Special Focus Issue

"Practice is where we learn how our theories or ideas are implemented. Practice is where we improve our skills by adapting to the ever-changing environment."

"We are similar to archeologists, we try to understand the customs, norms and values within different contexts; we search for understanding by listening to people's lived experiences."

"We added a voice to communicate our field to an international audience, included new voices, and considered the cultural variables that would make the effort fair and impactful."

"The global journal helped define CP practice, and create an outlet for the contributions of practitioners that otherwise would never have told the stories of their projects."

"We try to understand collaborations with communities, and we have sought vehicles that value opportunities to take risks and are open to our unorthodox storytelling."

Featured Articles from Around the Globe

Introduction to Part II of the Special Issue

Geraldine (Geri) Palmer, Jesica Siham Fernandez, Dominique Thomas

These articles represent a call for a participatory, action oriented and decolonial liberatory standpoint rather than a bystander or deficit approach.

The Premise of Persistence: Deconstructing Colonial Authority in Community Psychology Curricula and Structures, Towards Liberative Andragogy and Practice

Ericka D. Mingo, Christopher Balthazar, and Bradley Olson

In the U.S., Community Psychology (C.P.) arose in the 1960s, attempting to break traditional clinical and research psychology patterns. While CP rejected many Eurocentric and oppressive ideas, remnants remain in every ecological corner of our work: research, professional organization, academic institutions, and community practice. This paper takes a historical look a the origins, maintenance, and risks of the premise of persistence.

Dialogues of Disruption: Confronting Oppression in the Academy

Ciann L. Wilson, Amandeep Kaur Singh, Ann Marie Beals, Rajni Sharma, Brianna Hunt, Ellis Furman, Natasha Afua Darko, Tiyondah Fante-Coleman, Vivila Liu, and Natalie Kivell

Within academia in recent years, there has been a concerted effort to re-center the perspectives and rights to free speech of the status quo at the expense of the safety and wellbeing of queer, trans, racialized, and Indigenous communities. Through our hard-fought lessons learned from often painful lived experiences as queer, trans, and Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) scholars and activists, this paper aims to: 1) Archive and document the testimonies and experiences of multiply-marginalized students and emergent faculty in the field of community psychology in a mid-sized Canadian university; 2) Utilize critical and intersectional analyses in unpacking the layers of violence and harm expressed and experienced through case examples; 3) Use our experiences to share strategies on the successful navigation of white supremacy in the academic spaces in which we work and learn; and 4) Call academic disciplines, including community psychology, to action by identifying their ethical responsibility to cultivate non-violent spaces for BIPOC people.

Talking about Race in Puerto Rico: Four Descendants of the Transatlantic African Diaspora Share their Experiences

Nataka Moore, Julissa Pagán-Peña, Paola Rodríguez-Dávila, Rebecca Rodríguez-Rivera, and Tiana Santisteven

In an effort to better understand racial dynamics and the Puerto Rican’s perception of race, four descendants of the African Diaspora engaged in a self-reflective process using a roundtable approach to analyze their experiences in Puerto Rico. The roundtable approach is based in an ethnographic method of the qualitative approach. The objective of this paper is to start a dialogue to open up spaces and opportunities to engage in this difficult conversation. It is the authors’ hope that this paper can spark conversations and strategies to address the historical and contemporary impact of how Blackness is socially constructed in Puerto Rican Society.

Getting to the heart of it: A Reflection on the Importance of Community Psychologists Developing an Anti-racist Practice

Leigh Rauk

Reflexivity is an introspective practice of becoming aware of personal biases, values, and assumptions related to our positionalities as researchers (Case, 2017; Fernández, 2018a). This paper responds to the call by Langhout (2015) for community psychologists to engage in more personal writing about the ways in which affective politics impact feelings and emotions surrounding our work as scholar-activists as well as critiques the core community psychology values of social justice and diversity.

When Students Listen: A Co-Constructed Autoethnography of Graduate Student Activists Eradicating Racism in Higher Education

Kevin Ferreira van Leer, Kimberly M. Ashby, Sriya Bhattacharyya, Gloria G. McGillen, Cedrick-Michael Simmons

Although anti-racist and decolonial scholars in community psychology have shared valuable ways professionals can promote racial justice and contend with potential barriers (e.g., Lykes et al., 2019; Makkawi, 2017), little consideration has been given to graduate students’ resistance to institutional oppression. Through co-constructed autoethnography, it provides narratives addressing three central themes: (1) isolation, racism, and community-building; (2) direct actions and institutional pushback; and (3) internal conflicts and endurance. It considers how graduate students, as individuals who are structurally disempowered in higher education, persist in the face of oppressive institutional structures to challenge them, risks they experience in doing so, and techniques and resources that aid them.

Subverting Whiteness: A Systems Theoretical Approach to Anti-Racist Praxis

Charles R. Collins and Erin Watson

To subvert Whiteness, activists, educators, and scholars created White privilege (and other related) interventions seeking to illuminate the power inherent in Whiteness. However, these psychologically focused (implicit bias) interventions frequently fail to alter the systemic conditions that perpetuate and reinforce White privilege and BIPOC oppression. To address this issue, we provide a framework that takes a systems approach to subverting White dominance.

Imagination Praxis: White Anti-Racist Culture Building

Gloria Dykstra and Cristien Storm

This paper will chronicle the racial justice praxis the authors, and seven additional white colleagues, have undertaken in response to our growing awareness of the need for critical-liberatory spaces in which white anti-racist cultures can be cultivated. The practices undertaken by the group of white therapists and psychologists are a gesture toward anti-racist imaginings; striving to disrupt social and institutionalized white body supremacy.

In this Issue

This Issue's Homepage

Articles from Around the Globe

Editor's Note

Not My Time

I often feel like the best thing I can do is be quiet and let the work speak for itself.

Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice

Featured Articles from Around the Globe

In this Issue

Editor's Note

Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice ISSN 2163-8667

Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice
ISSN 2163-8667