Professor Lou-Marié Kruger
Professor Lou-Marié Kruger obtained a master’s in social science (political studies) from the University of Cape Town in 1989, and a PhD in clinical psychology from Boston University in 1996. In the same year, Kruger completed an American Psychological Association-accredited clinical psychology internship at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Harvard Medical School.
Her current research has been shaped by her early academic career — which introduced her to theories such as post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism and Marxism — and by her work as a political researcher and activist, focused on the impact of political, socioeconomic and cultural factors on the lives of South Africans.
Kruger began her graduate studies in clinical psychology in Boston with a Fulbright scholarship in 1990. She returned to South Africa in 1996 to work as a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University. Since then, her research has focused on the emotional worlds of low-income South African women and girls, using mostly psychoanalytic, feminist and postmodern theoretical frameworks. In her academic work, she highlights the fact that the impact of poverty is profoundly gendered and raced, and she consistently challenges the pathologising of women’s emotional responses to being poor.
She is committed to the empowerment of young clinicians and researchers. She co-ordinated the postgraduate programme in Clinical Psychology and Community Counselling at Stellenbosch University in South Africa for 13 years (2000-2013) and is currently still teaching and supervising in the programme. She sees teaching, mentoring and supervision as an integral aspect of her academic work and has received several teaching awards in addition to research awards, fellowships and nominations, such as a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship (2004), an American Association of University Women International Fellowship (1992-1993) and a Clara Mayo Memorial Award from Boston University (1992).
She has been published in international academic journals including Social Science and Medicine; Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; Feminism and Psychology and the Journal of Infant and Reproductive Mental Health, and regularly participates as a presenter, invited lecturer or keynote speaker at international and local academic events. As a critical scholar, Kruger has also set out to challenge the way in which we think in the South African context about knowledge, research, the dissemination of research results (creative non-fiction), interdisciplinarity, capacity building and community involvement/action research.
Kruger’s research cannot be separated from her clinical and community work in the Stellenbosch area. While she is passionate about writing and making the voices of women and girls audible, her action research projects are also aimed at having a direct impact and are typically conducted in the context of group and/or individual clinical and community interventions.