In the midst of multi-dimensional crises, genocides, and dispossessions, community psychology is compelled to reflect critically on its mission to promote just, sustainable, and dignified ways of being. Central to this reflection is a willingness to examine community psychology’s position and, indeed, complicity within structures of coloniality. As such, the decolonial turn in community psychology represents an attitude that compels an interrogation and a reimagination of community psychology’s ethico-political orientation. We therefore begin this chapter by considering how community psychologists responding to the decolonial turn might work with others to conceptualise, build, and consolidate community and, in doing so, offer roots and routes for a decolonising community psychology. We then introduce the Handbook of Decolonial Community Psychology, which we understand as a transnational plurilogue, one whose purpose is to forge solidarities and connections between different struggles. Following this, we speak to the Handbook’s chapters, each of which fall under one of two thematic sections: Stories of Decolonising Community Psychology, and Processes of Embodied Community Psychology. We conclude by offering a number of questions that, we hope, are able to guide and embolden commitments to decolonising community psychology.

The post-apartheid South African context has galvanized a burst of critical scholarship in psychology, differentially addressing the age-old question of relevance in the discipline (See Wahbie Long’s (2016). A history of “relevance” in psychology for a detailed overview). Community psychology, in its interrogation of the discipline’s apolitical history and continued practice, has facilitated complex understandings of social and political life that affect communities. In its questions focused on the role of power and ideology in (re)producing and sustaining dynamics of power in communities, community psychology has spear-headed critical insights into the knowledge and practice of psychology more generally, and community wellbeing specifically. Thus, enjoying a status as perhaps one of the more politically sensitive of the sub-disciplines, it is possible that community psychology may inadvertently remain incognizant of its own blind spots and erasures that do not fully interrogate its own knowledge and practice. One of these blind spots is the inattention to the role of emotion and affect both in the knowledge and practice of community psychology itself (some notable exceptions include Canham (2017, 2018), Hayes (2017), Malherbe (2021), Ngwenya et al. (2022), Ratele (2005), Stevens (2019)), as well as in the formation and operation of power dynamics within communities. My starting contention is that critical explorations of power and ideology in the discipline have favored theoretical orientations that either highlight the material structural conditions of power or the discursive and symbolic dimensions of power. These contributions have been useful but often to the detriment of the role of emotion and affect as vibrant features of power dynamics and ideology. I am interested in how emotions and affect both fuel and interact with social and political life, as well as how social and political life become sedimented in interior lives and vice versa. The question of what this means for community psychology knowledge and practice is part of this chapter’s interrogation: namely, the emotional processes and affective mobilizations that interact with community processes, broader society at large and even between community psychologists and the communities they work in.

The dispossession of indigenous lands is an important yet underexplored area in community psychology. If we are to deepen and strengthen a decolonial approach to studying land and psychology, what can we learn from historical land dispossession in the first place? Informed by the need to be vigilant about taken-for-granted concepts such as ‘friendship’, this study analysed records of the annexation of Mpondoland in 1894. Mpondoland was the last area of South Africa to fall under colonial rule. The study showed how, paradoxically, friendship was evoked to justify land dispossession as for-the-good of those dispossessed. The chapter reflects on how similar framing of friendship continues to frame contemporary land struggles in the same geographical area.

In this chapter, I outline what it is I mean by the terms “anti-capitalism” and “psychology of community”. Following this, I argue that because these two terms do not weld together in an easy union, an anti-capitalist psychology of community should be understood primarily in terms of its contradictions. It is these contradictions that render it a psychology of movement and becoming, rather than being and fixity. I attempt to showcase how conceiving of an anti-capitalist psychology of community through contradiction can attune such a psychology to the emancipatory demands of the moment. The chapter concludes with an outline of the book’s structure as well as a rationale for this structure.

This chapter is concerned with putting a psychology of community to work for anti-capitalist social movements (i.e. formalised anti-capitalist politics). Accordingly, I focus on the four modes of collective anti-capitalist resistance with which I have had the most experience in my community-engaged psychological work, namely, political organising, affective community-building, solidarity-making, and reflexive engagement. Throughout the chapter, I attempt to demonstrate how a psychology of community can bend in accordance with the demands of anti-capitalist community struggle, rather than vice versa. I conclude by illustrating this chapter’s concerns with an example from my own community-engaged work, specifically a participatory filmmaking project that was conducted with community members from Thembelihle, a low-income community in South Africa.

In this chapter, I consider what psychologists of community can offer to community struggles that oppose a capitalist rationality which economises and marketises almost all aspects of our lives, including conceptions of the human. To do so, I consider how an anti-capitalist psychology of community can assist those who are engaged in articulating counter-hegemonic discourse, reconstituting the everyday, fighting for epistemic freedom, and fostering love and care. The chapter concludes with a case illustration from the same participatory filmmaking project discussed in the previous two chapters.

This chapter clarifies the object of the book’s critique, namely, capitalism. Although there are various approaches that we can take when attempting to understand capitalism, I argue for three conceptions: capitalism as (1) a political project, (2) an ideology, and (3) a mode of normative rationality. I then speak to how each of these conceptions relate to one another and insist that an expansive anti-capitalism must consider all three. However, even though we cannot separate out any of these three conceptions from the others, I argue that one of them will always take precedence in anti-capitalist work. Put differently, because anti-capitalism will, regrettably, be unable to take on the totality of capitalism, it is useful to enter into anti-capitalist activism through either politics, ideology, or normative rationality and from here seek to connect with and address other formations of anti-capitalist resistance. My aim is, then, not to argue against or for a specific conception of capitalism, but to engage capitalism in a way that reflects a multitude of conceptions that might be useful for the practice of an anti-capitalist psychology of community. Thus, capitalism (and, in the following chapters, anti-capitalist resistance) is separated into politics, ideology, and normative rationality in ways that are artificial but tactically and analytically useful. The chapter concludes with an account of how capitalism, conceived of in these three ways, has intersected with community psychology and what this means for those who practise what I am calling an anti-capitalist psychology of community.

I attempt in this chapter to tie together the concerns of the previous chapters via a critical exposition of hope. Specifically, I consider what hoping against history means in relation to anti-capitalist future-building, psychology, and community. The contradictory, open-ended nature of an anti-capitalist psychology of community is, once again, emphasised in order to accent the multiple directions into which work of this kind can be taken.

This chapter addresses a psychology of community to capitalist ideology, that is, the social processes that obscure the contradictions of capitalism by making them appear as distinctive differences that are to be tolerated and/or overcome with hard work. I outline how psychologists of community can work with community members to re-symbolise ideology, after which I expound upon three modes of re-symbolisation that can be taken up by those involved in an anti-capitalist psychology of community, namely, transforming subjectivities, creating art in accordance with the popular aesthetic, and retrieving cultural memory. Considered together, these three modalities afford us insight into how psychologists of community can make themselves of use to the task of creating new ideological formations that reject capitalism’s oppressive logic. The chapter concludes with a case illustration from the same participatory filmmaking project examined in the previous chapter.

In this chapter, we explore how community arts practices contribute to the liberation and empowerment of individuals and groups with reference to our research with the Community Arts Network (CAN) and Noongar communities in Western Australia. Specifically, we focus on community arts and cultural development (CACD) and how it was utilised in support of processes of cultural reclamation, renewal and healing, which are understood as central to empowerment and psychosocial wellbeing in settler colonial contexts. CACD has roots in critical and liberation theories and resonates with participatory methodologies. Arts practice is central to CACD and it entails psychosocial processes such as deconstruction, witnessing, and intersubjectivity. The chapter highlights the use of different arts and cultural practices in various projects ranging from screen-printing, photography, soundscapes to portraiture. We contend that CACD can meaningfully expand community psychology’s methodological resources and sites for intervention, necessary for enacting the decolonial imperative.

This edited collection was inspired by the presentations given at the sixth International Conference on Community Psychology (ICCP) held in Durban, South Africa in 2016. The conference was co-hosted by two of the editors of this collection, Shahnaaz Suffla and Mohamed Seedat. The 2016 conference was the first ICCP to be hosted on African soil and as such carries a special significance for us. Indeed, radical forms of community psychology in South Africa have historically been at the forefront of critical engagements with mainstream psychology, raising questions about the discipline’s relevance to understand and address the challenges of a (post) apartheid/colonial context, but also questioning the role of psychology as a discipline in legitimising forms of inferiorisation and control. The year 2016 was also significant as it marked the second year of widespread protests on university campuses in South Africa under the banner of #FeesMustFall calling for a free and decolonised education. These protests led to a renewed interest in decolonial theorising on the continent and the diaspora, and renewed synergies with decolonial movements in the rest of the world. In this new wave of decolonial thinking, psychologists have once again drawn on community psychology praxes to expand on their theorising of power, identity and knowledge, and contribute to enactments of resistance, transformation and social change.

The burden of disease has quadrupled in much of the world population, affecting the Global South, particularly indigenous populations, the most. This chapter delves into what may explain the failure to translate good intentions behind health promotion, a global strategy towards better population health, into every day health practice and research. The role of biomedicine, and why it remains the dominant discourse in both health care and research is outlined. To address the global failure in delivering on the most progressive thinking about health and society in the history of humanity, the chapter argues for a decolonial shift in both discourse and praxis, illustrating how this shift often necessitates disobedience within disciplines or professions such as psychology and occupational therapy.

Considering dialogue theatre as a form of decolonial praxis, four authors reflect on their own knowings and practices through unpacking their inherent cognitive frameworks of colonization, freedom and their practices. The authors demonstrate the ways in which decolonial praxis should start with themselves, and using critical reflections and dialogue as tools to engage in deeper understandings of themselves, their relationships to colonisation, their search for freedom, and the tensions therein. In doing so, the authors explored the relationships between their being and doing transitioning in Australia, and how they navigate and negotiate spaces to achieve an egalitarian potential. They examined the ways in which their encounters, through initiating a dialogue theatre project, evoked conscientization as a result of the critical collaborative processes brought up through cultural, systemic, structural and epistemological inequalities that both stimulated and constrained the enactment of a decolonial initiative in Melbourne, Australia.

Formalised community psychology, and its critical variations in particular, has long been concerned with psychosocial change. Emerging from a developing method of collaborative thinking and writing, we consider in this chapter what a liberatory Africa(n)-centred community psychology might look and feel like, particularly in contexts of decoloniality, as well as what the consequences of such a praxis might be for psychosocial change. Accordingly, we take up the challenge of imagining how critical psychologists working in communities might situate and think Africa—with its myriad and often contradictory historiographies, politics, ideologies and cultures—within decolonising work, and how this situated thinking is able to re-write the disciplinary boundaries of community psychology. From here, in arguing for the transdisciplinary impulse of this kind of psychological praxis, we look to the revolutionary scholar and activist Neville Alexander whose work, despite having no formal ties with community psychology and is rarely—if ever—drawn on by community psychologists, serves as an important resource for those seeking to articulate a liberatory Africa(n)-centred community psychology. We conclude by considering what positioning the psychological within social change efforts means for decolonising psychologies of community within and beyond Africa.

In this chapter an expansive notion of everyday violence, the disrupting denial approach, is discussed from the standpoint of the oppressed. This approach is taken first as self-determination, then as counterpoint to modes of knowledge production, and knowledge produced in the colonial academy. The chapter outlines the author’s praxis which includes visceral, tacit, explicit and vicarious knowledge of life under oppression, and market democracy in South Africa’s unequal, transitional context. It is based on knowledge gained during more than two decades of conflict resolution practice, and five phase of action research consisting of individual research, and co-production of knowledge about invisible/visible violence with a transdisciplinary spectrum of peers from all walks of life. This led to adaptation, groundtruthing and calibration of Johan Galtung’s triad of cultural-structural-direct violence to suit unequal contexts, as discussed in the chapter.

This chapter explores ‘coloured’ men’s narratives in constructing a classed, gendered and raced Bishop Lavis in Cape Town. For decades, research on men who identify as ‘coloured’ has not adequately problematised ‘coloured’ masculinities. Young men who identify as ‘coloured’ have been found to be the most likely to perpetrate intimate partner violence, rape and gang rape. It has also been suggested that violence, drug abuse, gangsterism and alcoholism are prominent features of communities in which those who were identified as ‘coloured’ during apartheid reside, one such community being Bishop Lavis in Cape Town, South Africa. These narratives have led to this complex group of people and their communities being reduced to negative stereotypes. In this chapter, we present the findings of a study exploring the lives of young men who identify as ‘coloured’ living in Bishop Lavis, and provide alternative and more nuanced narratives of their identities, communities and spaces. We used Photovoice as a form of decolonial praxis and participatory action research methodology. The findings presented are drawn from the narratives of the participants, collected through individual interviews, photo-narratives and a focus group. The young men who participated in this study spoke of the complex experiences which have been and continue to be shaped by their race, age, class, gender and location.

While spatial apartheid is no longer formally maintained in Cape Town, South Africa, it seems at times to be bolstered by a “colonial spatial imaginary”. This concept, which is introduced in this chapter, encompasses collective perceptions and values that shape place identities, construct belonging in different places, and normalise associated spatial patterns and activities. In this chapter, we trace the colonial spatial imaginary through Cape Town’s colonial era to the present, to reinforce the relevance of urban space to the work of decolonial community psychologists. Drawing on the findings of a Participatory Action Research project with members of Reclaim the City, we aim to understand how the movement challenges eviction and displacement from the gentrifying suburb of Woodstock in Cape Town. In particular, by seeking to analyse Reclaim the City’s multi-faceted work as a decolonial enactment of community psychology, we examine how its creative praxis enables members to challenge the colonial spatial imaginary and build alternative spatial imaginaries.

In this chapter, we offer a conversation (or rather, a product of an ongoing series of historical and current conversations) whose aim is to orient ourselves and the reader to a number of intellectual, political, practical, and theoretical concerns that surround decolonial Africa(n)-centred community psychologies. In the first part of the chapter, we explore how conversation can serve as a collective and epistemologically just modality of knowledge-making within and for Africa(n)-centred decolonial community psychologies. Conversation, we argue, is able to disrupt, build upon, appreciate and stretch some of the ways by which these psychologies are written, practiced and thought about. In the second part of the chapter, we draw upon this conversational method to consider decolonial Africa(n)-centred community psychologies through a critical, non-psychological knowledge canon. Specifically, we dialogue over what the works of Edward Said, Walter Rodney, and the Combahee River Collective are able to offer those of us who are looking to reimagine community psychologies through Africa(n)-centredness and decoloniality. We conclude by ruminating on the potentialities of form (i.e. conversation) and substance (i.e. the non-psychological canon) for decolonising Africa(n)-centred community psychologies.

The ideology of race has been central to Australia’s formation as a nation, and race and whiteness continues to shape the everyday lives of differently positioned migrant, Indigenous and settler people and communities. This chapter draws on participatory research with community-based arts agencies who accompany various groups who are negotiating identity and belonging at the intersections of race, gender, generational status, and cultural changes. We situate our discussion within decolonizing diaspora and migration studies and creative methodologies. In these areas storytelling from the vantage point of alterity, of occupying intersectional positionalities, is a key methodology for making visible and tackling racism and narratives that constrain and limit subjectivities. The chapter illustrates that recovering histories, experiences and stories of ordinary people as a means for promoting epistemic justice. This practice opens possibilities for complex subjectivities that challenge global inclusion-exclusion binaries that maintain inequities, and neoliberal regimes of coloniality.

The current chapter provides a context for this volume that sets out to critically interrogate the biases in Western modernist thought concerning community and related applied psychologies. A specific focus is to illuminate and consolidate current ontological and epistemic alternatives that contribute to the possibilities of emancipatory futures in various local and global contexts. Across the collection of chapters within the book, decoloniality is articulated in multiple ways, and is manifested in interrelated practices, processes, and knowledge production activities towards social change. Through a review of chapters, we distilled three interrelated categories that refer to practices and principles that are aimed at enacting decoloniality and epistemic justice in community and applied psychologies: (1) Archival reclamation and expansion for onto-epistemic disruption, (2) Knowledge from below and centring voices and subjects from the margins as epistemic justice, and (3) Modes of praxis that encompass critical mutual accompaniment, acknowledge intersectional identities, and are premised upon dialogical ethics. These three categories of decoloniality being enacted are contextual, varied, and must be understood within the circumstances of moving and changeable power relationships that are always socially operant in knowledge production processes, interventions and forms of praxis.

In this chapter, we argue that the quest for decolonised community psychologies must necessarily engage with multiple knowledge archives. We draw on select historiographic accounts of Africa to invoke Africa’s archives and their attendant paradigmatic traditions. Our engagements with these archives signify at once onto-epistemic rupture as a counterpoint to the Eurocentric assumptions that continue to frame community psychology theory and practice in Africa and other parts of the Global South, and epistemic praxis as a decolonising response, inspired by the subalternised knowledges of Africa. We extend our analysis to theorise Black Consciousness philosophy as an insurrectionist archive that may be mobilised for liberatory articulations of community psychology in Africa. We accord primacy to the exposition of collectivist and humanising ontology—anchored in psycho-political praxis and activism—as a foremost contribution by the Black Consciousness Movement to the making of liberatory enactments of community psychology.

The call for decolonisation has led to the unsettling of the status quo within most institutions of higher education in South Africa. We contend that this moment of potential epistemic rupture provides the opportunity for African scholars to reshape the disciplines and disrupt Western canons of knowledge that have dominated African scholarship. Decolonisation has disrupted and challenged transformation discourses that sought to level the playing field without deeply engaging with structural challenges that continue to hinder change. We reflect on our personal challenges, concerns, discomforts and attempts at re-imagining and engaging with decolonial pedagogy. Furthermore, we present our thoughts about the ethical responsibility we carry as African scholars towards epistemic justice. We explore some of these thoughts by presenting three experiential accounts in which we highlight the decolonial and African epistemologies we have adopted in our facilitation of teaching and learning of psychology in general and community psychology in particular at our respective universities. These accounts demonstrate the importance of bringing our histories and communal identities to the pedagogical encounter.

Photovoice is a visual participatory action research methodology that exemplifies many of the aims of decolonial feminism and community psychology with its attendance to the development of critical consciousness, the situating of participants as experts in their own lives and the aim for the psychological empowerment of participants. However, in most research projects, the participatory dimension of the photovoice process does not extend beyond the stage of public exhibitions. Participants are rarely involved in the academic dissemination of the research findings. In this chapter, we seek to disrupt this, and to provide a reflection on the photovoice process from three varying positions of power within the project: participant, researcher and supervisor. In particular, this chapter examines how decolonial feminist mentorship in community psychology can be enacted and enabled through the lens of a photovoice project based in a psychology department at a university undergoing a contested transformation process. It reflects on how the first author, a young white woman, and the second author, a young black woman, have learned about the process of conducting decolonial feminist work from either side of a photovoice project examining gender and race in higher education, under the supervision and decolonial feminist mentorship of the third author, an established black academic.

We explore the potential of the life story approach to exemplify the principles of a decolonial feminist community psychology through mxn’s narratives of intimate partner violence against womxn. The life story method foregrounds personal life stories within their wider socio-cultural, historical and material contexts, and places emphasis on the social dynamics of power, oppression and resistance relayed in these narratives. Everyday life in global Southern contexts, such as South Africa, is steeped in inequalities, global capitalism, violence, and dispossession; therefore, the utilisation of methods of knowledge production that acknowledge these complexities is crucial. We reflect on the application of the life story method with two black mxn – Michael (age 46) and Scott (age 33) – recruited, in Cape Town, South Africa from a programme for intimate partner violence, intended to end mxn’s violence. This paper begins a dialogue about how decolonial feminist methodologies can be enacted through the life story approach in relation to individuals who simultaneously hold marginal positions in society in terms of race and class but hold privileged positions as heterosexual mxn. We present mxn’s narrations of their violence within the broader contexts of their histories and lives, and place a focus on the emancipatory and transformative potential of the life story approach and the benefit it might hold for understanding this larger context of marginalised mxn’s histories and their lives. We conclude by providing commentary on the potential opportunities offered through this approach and what that might mean for a decolonial feminist community psychology as well as its capacity for challenging normalised ways of doing and for consciousness-raising.