Decolonizing “Community” in Community Psychology

Abstract

This article endeavors to craft pathways that disrupt dominant modes of knowledge production and imagine nonhierarchical epistemic possibilities in teaching community psychology. The first section of the article discusses how the decolonial turn inspires new ways of advancing the critical social justice agenda of community psychology. Drawing upon decolonial frameworks and allied critical theories, I outline how coloniality is entrenched in the ways we theorize, research, and teach about “communities”—and the importance of decolonizing the construct of community in community psychology. The second section presents three vignettes capturing student responses to endeavors in the classroom to dismantle notions of community‐as‐Other. I interpret these vignettes through a decolonial perspective in order to highlight how colonial discourses of community can be produced and potentially maintained in the classroom context. The third section outlines some pedagogical and curricular recommendations as a possible pathway toward decolonizing notions of community. I conclude with some questions/provocations geared toward advancing decolonial and liberatory praxis in community psychology.

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