field, but with some methodological and theoretical differences. The Foucauldian study is anchored to a single case and family as an illness narrative that moves cross-referentially between bureaucratic state archival material, psychiatric case records, and intergenerational family-storytelling and family photographs. Following headaches and seizures, Harry Walter Wilbraham was medically boarded from his position as Postmaster in the Cape of Good Hope Colony of South Africa with a ‘permanent disease of the brain’, and was committed to the Grahamstown Asylum in 1910, where he died the following year, aged 40 years. In contrast to writings about colonial asylums that usually describe several patient cases...


Discourse & Society, 1994

In this study, we analyze a body of discourse concerning the government of space in South Africa,... more In this study, we analyze a body of discourse concerning the government of space in South Africa, employing the methodological framework developed by Wetherell and Potter (1992). Our data comprised a series of letters submitted to local newspapers by the white residents of a coastal town in the Cape Province. The letters protested, on various grounds, the development of a black `squatter' community within the town's environs. The present research focused upon residents' use of an ecological repertoire to warrant their arguments. In the first stage of analysis, we located several sites of contradiction at which the coherence of such arguments broke down. In the second, we delineated three moments wherein ecological discourse was employed to justify the racist division of space, while concealing overt racism. We conclude by underlining the value of Wetherell and Potter's model, which replaces a priori definitions of the content of racist ideology with a more fluid, con...

Psychology in Society, 2006

Agenda, 1996

Who reads sex advice columns? Why do we read them? Does sex information affect who we are expecte... more Who reads sex advice columns? Why do we read them? Does sex information affect who we are expected to be as women? LINDY WILBRAHAM explores these questions in light of ‘The Sexpert's Guide’ by Dr D...