Highlights Community psychology can contribute to healing and cultural renewal for indigenous communities. Storytelling through community arts practice is used to witness Elder stories. Narrative inquiry shows the ongoing effects of colonisation and coloniality. Narrative inquiry shows the various ways people resist and survive oppression. Decolonial approaches are vital to the goals of critical community psychology.
This article describes two participatory theater projects undertaken by Western Edge Youth Arts in Melbourne and aimed at challenging racialization and fostering belonging among culturally diverse young people. Drawing from interview and archival data, we suggest that participatory theater provided the young people the opportunity to share and reflect on their lived experiences and re-present themselves, as well as gain resources for responding to the different issues associated with racialization. In the settings created, participants were able to disrupt taken for granted and common sense understandings of self and other and create new stories of identity and belonging. These disruptions into the symbolic context of social identity construction are important for personal and social change, including for decentring whiteness. However, participatory theater is not a panacea, nor is it free of power relations. We discuss some of the challenges and limitations of the different projects. C 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Race remains a significant issue in the lives of many people in Australia. For example, Indigenous Australians lives continue to be marked by social and economic disadvantage and everyday experiences of exclusion. Within this context, the Community Arts Network Western Australia promote social change and the empowerment of Indigenous groups through community cultural development. With an emphasis on community strengths and resources, community arts practice is employed to create, promote, and improve opportunities for participation, network development and empowerment. In this article, we explore these projects from a community psychology orientation, which is committed to developing opportunities for inclusion and also exposing the workings of power in everyday settings. Although there have been many positive outcomes that have resulted from the different activities with communities, there have also been significant barriers to transformative practice, in particular, issues of racialisation and continuing colonisation. We discuss our efforts aimed at understanding racism, which have included engaging with critical race theory and whiteness studies within the context of Indigenous and non-Indigenous partnerships for change.
Community arts and cultural development is a process that builds on and responds to the aspirations and needs of communities through creative means. It is participatory and inclusive, and uses multiple modes of representation to produce local knowledge. 'Voices' used photography and photo elicitation as the medium for exploring and expressing sense of place among Aboriginal and non-Indigenous children, young people and adults in four rural towns. An analysis of data generated by the project shows the diverse images that people chose to capture and the different meanings they afforded to their pictures. These meanings reflected individual and collective constructions of place, based on positive experiences and emotions tied to the natural environment and features of the built environment. We discuss community arts and cultural development practice with reference to creative visual methodologies and suggest that it is an approach that can contribute to community psychology's empowerment agenda.
A growing number of writers in community psychology have called for re-claiming the radical impetus that inspired the development of the field. In this article we describe a program of work facilitated by a community cultural development agency that uses community arts practice to create, promote and improve opportunities for participation, network development, and empowerment in rural Western Australian communities. The program of work we describe in this article sits within a broader systematic effort aimed at social change in a specific geographic region of Western Australia, and reflects a particular commitment to challenging the continuing social exclusion of Aboriginal people in postcolonizing Australia. Informed by writing within community and liberation psychologies, we discuss three community arts projects and highlight the key concepts of participation, power/empowerment and situated knowing in our examination of community cultural development as participatory methodology. We emphasize the iterative and generative nature of arts practice and argue that community cultural development practice is often aimed at both instrumental as well as transformative outcomes. We suggest that the transformative dimensions require a critical theoretical lens to help explicate the operations of power and coloniality in the micro settings of community practice.
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