Africa’s Knowledge Archives, Black Consciousness and Reimagining Community Psychology

Signifying Islamic Psychology as a Paradigm: A Decolonial Move

“…As part of a transnational decolonial activist turn IP may link with knowledges produced within multiple epistemic sites of the South, resist possible intellectual isolation and exceptionalism, and raise its relevance for pluriversal understandings of human development in a pluriversalized cultural world. The centering of liberation and humanization raises critical consciousness about the influences of exclusionary power and social formations on Muslims’ psychological lives and subjectivities and apprehends the recovery and enactment of relational ontologies as inconceivable without both inner psychological reformation and ethico-political transformation, respectively (Suffla & Seedat, in press).…”

“…The third fundamental humanization – onto-epistemological recovery and presence – is comprehended as “obtaining dignity, power, agency, relationality and all the qualities that embody humanness” (Suffla & Seedat, in press). Humanization as a complex process is founded on epistemic freedom – the sovereign right to make sense of the world from one’s cosmological location (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018); resistance to dominant material and discursive practices that inscribe hegemonic identity formations and subjectivities and perhaps most salient a striving against what Nandy (1983) calls the “intimate enemy,” the internalized colonizing affective and cognitive scripts that produce psychic dissonance, self-doubt and affinities with colonial modes of being.…”

“…Referenced against the Islam’s theory of human nature (see Mohamed, 1995), humanization through enactments of hybrid subjectivities may be comprehended as the recovery of a relational ontology and as the process of striving to (re)become spiritual, ethical, epistemological, volitional, and psychology beings, breaking from the binaries and othering effected by coloniality. From this perspective, subjectivity is enculturated through its connection with the Divine as well as its relation to the self, epistemology, ethics, and the collective (Suffla & Seedat, in press). Opposing ontological polarities that disconnect the secular from the spiritual, Islamic conceptions of human nature stresses the spiritual dimension of being (ruh-the soul); it references spirituality, the primordial capacity for pro-social thought and choices as well as the ability to intuit a connection with the Divine (fitrah), as fundamental marks of being and subjectivity.…”

“…In the material realm epistemic agency may translate as enactments of ethico-political praxis, signifying resistance to dehumanizing narratives, social arrangements and othering practices; the mobilization of self-recognition, self-affirmation and agency as crucial psycho-political resources for countering the consequences of ontological alienation and (re)forming the self as a relational process of engagement with the Divine, the other, cultural and theological legacies, language, nature, and history as well as range of communities of significance (Bulhan, 1985; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Sadek, 2017; Suffla & Seedat, in press).…”

Fostering and sustaining transnational solidarities for transformative social change: Advancing community psychology research and action

“…A key feature of the decolonial option is to unlink from the Western hegemonic modern forms of knowing and doing and to embrace indigenous knowledge systems and ways of knowing, doing, and being that have been excluded or silenced (Dudgeon et al, 2020; Suffla & Seedat, 2021). In this issue, there are several examples of knowledge from the margins/below the abyssal line such as—indigenous, feminist, victims of violence, and asylum seekers' voices.…”