Questions and Answers

Dr Shahieda Jansen is the Deputy Director: Academic Support and ICT at UNISA, Western Cape. As a campus executive her major responsibility is to oversee academic support services throughout the student walk. Her oversight of high calibre student services articulates with the Higher Education mandate of graduate success and throughput.

Shahieda is a registered clinical psychologist who previously headed the Student Counselling Services at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Here she coordinated the psychosocial and developmental needs of students, supervised masters-level psychology interns and inspired academics to harmonise student wellness with the academic project. 

She presents annually on two areas of specialisation namely gender conscious empowerment for men and culturally embedded approaches to personal transformation. In her niche area of masculinised personal growth, she facilitates the development of exclusively male cultures in which men risk ‘fishing inwards’ interrogating constructions of their own manhood for the positive transformation of attitudes and behaviour. In a 2019 editorial published in the South African Journal of Psychology, on national radio stations and social media platforms Shahieda authenticates the male capacity for emotional dynamism.

As a provider of culturally intelligent personal transformation she crafted and implemented a locally resonant model of personhood. Whether engaging operational and strategic matters, or monitoring quality educational offerings, her crucial tone-setting conversation is always about “who we are”, before moving on to concerns about “what is the problem?”.