Genevieve Walters

Lecturer

Health, Education, Policing and Sciences

I am a Lecturer and Counsellor, working with clients and students from a variety of backgrounds in South Africa and the UK. I have a private practice and worked for agencies as a counsellor, consultant and manager of counselling teams. I focused my career on supporting NGOs in service delivery offering counselling for HIV prevention and care, Hospice, LifeLine, Bereavement Services, Primary and High School environments. I consulted on programs for local government, private businesses, and set up counselling responses to the 2017-18 Knysna Fires and 2020 Covid pandemic.

I fell in love with psychology as a subject completing my International Baccalaureate and pursued a career in counselling after realising that the therapeutic versus diagnostic part of the profession was where I felt a vocation.

I am so fortunate to have worked both in remotely rural and urban spaces in South Africa where I am from originally.

During my practitioner training, I was fortunate to work in a postmodernist learning environment that encouraged reflexivity. Following my educational goals changed me as a person. Embarking on my final stage of counselling training I felt a new yearning for a life ahead of me that I had never envisioned before, one more rooted in purpose and beneficence. Knowing the concept of Ubuntu that I am because we are, I shifted career goals towards finding intrinsic meaning and community in the work. The University of Fort Hare ran a project training paraprofessional counsellors and in that space of deep collaboration co- creating an understanding of the practice of counselling grappling with existential questions about mental health, therapy and healing, I realised that I sat more comfortably with myself when I was involved in supporting projects for people that generally did not have access to mental health services.

I therefore developed my counselling practice through working for organisations that had projects offering individual, family and group therapy. I also developed community-based interventions in response to key mental health issues and national disasters.

Counselling is about reciprocity; my view and experience of life has expanded through the work that I do. Through being with others making sense of it all I am constantly discovering new meaning and understanding whilst expanding a sense of self and being in the world.

I have lived a rich career and personal experience due to being open to the journey that counselling takes you on. The work has afforded me community development, management and private practice experiences in a range of communities and organisations. Since arriving in the UK I have been fortunate to expand my practice to working online and embark on lecturing.

I love the fact that lecturing enables me to share this experience with trainee counsellors, hopefully demonstrating that their degree can afford a range of personal, professional and entrepreneurial development.  

Professional memberships and activities

  • Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy

Academic qualifications

  • Post Graduate Certificate in Education, Staffordshire University
  • MA Soc. Sc. Counselling Psychology, University of Fort Hare
  • Honours BA Psychology, University of South Africa
  • BA (Psychology), University of South Africa

Expertise

  • Narrative Therapy
  • Trauma informed therapy
  • Bereavement therapy
  • Systemic interventions

Research interests

  • Reflexivity for professional and personal development
  • Reflexivity regarding ecosystem 

Teaching

  • Lecturer in Psychotherapeutic Counselling

Publications

Keene, G. S. (2011) Reflexivity with regards to sexual decision making: A study of a group of adolescents, living in the context of an informal settlement, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa VDM Verlag: Saarbrucken

in the UK for Quality Education

Sustainable Development Goal 4, Times Higher Education Impact Rankings 2024

for Career Prospects

Whatuni Student Choice Awards 2023

for Facilities

Whatuni Student Choice Awards 2023

for Social Inclusion

The Times and The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2023

of Research Impact is ‘Outstanding’ or ‘Very Considerable’

Research Excellence Framework 2021

of Research is “Internationally Excellent” or “World Leading”

Research Excellence Framework 2021

Four Star Rating

QS Star Ratings 2021