Milestones of democracy

OK, so I went to the vending machine near my office, put in R4 (that's about 60 US cents in case you were wondering), and got out a can of coke. It was #2 in the "milestones of democracy" series, explaining how in April 1994 "long queues were embraced with enthusiasm as South Africans prepared to make their voices heard". Also, they'll donate R1 million (about 150 thousand US dollars) to the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. Groovy! Must collect the whole set. Kind of reminds me of how McDonalds has now trademarked the phrase "I am Asian" - check it out at http://www.i-am-asian.com. Maybe Coke could ask Thabo Mbeki if he'd mind if they trademarked his "I am an African" phrase?

Trauma in context conference

The call for papers for the 9th Critical Methods Conference in September in Durban is out. The theme is "Trauma in context" and
the deadline is 4 June 2004. The call for papers is at http://www.criticalmethods.org/cmc2004.htm

New critical psychology blog

This is a new blog started by Desmond Painter and Martin Terre Blanche, but hopefully additional authors will join us in due course. The idea for the blog arose while writing a paper on critical psychology in South Africa. In writing the paper we became aware of the wealth of resources on critical psychology on the web, including much from other disciplines (such as gender studies and media studies) and thought that it would be useful to create additional pointers to it. We don't really have the capacity to try and set up a full-blown portal to critical psychology stuff (and anyway there are q few other sites already doing that), so the informal and ad-hoc nature of a blog seemed just right.

Another reason for starting this blog is to get some enthusiasm going for the 2005 international critical psychology conference in South Africa. More about that later...