Activism in changing times: Reinvigorating community psychology: Introduction to the Special Thematic Section

Abstract

The field of community psychology has for decades concerned itself with the theory and practice of bottom-up emancipatory efforts to tackle health inequalities and other social injustices, often assuming a consensus around values of equality, tolerance and human rights. However, recent global socio-political shifts, particularly the individualisation of neoliberalism and the rise of intolerant, exclusionary politics, have shaken those assumptions, creating what many perceive to be exceptionally hostile conditions for emancipatory activism. This special thematic section brings together a diverse series of articles which address how health and social justice activists are responding to contemporary conditions, in the interest of re-invigorating community psychology’s contribution to emancipatory efforts. The current article introduces our collective conceptualisation of these ‘changing times’, the challenges they pose, and four openings offered by the collection of articles. Firstly, against the backdrop of neoliberal hegemony, these articles argue for a return to community psychology’s core principle of relationality. Secondly, articles identify novel sources of disruptive community agency, in the resistant identities of nonconformist groups, and new, technologically-mediated communicative relations. Thirdly, articles prompt a critical reflection on the potentials and tensions of scholar-activist-community relationships. Fourthly, and collectively, the articles inspire a politics of hope rather than of despair. Building on the creativity of the activists and authors represented in this special section, we conclude that the environment of neoliberal individualism and intolerance, rather than rendering community psychology outdated, serves to re-invigorate its core commitment to relationality, and to a bold and combative scholar-activism.

LOLS@stigma: comedy as activism in the changing times of the HIV epidemic

“…Reactionary populism has been accompanied by new activisms: collaborative, horizontally organised, politically articulated through lives as much as organisations, exemplified by movements like #Metoo and #Blacklivesmatter. In the health field, these changing activist times (Cornish et al, 2018;Lee, 2019) are exemplified by 'ground-up' engagements -for example, people with HIV campaigning, alongside people who are negative, for PrEP access in the face of restrictions (Lancet, 2016); community-based promotions of testing; HIV organisations collaborating to providing services and projects that foreground people with HIV's creative expression, for instance through music, gardening, and theatre. Such citizenactivist coalitions operate, as they have throughout the HIV pandemic (Lorway, 2017;Mbali, 2013), to resist conventional settlements, but also to generate new biopolitical formations.…”

Beyond the familiar challenges for children and young people’s participation rights: the potential of activism

“…Activism is often rooted in the desire to defy dominant traditional, political, and social structures that exclude marginalised groups, such as women, people of colour, LBGTQI +, and disadvantaged people. 45 Activism has thus demonstrated its potential to address marginalisation, to call out oppression, and support minorities and under-represented groups to claim their spaces, to contest or reject dominant views and offer more inclusive perspectives. 46 Children and young people, as a marginalised group under the control of adults, have few options to engage in traditional forms of public debate and this is intensified by inequalities based on age, race, ethnicity, disability, and socioeconomic status.…”

Revealing the manifestations of neoliberalism in academia: Academic collective action in Turkey

“…Despite the well acknowledged role of structural inequalities and deprivations as a set of explanatory factors for the contention necessary to mobilize social change, and the importance of context for individual and collective behavior, neoliberalism has been mostly unnoticed in psychological collective action research, except a limited number of recent studies, which have treated neoliberalism mostly as an ideology (for a review see Bettache, Chiu, & Beattie, 2020). Going beyond this limited literature, we consider neoliberalism as constituting a structural and contextual factor in which many sorts of individual and collective action takes place (Cornish, Campbell, & Montenegro, 2018). We suggest that psychological collective action research may also develop new paths by considering how subjects speak about manifestations of neoliberalism in the steps leading to collective action.…”