The Department of Psychology congratulates Dr Tracey Haselau on the award of her PhD last week at the virtual graduation ceremony. Dr Haselau (formerly Fleming) is already a Rhodes alumni and previously worked as a contract lecturer in the department. For her thesis Dr Haselau investigated students’ talk about their service-learning experiences in psychology employing psychoanalysis alongside discursive psychology as a theoretical and methodological framework. The key findings from this research point to the ways in which students oscillate between employing two competing sets of discourses about their service learning - a liberal traditional discourse alongside a constructivist discourse service learning. In her research she shows how students’ emotional investments in these discourses are mediated by defensive positions caused by the anxieties incurred in service-learning contexts. An important part of her research involved highlighting the way in which anxieties in service-learning experiences may be contained (or not), so as to be aware of the problematic outcomes that may arise, such as the perpetuation of prejudicial attitudes and othering. One examiner of the thesis was impressed by the “sensitive and complex analytic work carried out” describing the work as doing “an excellent job of describing the tensions and consequent contradictory subject positions inherent in students’ talk”. Another examiner described the employment of psychoanalytic concepts in this work as “skillful and extremely helpful” and stated that “the work promises to make a novel contribution to the literature and deepens our understanding of South African students’ experiences of service-learning in psychology (and indeed service-learning more generally)”. Her thesis was supervised by Prof Lisa Saville Young.