This address focuses on the analysis of ideas that have contributed to build a psychology oriented towards a way to answer social problems affecting a kind of group present in every society: the community. Because of their human condition communities have a history, are relational and should be understood in their complexity. Community Psychology (CP), in its critical orientation, has looked for social transformation as a way to seek that constant goal of humanity: a better world. To do so, CP has assumed the idea of praxis and, consequently, the ideas of engagement and participation, whose links will be presented in their theoretical, methodological and practical aspects. That transformational praxis is also related with the ideas of power and empowerment (fortalecimiento) understood as the joint construction carried out by psychologists (external agents) and community stakeholders (internal agents), that may lead to conscientization and liberation, two ideas introduced by Freire. These ideas are presented as a theoretical system in which the ethic and political dimensions, together with complexity, constitute the basis for transformation, balance or, fleeting amelioration.
In developing community work we have faced challenges and dilemmas relating to the involvement and commitment of different actors in the networks of community and everyday coexistence. Although there has been an increase in sensitivity and motivation within civil society towards psychosocial practices in various community projects, this has not meant that participation – committed to social transformation – or awareness-raising – seen as a critical and political process – have been implemented and are guaranteed to be present in the above mentioned work. In the practice of community work, it can be seen that participation and awareness-raising constitute necessary psychosocial processes for the possibility of social transformation, starting from the networks of everyday life. It is the aim of this paper to deepen the analysis of the contents and meanings in the concepts of Participation, Awareness-Raising and Strategies for psychosocial survival, in order to support the realization of intervention-work that is committed to the concrete reality of the population and with political projects of transformation. There will be a search for the similarities, differences and intersections between these concepts according to the views of Paulo Freire on Awareness-Raising education, and Ignacio Martin-Baró, as well as pointing to suggestions in the area of Latin-American practices of Community Social Psychology. With a view to a socially committed practice, we shall analyse the following conceptual axes: a) connections between knowledge-ignorance, loveunlove, hope-hopelessness present in the process of participation; b) society-culture-everyday life; c) education and community practices as forms of liberation (emancipation); d) possibilities for the praxis of maintenance and transformation. Finally, a proposal is made for a model of analysis for everyday-life according to Community Social Psychology, bringing together ideas from both authors and analysing the strategies for survival and resistance in everyday life that cut across our community practices. It is also the aim here to reflect on community practices as educational projects of social transformation, as well as on projects of popular education as possibilities for awareness-raising and participation in concrete life. In developing community work we have faced challenges and dilemmas relating to the involvement and commitment of different actors in the networks of community and everyday coexistence. Although there has been an increase in sensitivity and motivation within civil society towards psychosocial practices in various community projects, this has not meant that participation – committed to social transformation – or awareness-raising – seen as a critical and political process – have been implemented and are guaranteed to be present in the above mentioned work. In the practice of community work, it can be seen that participation and awareness-raising constitute necessary psychosocial processes for the possibility of social transformation, starting from the networks of everyday life. It is the aim of this paper to deepen the analysis of the contents and meanings in the concepts of Participation, Awareness-Raising and Strategies for psychosocial survival, in order to support the realization of intervention-work that is committed to the concrete reality of the population and with political projects of transformation. There will be a search for the similarities, differences and intersections between these concepts according to the views of Paulo Freire on Awareness-Raising education, and Ignacio Martin-Baró, as well as pointing to suggestions in the area of Latin-American practices of Community Social Psychology. With a view to a socially committed practice, we shall analyse the following conceptual axes: a) connections between knowledge-ignorance, loveunlove, hope-hopelessness present in the process of participation; b) society-culture-everyday life; c) education and community practices as forms of liberation (emancipation); d) possibilities for the praxis of maintenance and transformation. Finally, a proposal is made for a model of analysis for everyday-life according to Community Social Psychology, bringing together ideas from both authors and analysing the strategies for survival and resistance in everyday life that cut across our community practices. It is also the aim here to reflect on community practices as educational projects of social transformation, as well as on projects of popular education as possibilities for awareness-raising and participation in concrete life. In developing community work we have faced challenges and dilemmas relating to the involvement and commitment of different actors in the networks of community and everyday coexistence. Although there has been an increase in sensitivity and motivation within civil society towards psychosocial practices in various community projects, this has not meant that participation – committed to social transformation – or awareness-raising – seen as a critical and political process – have been implemented and are guaranteed to be present in the above mentioned work. In the practice of community work, it can be seen that participation and awareness-raising constitute necessary psychosocial processes for the possibility of social transformation, starting from the networks of everyday life. It is the aim of this paper to deepen the analysis of the contents and meanings in the concepts of Participation, Awareness-Raising and Strategies for psychosocial survival, in order to support the realization of intervention-work that is committed to the concrete reality of the population and with political projects of transformation. There will be a search for the similarities, differences and intersections between these concepts according to the views of Paulo Freire on Awareness-Raising education, and Ignacio Martin-Baró, as well as pointing to suggestions in the area of Latin-American practice of Community Social Psychology. With a view to a socially committed practice, we shall analyse the following conceptual axes: a) connections between knowledge-ignorance, loveunlove, hope-hopelessness present in the process of participation; b) society-culture-everyday life; c) education and community practices as forms of liberation (emancipation); d) possibilities for the praxis of maintenance and transformation. Finally, a proposal is made for a model of analysis for everyday-life according to Community Social Psychology, bringing together ideas from both authors and analysing the strategies for survival and resistance in everyday life that cut across our community practices. It is also the aim here to reflect on community practices as educational projects of social transformation, as well as on projects of popular education as possibilities for awareness-raising and participation in concrete life.
Latin American Community Social Psychology (CSP) is one of the few psychological disciplines that has had an autonomous development in our region. This development has been characterized by a theoretical, methodological and applied production derived from the diverse and complex problems in our context. The development includes academic and non-academic practices and products, as evidenced by numerous undergraduate and graduate university courses and programs in the field, as well as its multiple areas of application (health, environment, education, slums, disasters, public policies), processes (organization, participation, critical reflection, consciousness raising, leadership, empowerment, feeling of belonging, identity), scopes of action (governmental and nongovernmental organizations, health centers, educational institutions, community organizations, residential communities), populations (particularly socially vulnerable and economically disadvantaged groups), activities (research, intervention, evaluation, training, negotiation, prevention, conferences, publications). The increasing number and variety of activities undertaken by CSP professionals provide support for a sustained growth of the discipline. However, has CSP’s trajectory been in accordance with the needs, principles, values and goals that guided the field’s birth half a century ago? Have CSP’s accomplishments satisfied its founders’ expectations? What is the current pertinence of such accomplishments and of the elements which oriented their fulfillment, in view of rapid and continuous changes in virtually all society’s domains? Have CSP’s theoretical developments contributed to solve psychosocial problems it initially aimed to address? Have methodological strategies employed, developed or adapted by CSP been useful for understanding, managing and producing knowledge about the issues addressed? In addition, considering CSP trajectory, can we refer at the end of the first decade of the millenium, to the same but grown up and established discipline, or are different CSP’s emerging?, Which are some dilemmas and challenges currently confronted by researchers, academicians, practitioners, advocates, whose timings, tasks and demands vary? Are universities providing adequate training in terms of skills and tools for working with communities? Which are some of the myths on CSP that have emerged? Finally, has CSP contributed, both from inside and outside academy to ameliorate poverty in our continent? These, as well as many other questions and answers coming from participants in the Third Conference will undoubtedly help to collectively strenghten old but still relevant directions for the discipline and to outline new ones, that will make us and the people we work with better human beings.
In a globalized world, traditional values of Community Psychology, like community building, social change and empowerment, require more than working in a local community and/or improving the social situation of specific groups. While this work will remain an important core part of Community Psychology, the field of Community Psychology also should empower itself: by using its competencies to develop social innovations, focusing at emerging futures by developing shared goals (and take shared risks), and by collaborating with other disciplines, societal institutions, business companies or other actors in society in order to make a difference in the world. Community Psychology as a global academic field and a practical challenges has a rich history based on different disciplines, on various political and value backgrounds coming from traditional and industrialized regions and countries from all parts of the world. To use this richness, we have to start to learn from each other and to value different approaches. Therefore, in the future, Community Psychology should focus both on macro- and micro-issues of community analysis and community building, and it should develop its identity as a “linking science” fertilizing different approaches into a both overall and culture-specific approach of community-based research and practice. To achieve these goals, it will be important to elaborate and re-identify the “DSA of community psychology”: Design Skills to develop both strategicinnovative and creative abilities in order to nurture mutual knowing, awareness and playfulness, Social Skills to enhance the art of community building as a collaborative and empowering process, leading to social responsiveness and inclusion. Action Skills to learn how to co-create, implement and evaluate new concepts and social innovations to build communities in different settings.
This chapter outlines the involvement strategies used in a participatory action project conducted in the UK, together with co-researcher evaluation of their experiences, presents reflections on the process of involvement in service design and delivery and its impact on community coresearchers. The study was jointly commissioned by a Primary Care Trust and a Local Authority Adult Social Care department in partnership with researchers in the Research Institute of Health and Social Care at Manchester Metropolitan University. The study, in line with the UK government well-being agenda (DoH, 2007b), was designed to reveal the ways in which services provided for people with Long Term Neurological Conditions (LTNC’s) can enhance well-being rather than simply reveal or address their health and social care needs. In effect, this refocuses service provider perceptions away from seeing people with LTNCs as needy, or as problems to be solved (by addressing their needs) and more towards people whose well-being can be substantially improved with the support of professionals. People with LTNCs who were involved in this study included those with Parkinson’s Disease, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, stroke, dementia, epilepsy, motor neurone disease, muscular dystrophy, acquired traumatic brain injury among others with rare conditions such as Lesch-Nyham Syndrome. The study took a participatory action research approach (Kagan, Burton and Siddiquee, 2008) in which a key element was the input from the LTNC’s service user and service provider communities. The experiences of university and co-researchers have been traced in this paper, pointing to the importance of considering the short and long term implications of collaborative working and the impact this has on project outcomes and service design.
Just under one hundred million is a conservative estimate of the number of adults whose lives are adversely affected by the alcohol or drug addiction of close relatives. Including children in the figures would add tens of millions more. The particular qualities of the experience of having to cope with excessive drinking or drug taking in the family, in combination, can make it a unique and highly stressful and disempowering experience. A programme of research over a number of years has 1) explored in detail the nature of affected family members’ experiences, and 2) developed and evaluated a method for helping affected family members in their own right. Work in Mexico, England, among indigenous Australians, and in different regions in Italy has suggested the existence of a common core of disempowered experience for family members, with some cross-cultural variations. Predominant cultural norms – individual, familial collective, or community collective – are amongst the factors that modify the core experience. A method of supporting affected family members – the 5-step method – has shown promise in a number of countries. Its emphasis is upon listening carefully to a family member’s story, providing relevant information, discussing coping dilemmas, and building social support. The method is flexible enough to be used in brief forms (including booklet and web forms), with anyone affected by or concerned about another person’s addiction, and it can be used in a wide variety of settings including primary care and other community settings. Examples will be given of the ways in which it can re-empower family members by building their confidence to cope effectively.
Some time ago, a psychosocial research project was launched (1999) in an Otomí community in the state of Hidalgo to determine the dynamics of alcohol consumption. It was found, as in many places in Mexico, that alcohol consumption is deeply rooted in culture and that it is a tradition, but also the cause of many social problems, which involve various spheres of everyday life. One of these is women’s everyday lives due to the violence and economic negligence inflicted on them, which produces emotional states of anguish, anxiety, physical and psychological malaise, which increases when they see how their partners’ health is affected as a result of alcohol consumption. Can anything be done for them? Do they want help? Although women are not the only ones to suffer from this, since some children and parents are also affected, they are the main ones to feel the effects. As a means of supporting the family group, a brief intervention model was adapted as an alternative for providing support for the family. The results of the participation in the intervention program and the analysis of the narrations of this process expressed by women are presented in this paper. By mental itineraries, we understand the processes of psychological and cognitive changes undergone by these women in the search for an answer to a situation they could no longer tolerate, which plunged them into a state of crisis. This is analyzed from the theory of experience (Turner, 1994; Mier, 2001) and the Ritual Process (Turner, 1969) understood as, a process of awareness different from previous ones, which makes it different from other similar events. It also drives them to seek help, even though this may involve dealing with cultural norms and patriarchal dominance. What changes an everyday experience for a woman who has tolerated a situation for a long time, suddenly turning it into a social drama that drives her to seek help? The anthropology of experience is based on how individuals experience their culture, in other words, how events are perceived by awareness. To document this experience, we not only recorded data but also cognition, feelings and expectations. Studying this long-established, everyday situation that suddenly becomes a social drama requires examining all the stages in order to be able to reconstruct it. The social drama comprises four stages: rupture, crisis, readjustment and reintegration. Lastly, the study proved the usefulness of the intervention for indigenous communities, despite the fact that the model is counter-cultural, since it runs counter to the cultural habits of alcohol consumption and obedience in a highly patriarchal society that looks for victims and culprits as a means of dealing with situations that cannot be solved or understood.
Homelessness has emerged as a significant and enduring social problem globally in developing and developed countries. With is aim of promoting social justice and influencing public policy, community psychology has much to offer in terms of addressing this problem. The presentation will focus on research and on research and knowledge mobilization efforts on homelessness in Canada of the keynote speaker that now spans over a decade. Specifically, findings from intervention and observational studies as well as knowledge dissemination products including a short video and report card on homelessness will be presented. Lessons learned from this work as a community psychologist will be discussed.
For over a quarter of a century David and Cathy have worked in separate, parallel but mutually supportive and stimulating ways, as community psychologist and community activist respectively, to collaboratively understand and contest socio-structural violence. Each has focused in different but critically complementary ways on interconnections between poverty, inequality, unemployment and psycho-social destruction. As a community activist, drawing on her experience of popular education and radical politics, Cathy characterized what was constituted by these interconnections as manifestations of “Wars Without Bullets” waged remorselessly against structurally oppressed people, and to promote conscientization through popular education, theatre of the oppressed, film making, radical politics and accessible writing. As a community psychologist, drawing upon critical scholarship and radical praxis, David tried to develop the notion of a “War Without Bullets” in ways which would give it legitimacy within the rhetorical discursive practices of the establishment yet critically refuse individualism, psychologism and essentialism. Both sought to deploy the notion of the “War Without Bullets” for progressive change. In this presentation, the discursive frame of reference of the “War Without Bullets” will be explicated, developed and critiqued. In doing so some advantages of long term collaboration between community activism and community psychology for effective thinking and action will be explored and debated.
The escalation of political violence, the extent of psychological trauma, the dehumanization, the naturalization of violence, institutional lying, and breach of trust are difficulties to building cultures of peace in Colombia. Their analysis and the experiences of communities of resistance and/or of peace, can lead to propose challenges that lead to manners of coexistence.
In May 2008, South Africa was hit by waves of violent attacks against foreigners from the majority world. These xenophobic attacks resulted in the death of more than 70 persons, many injured and displacement of approximately 120, 000 people, all of them people of colour and most of them poor. While South Africa has long been considered one of the more violent countries in the world, the intensity of, as well as the apparent motivation for, this ‘new’ manifestation of violence came as a surprise to most. Based partly on the insights of Frantz Fanon and Hussein Bulhan, this paper examines the causes of this violence and argues that its emergence should not have come as a surprise. Furthermore, the paper explores the use of a memory project as a necessary starting point in South Africa for interventions aimed at addressing this violence.
In this paper I explore the challenges, tensions and possibilities for pedagogy and community research in contexts where race relations have been, and continue to be, characterised by dynamics of dominance and subjugation. I draw on three areas of research and practice (i.e., developing pedagogy for anti-racism, partnering a community-based agency working to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and researching immigrant settlements) where I have been involved in examining responses to intergroup relations with a focus on identity construction. Based on this work, I have found myself venturing far beyond the borders of community psychology to identify multiple ways in which people negotiate racialised oppression. This writing has also helped in identifying the intricate ways in which research and practice can inadvertently contribute to oppression. As an example, I discuss whiteness studies and Indigenous studies as part of this venturing. This scholarship has opened up valuable opportunities for me to enhance critical pedagogy and research, and examine the diverse responses to this area of research and pedagogy. I discuss some of the conceptual and methodological resources that have been helpful in making visible symbolic ways in which race related privilege and power continue to shape intergroup relations. I also discuss the importance of investing in different ways of knowing and doing as an essential political imperative for a progressive community psychology.
The changes and transformations in Primary Health Care (PHC) developed in recent years from the implementation of the model of Physician and Nurse of the Family in Cuba, must be supported by a shift in perspective and move from an eminently biologicist paradigm to a biosociocultural paradigm. This makes it possible to explicitly situate the relationship between culture and health and explain the social and cultural factors related to healthy behaviors, and also to support interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies. The results presented in this paper corroborate the theoretical postulates of cultural anthropology, cultural sociology and medicine that argue that the gap between multidisciplinary health teams and social actors occurs, among other reasons, because of existing traditional cultural etiological models of health and disease. Cultural differences could be addressed through knowledge of the patient's culture, his cultural practices and his links with family members and other stakeholders in the community. It allows the productions of a process that includes cultural communication, listening carefully the patient’s point of view rather than just ordering treatments that reflect scientific practices. The strategies and backgrounds presented in this study demand the presence of multiple perspectives and are very important to designing policies and models of intercultural health care to achieve satisfaction of patients, families and communities.
Community Psychology has basically been an informal academic field of studies and practices. Its roots can be traced to an implicit community psychology practiced by indigenous and rural populations since pre-hispanic times, through colonial rule, XIX century republican regimes, post Mexican Revolution rural education programs and governmental and non governmental community development initiatives. The actual academic field of Community Psychology in Mexico shows a scarcity of academic programs that have not had the opportunity to become firmly established in higher education institutions. The main sources of academic theory and practice in contemporary Community Psychology in the world have had limited influence in Mexico. American community psychology with its strong clinical trend has been present but has not been the most important source of impact on Mexican community psychologists. Latin American community psychology with its contributions to confront the irrelevance of social psychology has also contributed to the development of Mexican community psychology but its influence was not decisive and only recently fruitful exchanges have been established. The field in Mexico has been informally evolving through the practices and thinking of Mexican psychologists confronted by pressing social challenges they have been forced to face in their efforts to make psychology relevant and useful. Mexican psychoanalysts tried to apply their expertise with marginalized urban settings. Humanist psychologists looked for underserved populations to make explicit their professional commitment in serving humanity. Behavior psychologists tried to devise a training curriculum centered on community service. Clinical psychologists at UNAM were concerned about the problems of our people in the big metropolis and by the traumas caused by natural disasters. Psychologists from all over Mexico and from diverse academic subfields and traditions have been working hand in hand with anthropologists, sociologists, social workers, popular educators, rural experts, and all sort of fields of study, in confronting the problems generated by the unequal distribution of wealth, corruption, the literacy and digital gaps, the denial and discrimination of ethnic peoples, and the increasing violence endured by many people in different regions of the country. What will be the future of community psychology in Mexico? What have we learned? What are our weaknesses and what are our strengths? Do we need a more formal training? Do we need a formal employment market? Do we have something specific to offer among the health, education and social sciences? What are our theoretical and practical inputs? We live in difficult times. Community Psychology will be more needed than ever. What should we do to make it relevant?
Communitarian life is the human condition. In it human beings find mutuality, affection and identity – three of the fundamental resources they require to fulfill their existence. Because of the span of resources communitarian life brings about it has not only proved along human history to be a condition that grants better quality of life but has also rooted the strategy of manufacturing cells (the main tool enterprises manage to face the fierce economic competition in the beginning of the XXI century). The structure of manufacturing cells is a technique which replaces the logic of the assembly lines by the logic of the communitarian life. Notwithstanding this revival of community by the enterprises, the present day society has not spread the community model as its pattern of existence. Conversely, that kind of use of the community model was neutralized by several factors, being one of them the steady production and innovation of all sorts of gadgets, which can and have been used to solve people’s problems and satisfy their needs, thus an stimulus for an individualistic culture. The dependence of those gadgets has created a culture in which communitarian life is not required because people learn to depend on gadgets rather than on other people. Apparently, people do not need the community any more because being able to live alone, the other turns to be less important than the gadgets. That culture has been characterized by traits which being the social pattern of human life imposes hurdles to the development of the communitarian life. The first of these traits is the value given to and the dependence of sensations. This cultural trait has been an obstacle to community which is strongly dependent of affection. It is hard to think of a community grounded on sensations because the latter has to do with individuality. The second cultural trait is the loss of sensitiveness for the causality of things. The gradual but steady loss of confidence in the economic and political systems fuels the disappointment with the real word, a condition which according to Desbarats (2009) fuels in its turn “the bulimia” of work and of causality. Surrounded by technologies people have the perception of power and therefore become result directed rather than building of textures of causalities directed. Community implies the sharing of work on the causes of both the events and targets. The third cultural trait is the cult of the urgency, a kind of recreation of the non-temporal time. The conditions created by the economic competition within the context produced by technologies which shrink the time and the space impose the dependence of the flow of conjunctures. These conditions are easily seen in the “zappings”, “fast”, “spots”, “clips” and “just-in-time” patterns of social and individual behavior. The “24 hours” services confirm the non temporal time. Today to be busy all the time gives meaning to the existence. How is it possible to build communitarian life when the prevailing cultural logic is the one of the flow of the conjunctures? The individual profile fueled by that culture discloses a person flexible, always rushing, with short term focus, reactive, authoritative, intolerant to frustration and to failure, unable to delegate and unmotivated to communitarian life. As such, that individual may be master of his/her time but is turned into slave of his/her desires. These conditions nourish the social sedentarization and the individualization. Through the communitarian life people can learn that the mobile phone is a powerful weapon in the war to fight the economic competition as they can also learn that it is fragile as an instrument of emancipation. In the war people face with their own conscience the most powerful weapon is reflexivity and affection, two resources they can find easily in the communitarian life, not in the gadgets.
The first part of the conference tries to show how the constitution of qualitatively human social actors and of humanizing communities are processes that implicate each other and that these processes cannot happen in the dominant direction of this historic figure. Therefore, the title does not express one of the ways of being a human social actor and of creating a community; it expresses the only one possible. The second part analyzes the way in which the inhabitants of Latin American popular neighborhoods become human social actors. It characterizes their way of being as being-in-between: in-between the rural and the urban, in-between the popular neighborhood and the city and in-between the heterogeneities of the popular neighborhood. The being-in-between those coordinates gives place to various human types, some better at impersonating subjectuality than others. This is born of the obsession we characterize as agonic conatus for a dignified life. In considering conviviality as the mode of relation of the inhabitants of the popular neighborhood, we ask ourselves how to pass from it onto community, given that community is not in the history or pre-history of the popular neighborhood. The community would be a contemporary construction. In clarifying the factors that contribute to the formation of communities, we weigh the religious organizations and study the role of the church base communities (CEB’s in Spanish) which are the humus of liberation pastoral work. We give importance to the external factor that catalyzes the process, demonstrating its risks and the need to overcome the illustrated modernity relationship.