Yamini Kalyanaraman
Public Service Counselling Psychologist (HPCSA); Doctoral Student (CSSR)
MA in Counselling Psychology, RU, Makhanda; BA Honours in Psychology (cum laude), RU, Makhanda; BA in Psychology, English, and Journalism, Christ University, Bangalore.
Born in India, Yamini studied in various schools across the sub-continent. She has been living in SA since 2014.
Her full Masters dissertation, for which she was awarded a distinction, explored womxn’s pregnancy narratives in the Eastern Cape Province using an intracategorical intersectional framework and Macleod’s ‘supportability’ model. At the PsySSA conference in 2019, her paper won the Best Student Presentation in the Feminism and Psychology / Sexuality and Gender Division. Her paper argued for an interconnectedness between a womxn’s personal (emotional, physical, and cognitive) experiences of pregnancy; the micro-interactions of support (un)available from partners, family, friends, healthcare workers, workplaces, and community members; and the macro-structures of socioeconomic policies, religiosity, cultural practices, and healthcare systems.
Yamini’s PhD is an action-research based project that aims to operationalise CSSR’s previously published Abortion Counselling Guidelines. Through a reproductive justice framework, the primary aim of this research is to develop, conduct, document, and dynamically revise an abortion counselling training course for South African nurses – one embodied in dialogical pedagogical praxis. This research is supervised by Distinguished Professor Catriona Macleod and is taking place in partnership with the Eastern Cape Department of Health. Her research is funded by the National Research Foundation.
Yamini lectures at Rhodes University on Community Psychology and supervises Honours students’ research and co-supervises a Masters research project.
Masters Dissertation
Kalyanaraman, Y. (2019). An intracategorical intersectional framework for understanding ‘supportability’ in womxn’s narratives of their pregnancy. (Unpublished Masters Dissertation). Rhodes University, Makhanda.
Conference Presentations
Kalyanaraman, Y., & Macleod, C. (2019, September). An intracategorical intersectional framework for understanding ‘supportability’ in womxn’s narratives of their pregnancy. Paper presented at the 25th Annual South African Psychology Congress, Johannesburg.
Kalyanaraman, Y., Yendall, K., & Akhurst, J. (2018, May). Community‐based Learning: Exploring the interface of theory and practice via the reflections of trainee psychologists engaged in projects with a local community. Poster presentation at the Community Engagement and Social Innovation Symposium, Makhanda.
Last Modified: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 16:55:15 SAST