Commonalities between recent feminist thinking and community psychology are described in order to argue that a feminist agenda can and should be more fully incorporated into the discipline of community psychology. The two domains share a historical context and significant theoretical assumptions — e.g., the importance of empowerment for social change. Generally accepted goals and methods from each domain and examples of research, theory, and practice are presented for purposes of documentation and illustration. This article also addresses the critical question, Why hasn't community psychology incorporated a feminist agenda more fully into research, theory, and practice, given its compatibility with feminism? Finally, a discussion of how a feminist agenda would strengthen community psychology and strategies for accomplishing such an agenda are presented. Areas of concern include classroom dynamics, field placement opportunities, the psychological consequences of sexist language, the complex interactional effects of multiple oppressions (e.g., racism, sexism, and ageism), homophobia as a community problem, violence against women, and the feminization of poverty.
Stories about community work in New Zealand and Scotland are presented to describe and reflect on issues central to feminist community psychology. Organizing a lesbian festival, Ingrid Huygens describes feminist processes used to equalize resources across Maori (indigenous) and Pakeha (white) groups. Heather Hamerton presents her experiences as a researcher using collective memory work to reflect on adolescent experiences related to gender, ethnicity, and class. Sharon Cahill chronicles dilemmas and insights from focus groups about anger with women living in public housing in Scotland. Each story chronicles experiences related to oppression and privilege, and describes the author's emotions and reflections. Individually and collectively, the stories illustrate the potential offered by narrative methods and participatory processes for challenging inequalities and encouraging social justice.
Using an historical framework, we document and assess efforts to include women, women's issues, and feminism in community psychology and in the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA). Initiatives of the SCRA Task Force/Committee on Women are traced from its inception to present. We also chronicle the dilemmas and difficulties of moving toward a feminist community psychology. The history is divided into five phases. Each phase is described in terms of women's involvement in the field and efforts to integrate feminist content into research and practice of the field. Reflections on the qualities of contexts that have both supported and inhibited inclusion are identified. We look to this history to try to understand the observation that while women have been increasingly visible in leadership roles and women's professional development has been encouraged, less progress has been made toward building a feminist community psychology.
This is the second of two special issues of AJCP on feminism and community psychology, which were developed as an initiative of the Women's Committee of the Society for Community Research and Action. The purpose of these special issues is to illustrate the commonalties shared by feminist and community approaches, ways in which each field can be used to inform the other, and the challenges and successes each field has faced in living up to its values. In Part I we presented articles that dealt with specific topics that can be usefully understood and addressed through feminist approaches. In Part II (this issue) we chose articles that investigate the role of methods in a feminist community psychology.As Mary Crawford and Ellen Kimmel write, ''we cannot unlink what we know from how we know it' ' (1999, p. 3). It is this relationship that we wish to examine in this special issue: the relationship between how we gain knowledge and the kinds of realities that knowledge is used to construct.While working to conceptualize the issues involved in a feminist community psychology, we identified seven themes that we think represent 1
From 1982 through 1996, 840 structured interviews about urban quality of life (QOL) were conducted with residents of Lowell, Massachusetts, by graduate students in a seminar about the city. Perceptions of safety and general QOL were analyzed by social status (gender) and social contexts (economic and historic) using multivariate and univariate ANOVAS. Main effects were obtained for gender, area income, and time. Subsequent analyses revealed that men felt safer than did women at night in neighborhoods and downtown, and that residents of lower income areas perceived both neighborhood QOL and safety more negatively than residents of higher income areas did. Small effects were found for downtown safety by area income in the opposite direction. Differences over time for downtown safety and city QOL (but not for neighborhood) suggest that the early and mid-1980s were viewed somewhat more favorably than the 1990s, with some improvement in the most recent period. Results suggest that economic context and time were related to perceived safety and QOL, though in different ways, whereas gender was related to perceived safety but not to QOL. Respondents' comments and community psychology principles are used to elaborate on and suggest interpretations for quantitative results.
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