Volume 14, No. 1

David A. Julian, Tom Wolff, Brian Bishop, Kyrah Brown, José Ornelas, Megan Renner, Victoria Scott

Re-Examining the Definition of Community Psychology Practice

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Throughout the early and mid-2000s, Community Psychology practitioners worked with the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA) Executive Committee (EC) to revisit relevant organizational goals and objectives.  These conversations resulted in the recognition of the need to more fully operationalize the “action” component of SCRA. Ultimately, a draft statement was brought to the first International Community Psychology Conference in Puerto Rico.  Through a highly participative process, a group of conference attendees emerged with a definition of community psychology practice: 

The aim of community psychology practice is to strengthen the capacity of communities to meet the needs of constituents and help them to realize their dreams in order to promote well-being, social justice, economic equity and self-determination through systems, organizational and/or individual change.

Since the definition was developed over a decade ago, much has changed. This special issue was conceived as a means for the field to consider the definition of Community Psychology practice in light of these and other advances in our thinking. The special issue editorial team invites the field to ponder proposed changes and new definitions of community psychology practice.

Christine Robinson

Definition Revisited: Human Dignity and Co-creation, the Heart of Community Psychology Practice

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As a multidisciplinary applied field, community psychology is remarkably situated to bring respect for the inherent dignity of all people. The soul-searing events of the summer of 2020, the Capitol insurrection of January 2021, increasing violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Islamaphobia, ongoing murders of Black people and the (dis)abled, and attacks on the Jewish community demonstrate that in the United States, wellbeing is far from uniform. Many organizations, neighborhoods, systems, policies, and places have not consistently enabled wellbeing. Manifestation of the power of human dignity, the value of civil society, civic discourse, the salience of collective efficacy, and community wellbeing are at the heart of community psychology. Collective efficacy is "a group's shared belief in its conjoint capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given levels of attainments." This moment in time prompts a reexamination of paradigms, theories, and definitions alongside aligned practices and values that transcend the field.

Nuria Ciofalo

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

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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.

Jesica Siham Fernández, Janelle M. Silva

Is There Room for More?: Considering the Need for a Decoloniality Community Psychology Core Competency

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From a decolonizing standpoint, as proposed by Cruz and Sonn (2011), the current community psychology competencies seem insufficient because these often leave power structures intact. Consequently, we propose a decolonizing, decolonial and anti-colonial competency in community psychology practice to facilitate the practitioner’s process toward decoloniality, specifically decolonizing language, discourses, relationships and research processes with communities. A decolonial competency in community psychology practice is characterized by an iterative process of critical ethical reflexivity that aims to de-link community psychology practice from hegemonic Western Eurocentric perspectives in order to foster and center community voice, knowledge and power. Through an autoethnographic methodology we offer reflexive vignettes to illustrate a decolonial competency, and the lessons we have learned throughout community psychology practice. As a core community psychology competency, decoloniality can equip practitioners with the skills to engage meaningfully in a critical ethical reflexive practice that aligns with the discipline’s values and foundational principles.

Bernardo Parodi Svartman, Antonio Euzébios Filho, Gustavo Martineli Massola, Mariana Prioli Cordeiro, Alessandro de Oliveira dos Santos

Community Social Psychology Practice: Reflections from Experiences in Brazil

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The current definition of community psychology practice has the merit of recognizing that the struggle against inequality characterizes community practice in general. However, by proposing a definition that encompasses all psychological practices within communities, one runs the risk of falling into an abstract definition that disregards history. A more accurate definition must consider the meaning of community in different social realities and, consequently, different practices. In Latin America, the classical definition of community as a consensual and homogeneous unit of interaction, interdependence, and social ties, within a well-defined geographical area, does not adequately suit the diversity of community psychology practice. Colonial processes of epistemicide, genocide, and slavery have created a deep sense of uprooting in Brazil. For this reason, community social ties are often under threat or are even non-existent. Community psychology practice consists of creating conditions for the development of such social ties, which must be forged in the fight against forces that result in inequality. In this context, the concept of community psychology practice must encompass social group interactions and social ties; their potency of action; their experience with a territory; and the relationship between groups’ internal and external histories. This article presents three empirical experiences that substantiate and exemplify these dimensions. We conclude that community psychology practice in Brazil helps communities to understand their past to build their future, it focuses on the struggle against oppression, on developing political literacy, and on increasing consciousness of relations between communities and society in general.

Scotney D. Evans

There is no community practice that is neutral with respect to justice: A call for activist community praxis

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Our community research and action either contributes to social justice or it serves to maintain the prevailing power structure. In the ongoing fight for racial justice, our practice either contributes to racial equity or sustains racial inequity. There is no community practice that is apolitical or neutral with respect to justice. Too often, our knowledge of deep social inequities and their contribution to human suffering “fails to translate into a lived praxis that adequately contests the multiplicity of ways racism, capitalism, homophobia, privilege, and sexism are made manifest.” The varied manifestations of community psychology practice are both pragmatic and utopian. We seek to engage in community research and action that responds to the immediate needs of communities and minimizes suffering even as we imagine a more just world. But our predominant theories, perspectives, and practices are inadequate for meeting the critical issues that we face. To respond to the intersecting crises of our times we need to move beyond approaches tied to the political and social philosophy of liberalism and employ radical imagination. We must envision radically different systems and deploy “visionary pragmatism” to help in the development of a more politically engaged praxis.

Tiffeny R. Jiménez, Ericka Mingo, Judah Viola, Bradley Olson, Christopher Balthazar

Foundations for Relational Ethics: Introducing a Continuum of Community Psychology Praxis

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Community psychology (CP) attends to the challenges facing communities in our efforts to bring about justice and well-being. We are explicitly concerned with understanding the origins of oppression within various contexts, using diverse approaches. It is therefore necessary to reflect on our conceptions of practice where our diverse roles in the community facilitate collaborations within and across complex cultural contexts (Jimenez, Sanchez, McMahon & Viola, 2016). This article introduces a continuum of CP praxis emphasizing the need for an increasing awareness of the history of oppression, the need for epistemic justice, and ways in which power is built into the sciences from which our field has grown. We hope that such a continuum will help us better frame our practice, as it provides a framework for holding multiple worldviews toward a more ethical, relational praxis.