Decolonial Enactments in Community Psychology (eBook)

This edited volume in the Community Psychology Book Series emphasizes applications of community psychology for disrupting dominant and hegemonic power relations. The book explores domains of work that are located within critical community psychology, as well as work that is conventionally not self-defined as community psychology but which draws on and contributes to the foundations and enactments of critical and liberatory community psychology. Specifically, the book advances conceptions and praxes for community psychology grounded within a decolonial framework. The volume heeds the call for a generation of approaches to community psychology that link local struggles to broader questions of power, identity, and knowledge production, bringing together examples of praxes from different contexts as a political project of highlighting indigenous struggles toward self-determination. Collectively, the chapters in this book embody a decolonial agenda for community psychology that foregrounds social justice;  the lives and knowledges of the marginalized and oppressed; epistemic disobedience and transdisciplinarity; and decolonial aesthetics. The book is divided into two parts - Part I: Conceptions of Engagement for Community Psychology delves into the conceptual framework for a decolonial community psychology, and Part II: Modes of Enactments and Praxes for Community Psychology builds on these theoretical advancements through examples of praxis in different contexts. The audience for the book includes scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists, and students located within community psychology specifically, as well as disciplines within the health and social sciences, and arts and humanities more broadly.

Shose Kessi is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. Professor Kessi is the founder and the first chairperson of the UCT Black Academic Caucus (BAC), an organisation that has been a leader in the transformation debate at UCT. Her innovations in teaching and research, in addition to her contributions to institutional leadership, are an integral part of the project of transformation and decolonisation in higher education, and her focus on participatory action research also mitigates the epistemic violence of traditional research practices by bridging the gap between academic knowledges and the knowledges of marginalized communities. She received the Harvard-Mandela fellowship in 2014, the Erik Erickson Award for political psychology in 2018, has published extensively in journals, and was a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Shahnaaz Suffla is Associate Professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa. Her research interests draw from the intersections of critical African, community and peace psychologies, and public health, and are located within liberatory philosophies and epistemologies. Her thinking and scholarship is influenced by the vision of research as a transforming, humanising and decolonising enterprise. Specifically, her research interests include a focus on psychosocial and psychopolitical interventions in contexts of structural and epistemic violence; participatory engagement as a site of activism, resistance and social change; and Africa-centred approaches to research and scholarship. Professor Suffla is actively engaged in organised psychology in South Africa, and is currently the President-Elect of the Psychological Society of South Africa.

Mohamed Seedat is Professor and Head of the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa. With a background in transdisciplinary thought, he writes about community engagement, social connectivity and solidarity, violence, critical humanism, intellectual traditions in science, and the psychologies underlying South Africa's ongoing and renewed struggles for a decolonised caring society. His body of work, inclusive of regional and international collaborations, contributes to compassionate emancipatory scholarship for the 21st century, the capacitation of next generation socially-engaged researchers and academic leaders, and the transformation of writing cultures in the academy. He is currently leading studies on the social anatomy of protests, psychopolitics underlying struggles for justice, and safety promotion demonstration sites. Professor Seedat is a vision-making and strategic development facilitator and life-oriented academic coach, mentor and post-graduate student supervisor. He has published widely in his areas of interest.