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Articles

Vol. 14 No. 1 (2023)

Towards an Emergent Conceptualization of Decolonial Praxis and Competencies in Community Psychology

Submitted
April 7, 2023
Published
2023-01-31

Abstract

The epistemologies of the Global South teach that co-creating alternatives to modernity requires a commitment to delink from colonial ideologies and practices that have been normalized by many institutions and venues, including the academy itself. Looking from “the South” allows us to move UStatesian approaches to community psychology from the center, a privileged position “above” other approaches, as though to the edge of a circle alongside other approaches from different cultural contexts. This repositioning enables us to see pluriversal, community psychology praxes, i.e., multiple localized approaches to engendering thriving. Epistemologies of the Global South reject universalizing theories. These epistemologies generate an ecology of knowledges that resist the hegemonic conception of an only-one-world contained in global standardizations of consumption and extraction propelled by capitalism. Learning from the Global South, we propose a definition of a decolonial community psychology praxis that reflects pluriversality within a relational ontology that promotes the values of sentipensar/feeling-thinking with the Earth, affective conviviality, conscientization and annunciation, decolonial solidarity, ecopsychosocial accompaniment, and buen vivir (collective well-being). It includes the rights of the Earth, embracing an ecology of knowledges and webs of solidarity with communities’ struggles to sustain cosmovisions (Indigenous worldviews) that delink from Western-centric ideologies.