Community psychology and its (dis)contents, archival legacies and decolonisation

Abstract

This article serves as the introduction to the Special Issue on Liberatory and Critical Voices in Decolonising Community Psychologies. The Special Issue was inspired by the Sixth International Conference on Community Psychology, held in South Africa in May 2016, and resonates with the call for the conscious decolonisation of knowledge creation. We argue that the decolonial turn in psychology has re-centred critical projects within the discipline, particularly in the Global South, and offered possibilities for their (re)articulation, expansion, and insertion into dominant and mimetic knowledge production. In the case of Africa, we suggest that the work of decolonising community psychologies will benefit from engagement with the continent’s multiple knowledge archives. Recognising community psychologies’ (dis)contents and the possibilities for its reconstruction, and appealing to a liberatory knowledge archive, the Issue includes a distinctive collection of articles that are diverse in conceptualisation, content, and style, yet evenly and singularly focused on the construction of insurgent knowledges and praxes. As representations of both production and resistance, the contributions in this issue provide the intellectual and political platforms for social, gender, and epistemic justice. We conclude that there are unexplored and exciting prospects for scholarly work on the psychologies embedded in the overlooked knowledge archives of the Global South. Such work would push the disciplinary boundaries of community psychologies; help produce historicised and situated conceptions of community, knowledge, and liberation; and offer distinctive contributions to the global bodies of knowledge concerned with the well-being of all of humanity.