We Can Lift Each Other Up
Reimagining a Mental Health Intervention as a Critical Service-Learning Initiative
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21504/ajhece.v1i3.2520Keywords:
Gender-based violence, Storytelling, Narrative understanding, Mental Health Intervention, Engaged scholarship, critical service-learning, democratic civic engagementAbstract
In this paper, I suggest that ‘SHAER: Storytelling for Health, Acknowledgment, Expression and Recovery’ can be reimagined as a critical service-learning initiative. This suggestion is based on trying to make sense of two unexpected outcomes of implementing a mental-health intervention for women survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in Makhanda, South Africa. I argue that while SHAER was initially conceived as a mental health intervention, it creates an open space characterised by mutual recognition in which participants appear to others—disclose their identity and reality—and develop a critical consciousness. Drawing on the unexpected centrality of forward-looking, agency-affirming narratives of motherhood, rather than backward-looking, victim or survivor-centred ‘trauma stories’, I propose that SHAER offers a model for transformative community engagement in higher education institutions in South Africa. In its barest form, SHAER can be seen as a platform for fostering relational agency, self-authorship, and solidarity through narrative exchange and recognition. As such, SHAER aligns with the aims of what Tania Mitchell calls critical service-learning and John Saltmarsh and Matthew Hartley call democratic civic engagement and offers a powerful model for embedding community engagement within the academic project.
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