Teaching Aids: Struggling with/through student resistances in psychology curricula in South African universities

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.