Decoloniality and Epistemic Justice in Contemporary Community Psychology

This book examines the ways in which decolonial theory has gained traction and influenced knowledge production, praxis and epistemic justice in various contemporary iterations of community psychology across the globe. With a notable Southern focus (although not exclusively so), the volume critically interrogates the biases in Western modernist thought in relation to community psychology, and to illuminate and consolidate current epistemic alternatives that contribute to the possibilities of emancipatory futures within community psychology. To this end, the volume includes contributions from community psychology theory and praxis across the globe that speak to standpoint approaches (e.g. critical race studies, queer theory, indigenous epistemologies) in which the experiences of the majority of the global population are more accurately reflected, address key social issues such as the on-going racialization of the globe, gender, class, poverty, xenophobia, sexuality, violence, diasporas, migrancy, environmental degradation, and transnationalism/globalisation, and embrace forms of knowledge production that involve the co-construction of new knowledges across the traditional binary of knowledge producers and consumers. This book is an engaging resource for scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists and advanced postgraduate students who are currently working within community psychology and cognate sub-disciplines within psychology more broadly. A secondary readership is those working in development studies, political science, community development and broader cognate disciplines within the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Garth Stevens is a Professor and Clinical Psychologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His research interests include foci on race, racism and related social asymmetries; critical violence studies; and historical/collective trauma and memory. He has published widely in these areas, both nationally and internationally, including co-editorships of A 'race' against time: Psychology and challenges to deracialisation in South Africa (UNISA Press, 2006) and Race, memory and the apartheid archive: Towards a transformative psychosocial praxis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), presently serves as the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, and is the current President of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA).

 

Christopher C. Sonn, PhD, is Professor at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a fellow of the Institute of Health and Sport and teaches into the Applied Psychology Program in the College of Health and Biomedicine. His research is concerned with understanding and changing dynamics of oppression and resistance, examining structural violence such as racism, and its effects on social identities, intergroup relations and belonging. He holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is co-editor of Creating Inclusive Knowledges and co-author of Social Psychology and Everyday Life, and Associate Editor of the American Journal of Community Psychology and Community Psychology in Global Perspective.