Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice Volume13Issue1May 26, 2022

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."

Coloniality Unplugged: Cosmologies and Terrains of the Dark Matter

Tiffeny Jiménez, Gordon Lee, Hana Masud, Ericka Mingo

This is the story of the development of the special issue…

The Makings of You: Racial Justice in Praxis Conference, Chicago, 2017

Rochele Royster

The Racial Justice in Praxis Conference 2017 was an intentional journey to create an academic conference accessible to all including academics, activists, and community members. By breaking down power structures, centering creative resistance, and honoring the voices of the community the conference became a transformative space for growth, connection, and radical joy. The conference was an eclectic gumbo that included research, dialogue, art, music, and culture. This is a written reflection of the process of planning that conference, centering the voice of community, and liberating institutional academic spaces.

Reclaiming the Village through Education: Re-awakening – Tell Your Story

Sirena Dieudonné

How does one reclaim a village? This piece is about filling an empty space. A soul left to wither and die from knowledge stolen generations ago. I am only one person on a quest to reclaim knowledge meant to nourish my soul and generations to come. A journey which no one who has not experienced the emptiness, can understand. Imagine, never at rest because of the yearn to learn, just who you are. We can keep our flames burning through our stories. Sankofa, retrieve what was ours, go back, get your knowledge and return. Reclaim the village.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy: A Metaphoric Look at the Impact of Colonialism (in the Village and On Ourselves)

Jacqueline Samuel

As a tool for critical, participatory and socially transformative praxis, storytelling offers those typically silenced an opportunity to share personal stories (Sonn, Stevens, & Duncan, 2013). This is the aim of author. Whether in prose or narrative these stories from the village should be perceived as lessons, teachings, and/or scriptures. This is an acknowledgement of experiences had, to promote an awareness and awakening to the root causes of oppression. The narrative of the oppressed should be treated as delicately as one would treat any sacred journal about life because it chronicles the path of oppression and demonstrates how Dark Matter becomes a theoretical concept that fuels a Metaphysical Catastrophe.

Using a Revolutionary Conscious Praxis (RCP) to Dismantle the Code of Silence as Internalized Colonialism

Geraldine Palmer

The “code of silence” embraced among many descendants of the African Diaspora, has its roots in the African to Black/African American experience during enslavement and the Jim Crow era. It is both a historical and contemporary survival strategy and is sometimes used as a means of resistance. Using a personal story of the author, this article offers an example of how decision making can look when we are living from internalized colonialism. A model is also offered for transforming internalized colonialism and decolonizing our spaces. Furthermore, this article is an effort to fill the void in telling Black/African American women’s stories where historically they have been left out of the discourse. Telling our stories is healing and transformative.

From the Womb to the World - A Girl Learns Her Mother’s Story

Deidra Somerville

The article explores the continuity of the village through the experiences of four generations of women, each working within her own conscious knowledge of mothering, mothering practices, and her role in village life. The author tells the story as inheritor of indigenous ways of knowing passed on to her, the coloniality that disrupts and dismantles the practices she inherits and how decolonial praxis informs her voice, choices, and practices in response to coloniality.

The Tale of Two Villages

Gloria West

I want to tell you about the history of my family’s survival. This story is important because it has blazed a trail for four generations of my lineage to live differently from our ancestors. Each generation has a painful but beautiful story of endurance. It could be a roadmap for so many fighting families. The purpose of my story is to bring awareness of the Black struggle and survival. We must learn who we are, where we come from, where we want to go, and how to get there, which would be based on our own sense of sense of stability in a decolonized village.

A Tale of Resistance and Love

Hana Masud & Khaled Batrawi

Photo: “Painting of Paolo Freire by Community Psychologist Bradley Olson (2020)”

The nature of this piece asks us to open ourselves up to operating at a different level of awareness, calling on a more creative, intuitive, and more abstract/poetic epistemological frame. This piece is a short fable-like story exploring the ethics of the human within moments of immense struggle. For those of us who grapple with living within dynamics of various forms of oppression, this is essential reading for deeper discovery into ways of maintaining a sense of freedom.

Remembering the Life and Legacy of Ibrahim Makkawi

As Palestinian psychologists, clinicians, researchers, and educators we collectively come together to uplift the liberation narratives and work paved by Dr. Ibrahim Makkawi. The following is a memorial; a set of tributes to honor the life and legacy of Ibrahim.

In Science We (Should Not Always) Trust: Decolonizing the Science of Psychology

Oksana Yakushko

This paper is intended as an introduction and a call for questioning psychological sciences. Western sciences, especially sciences that focuses on racial and gender “differences,” have served among the most colonizing influences worldwide. Frantz Fanon’s (1959) term “shameful sciences!” especially applies to social Darwinism and eugenics as forms of scientific racism, scientific sexism, and scientific imperialism. In this contribution, I highlight my struggles as a scholar to recognize these scientific narratives, to decolonize my own praxis as a scholar and a psychology clinician, as well as to address the long standing impact of these ideologies in the academy and society. I argue that In Science We (Should Never) Blindly Trust, and share my suggestions for ways to learn, name, and resist racist and sexist ideological sciences.

Radicalizing Psychology; Embodying Decoloniality

Tiffeny Jiménez & Gordon Lee

Modernity has disembodied and dissociated psychological subjectivity. It has significantly affected the capacity of individuals and communities to engage proactively in their worlds. Racism is part of modernity’s system of social control and is embedded as part of a Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP) (Quijano, 2000). Community Psychology is based on assumptions rooted in the CMP, and its methodologies and conclusions must be called into question. This article is intended as an intervention to stop the ongoing harm of the CMP.