Puleng Segalo. Supplied
Winner: Dr Puleng Segalo
Dr Puleng Segalo received her PhD in social and personality psychology from the City University of New York Graduate Center. She currently works as a senior lecturer at the University of South Africa, teaching social and community psychology.
Segalo’s research work with women from various communities in South Africa offers textured “herstories†as a new genre of qualitative visual evidence of oppression and desire. Through the use of embroideries, the personal is quite literally stitched into the political and historic landscape. Segalo has also interrogated transcripts of testimonies made to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) by women survivors of apartheid and interviewed women from a Gauteng community. Analysing how the constricted/constructed context of telling shapes the stories that are told, and by comparing the embroideries with the TRC testimonies and interviews, she recognises that no method is uncontaminated by the past.
The memories of oppression, past and present, haunt the text, and the immediate context of narrative production bears consequences for the unfolding narratives. These embroideries, although contrasting sharply with the TRC testimonies, pick up on the threads of cumulative violence, nostalgia, oppression, desire and fear.
Segalo’s work exposes how much structural violence transforms every day constructs, including mobility and freedom. Her work reminds us that it is important to learn more about the effects, identities and subjectivities released and rehearsed when women are asked by NGOs, feminist organisations, fund raisers or philanthropies, to perform, sketch, sing, embody and narrate “branded†biographies of trauma and survival.
Since the start of her research career in 2007, Segalo has produced a coherent body of work and has a consistent record of research productivity. She has published eight articles in accredited journals, two contributions to accredited conference proceedings, two book chapters, and five non-accredited contributions. She has acted as a reviewer for the Journal of Psychology in Africa, South African Journal of Psychology, Journal of Black African Theological Studies, New Voices in Psychology and Journal of Social and Political Psychology. Segalo has presented reviewed research papers at 12 international conferences and 10 national conferences. She is currently supervising five master’s and four doctoral students. She is an active member of the Psychological Association of South Africa, and holds positions on a number of its executive committees. Segalo has received recognition for her research work in the form of awards and invitations as a guest speaker at a number of national and international academic forums and popular media. Over the years she has received a number of awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship, a National Research Foundation Prestigious Scholarship, a PEO Peace Scholarship and an Oppenheimer Fellowship.
In 2013, she was awarded the 2012/13 Unisa Principal’s Award for Excellence in Research. She has recently been invited by the National Research Foundation to be one of their role models for younger researchers and is actively involved in a national youth mentoring campaign. In addition, she is actively involved in the annual Unisa Student Research and Innovation Showcase, which aims to encourage students by giving them an opportunity to present their innovative research work.
First runner-up: Professor Matseliso Mokhele
Professor Mokhele completed her PhD in Education at the University of South Africa, and was a finalist for the youngest doctoral graduate award among the members of Unisa’s academic staff that year. She is currently a research associate professor at the University of Fort Hare.
Mokhele’s journey in research began 10 years ago when she worked as an unpaid volunteer research assistant on a major research and development project in science and mathematics education at the University of Pretoria.
Passion for research
As a volunteer honours student, she did everything from making telephone calls to setting up interviews with participants in the research project, setting up data storage and retrieval systems, cleaning up data, and later participating in data collection and analysis. It was this experience that ignited her passion for research.
Since presenting her first research paper at an international seminar at Makerere University (Uganda) in 2006, Mokhele has presented at least one paper at an international conference every year.
Mokhele’s research focuses on what has become a large industry in South Africa, the provision of professional development and support to primary and secondary school teachers.
Her interest is in understanding this industry and its potential benefits and liabilities from the perspectives of the intended beneficiaries, the teachers. Her research suggests the need to rethink the programmes.
A major recommendation from her research work is that professional development and support programmes should provide more than just the skills and knowledge to do a particular job, but provide the teachers with personally significant experiences that change not only their working lives, but also their private lives.
Such experiences are a necessary condition for changing the work that teachers do in their schools and classrooms with the learners. Her current research continues the inquiry into the perspectives of the intended beneficiaries of teacher development and support programmes, with a focus on teacher-led professional development programmes. In February 2014, Mokhele was awarded a three-year Thuthuka Grant by the National Research Foundation to undertake this research.
Mokhele has published over 15 articles in local and international journals. She currently supervises four PhD and three master’s students and is one of those responsible for the postgraduate and staff research training programmes in the Education Faculty of the University of Fort Hare.
Women in research
She is a Y2 NRF-rated researcher. Mokhele has received an award from the prestigious American Educational Research Association to present her work to international audiences. In 2012, she received the Women in Research (Resilience in Research) award from Unisa.
Mokhele is not only passionate about her own research, but takes keen interest in supporting especially other black women researchers to break into the research and publications environment. Despite her age, she has mentored and supported four other black women researchers, all much older and more experienced in academia, to co-publish their first research articles in international journals with her in 2012 and 2013.
Second runner-up: Professor Petro du Preez
Professor Du Preez is an associate professor in the School of Curriculum-based Studies at North-West University. She obtained her PhD from Stellenbosch University in 2008, after receiving a scholarship from DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service) in 2006 to complete her PhD at the University of Hamburg, Germany.
She has achieved enormous recognition in her short career as a full-time researcher and academic. Promoted to associate professor in 2011, she became the youngest professor ever appointed in the Faculty of Education at North-West University.
Her contribution and dedication to publications in human rights education and curriculum studies (mostly in higher education contexts) have been noticed by scholars nationally and internationally. She is the project leader in the newly established Education and Human Rights in Diversity research unit in the Faculty of Education Sciences of North-West University, with specialisation on innovative curriculum inquiry in post-conflict societies. In recognition of her academic potential and abilities, in 2012 Du Preez was appointed as the MEd and PhD programme leader and chair of the MEd and PhD programme committee. The committee’s task is to assess all proposals for postgraduate studies. She has been invited by two leading universities to be a presenter in postgraduate research support programmes.
In 2014, Du Preez received a Y2 rating from the National Research Foundation. In 2012, she was also recognised as one of the top 200 youth leaders in South Africa by the Mail & Guardian in the category Science and Education, and in 2013, as one of the “movers and shakers in academia†by Higher Education Resource Services (South Africa).
In 2013 she received a grant from the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa for her research on child trafficking as a human rights violation. Du Preez is at present developing into one of the leading voices in curriculum studies and human rights education in the higher education fraternity in South Africa and among her international peers. She has presented 22 research papers at national conferences and another 22 at international conferences. Du Preez has published 15 articles in ISI-accredited peer-reviewed journals and 10 book chapters. She has been invited by one of the leading ISI journals, Compare, to contribute an article that was published earlier this year. She is an external peer-reviewer for 10 national and international journals. An academic book that she co-edited (Curriculum Studies: Visions and Imaginings) is currently in print. Since 2009, she has produced five master’s and one doctoral student. During the same period she examined a total of 12 theses/dissertations. She is currently promoting four PhDs and supervising four master’s students.
Du Preez’s National Research Foundation-funded project, “Education research for quality PhD study curriculum-making: A South African meta-studyâ€, will contribute to the question of quality and international benchmarking for PhD curriculum-making.
