Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology

Abstract

The Community Psychology book series is envisaged as a space to review the established assumptions and knowledge economy underlying community psychology, and encourage writings that recognize the plurality of people and the many geographical, psychological and sociological locations that they occupy. The book series will enable contributors to stimulate thought that questions that which is constructed as critical knowledges, community psychology, and the meanings of liberation and community. Contributions to the book series draw attention to the applications of community psychology in the Global South and the Global North as they relate to such issues as violence, socio-economic inequality, racism, gender, migration, dispossession, climate change, and disease outbreaks. In do so, it centers community psychology as focused on the well-being of collectives, and dealing with such focal issues as deploying psychology to support social justice, the relevance and appropriateness of its internal logic, and methods that deal with the range of psychological, social, cultural, economic, political, environmental, epistemic, and local and global influences that bear on the quality of life of individuals, communities and society. The book series concentrates thus on the following three key areas of focus: 1) decoloniality, power and epistemic justice, 2) knowledge production, contestation and community psychology, and 3) community psychology in context. The series is of vital and immediate relevance to researchers, practitioners, faculty and students from the intervention sciences, including anthropology, sociology, public health, development studies, social work and urban studies More information about this series at

Mystical poetry and the ontology of the self in liberation psychology.

“…LP, in its decolonial emphasis (Seedat, 2021; Younis, 2021), as well as its emphasis on questioning individualism, and hegemonic psychology’s ideas of individualism and self-interest, shares many of these foundational critiques from Foucault and other decolonial thought (Comas-Diaz & Torres Rivera, 2020). Decolonial community psychology, a close cousin of LP, centers the same ideas (Boonzaier & van Niekerk, 2019).…”

Islamic feminist liberation psychology and peacebuilding: Case studies of Muslim women in community organizing in restorative justice and parenting.

“…Like its cousin, community psychology, LP is also formed in a context around the world of resistance to colonialism (Boonzaier & van Niekerk, 2019). The resistance to colonial violence, in particular, appears in the work of prominent thinkers such as Fanon (2004), Montero (2007, 2015), and Maldonado-Torres (2016), and many others.…”

“…Islamic LP is also decolonial in its theoretical grounding, reflecting trends in both Islamic psychology (Pasha-Zaidi, 2021) and LP (Seedat, 2021; Younis, 2021). Decolonial feminist community psychology also reflects these trends, including decolonial feminist Muslim community psychology (Boonzaier & van Niekerk, 2019).…”

“…However, White feminists often overlooked the oppression of race, colonialism, classism, and heteronormativity, as experienced by women of color. Simultaneously to the development of mainstream, White, EuroUS feminism, women in the global south and the global north in communities of color, indigenous communities, and the African diaspora articulated other forms of feminism (Boonzaier & van Niekerk, 2019). These feminisms directly addressed how power is structured in society and attempted to reach the roots of the problems of patriarchy.…”

‘Troubling’ Politics of Research on Young Sexual Practices in South African Contexts

“…As a result of these shifts, those involved in local feminist scholarship in global contexts have stepped up their engagement with re-thinking and re-interpreting normative practices of research and pedagogy in the academy. Such efforts have frequently been located in interdisciplinary and transnational collaborations, and in recent years have seen a particular emphasis on collaborations across the terrains of scholarship, activism and art as one key component of re-making more just, equal and ethical practices in higher education (for example, Boonzaier and Van Niekerk, 2019;Braidotti, Bozalek, Shefer and Zembylas, 2018;Shefer, Hearn, Ratele and Boonzaier, 2018). This paper is located within this context of a proliferation of experimentation and creativity in the South African context of public and institutionalised education, with a particular focus on scholarship that is directed at gender and sexual justice.…”