💬 Biography
Puleng Segalo (PhD, Psychology) serves as the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Her scholarship examines historical trauma, particularly its gendered and intergenerational dimensions. For more than ten years she has collaborated with a women’s collective, engaging in shared reflection and knowledge-making to imagine possibilities for psychological well-being within unjust social conditions. Drawing on Africanist and decolonial feminist frameworks, she situates women’s lived realities within their social and structural contexts and analyzes how systemic inequalities shape everyday life. Her work is further grounded in African knowledge systems that emphasize the interconnected roles of children, adults, and elders in sustaining communities. Guided by African cosmology’s respect for elder wisdom, she incorporates Indigenous knowledge practices to help recover marginalized histories and learn from community leaders who preserve cultural memory. Segalo also foregrounds mental health access and highlights the vulnerability of many older persons who face abuse, neglect, and insufficient care.
She received the 2022 UNISA Chancellor’s Award for research excellence. Internationally, she was honoured with the 2021 World Academy of Sciences award for advancing the public understanding of science and developing innovative strategies for science and technology engagement in the Global South. In 2023, the City University of New York named her Alumni of the Decade. Her global impact is reflected in invitations to speak on BBC, interviews with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and an address to the British Parliament on rethinking research collaborations between Africa and the Global North.
🎤 Presentation: Elders as Living Archives: Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer and the Epistemic Power of Oral History
The African proverb, “old age is the crown of life; to bypass it is to forfeit its honour,” foregrounds the value of attaining elderhood and celebrates the dignity of longevity. In a similar vein, the Yoruba saying, “the old man is the repository of knowledge,” portrays elders as living archives. Across many societies, elders are not only guardians of tradition but also interpreters of history, morality, and collective identity. Through storytelling, ritual guidance, proverbs, and embodied practices, they convey cosmologies, social values, survival skills, and historical awareness across generations. Within this framework, oral history functions as a dynamic way of knowing that both safeguards shared memory and evolves alongside contemporary realities. In a world shaped by rapid technological change, climate crisis, migration, and cultural homogenization, elders gain renewed relevance. Their lived experience provides ethical direction, ecological insight, and historical perspective for navigating uncertainty and social fragmentation. At the same time, digital technologies are transforming how oral traditions are passed on, introducing risks of dilution but also opportunities for preservation and broader dissemination. Actively involving elders in these transitions is therefore essential to ensure that cultural memory remains a source of resilience rather than merely a remnant of the past. In this presentation, I will focus on examining the role of elders in the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, emphasizing oral history as an active store of cultural memory. Further, I will attend to the importance of placing oral transmission within broader discussions of knowledge production, as I argue that oral traditions challenge the dominance of written archives as the main source of legitimate knowledge.