The global development of community psychology as reflected in the American Journal of Community Psychology.

This commentary presents a virtual special issue on the global growth of community psychology (CP), particularly, but not exclusively, as reflected in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP). CP exists in at least 50 countries all over the world, in many of those for over 25 years. Yet, aside from several early Israeli articles, AJCP rarely published work from or about countries outside the US and Canada until the early 2000s, when the number of international articles began to rise sharply. The focus of CP developed differently in different continents. CP in Australia and New Zealand initially followed North America's emphasis on improving social service systems, but has since focused more on environmental and indigenous cultural and decolonial issues that are as salient in those countries as in North America, but have drawn much more attention. CP came later to most of Asia, where it also tended to follow the North American path, but starting in Japan, India, and Hong Kong and now in China and elsewhere, it is establishing its own way. The other two global hotspots for CP for over 40 years have been Europe and Latin America. The level and focus of CP in Europe varies in each country, with some focused on applied developmental psychology and/or community services and others advancing critical and liberation psychology. CP in Latin America evolved from social psychology, but like CP in Sub-Saharan Africa, is also more explicitly political due to a history of political oppression, social activism, and the limitations of individualistic psychology to focus on social change, overcoming poverty, and interventions by (not just for) community members. Despite those differences, CP literature over the past 23 years suggests an increasingly common interest in social justice, multinational collaborations, and decoloniality. There is still a need for more truly (bidirectional) cross-cultural, comparative work for mutual learning, sharing of ideas, methods, and intervention practices, and for CP to develop in countries and communities throughout the globe where it could have the greatest impact.

"Don't let anybody ever put you down culturally . it's not good ": Creating spaces for Blak women's healing.

Research has highlighted the importance of Indigenous knowledge and cultural practice in healing from ongoing histories of trauma, dispossession, and displacement for Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere. Connection with culture, Country, and kinship has been identified as protective factors for Aboriginal social and emotional well-being and as facilitating cultural healing. This paper draws on stories mediated through cultural practice specifically, Wayapa and bush-dyeing workshops, to explore how women resignified experiences and engaged in "healing work." Our collaborative analysis of the stories shared resulted in three main themes that capture dialogs about the need for culturally safe spaces, vulnerability and identity, and culture, Country, and place. Centering Aboriginal knowledge, our analysis shows the meanings of Country, spirituality, and the coconstitution of people, culture, and the natural environment. Through Indigenous cultural practice, the women "grew strength in relationship" as they engaged in the psychosocial processes of deconstruction, reclamation, and renarrating personal and cultural identities.

Fostering and sustaining transnational solidarities for transformative social change: Advancing community psychology research and action.

As we planned this special issue, the world was in the midst of a pandemic, one which brought into sharp focus many of the pre-existing economic, social, and climate crises, as well as, trends of widening economic and social inequalities. The pandemic also brought to the forefront an epistemic crisis that continues to decentre certain knowledges while maintaining the hegemony of Eurocentric ways of knowing and being. Thus, we set out to explore the possibilities that come with widening our ecology of knowledge and approaches to inquiry, including the power of critical reflective praxis and consciousness, and the important practices of repowering marginalised and oppressed groups. In this paper, we highlight scholarship that reflects a breadth of theories, methods, and practices that forge alliances, in and outside the academy, in different solidarity relationships toward liberation and wellbeing. Our desire as co-editors was not to endorse the plurality of solidarities expressed in the papers as an unyielding methodological or conceptual framework, but rather to hold them lightly within thematic spaces as invitations for readers to consider. Through editorial collaboration, we arrived at the following three thematic spaces: (1) ecologies of being and knowledge: Indigenous knowledge, networks, and plurilogues; (2) naming coloniality in context: Histories in the present and a wide lens; (3) relational knowledge practices: Creative joy of knowing beyond disciplines. From these thematic spaces we conclude that through repowering epistemic communities and narratives rooted in truth-telling, a plurality of solidarities are fostered and sustained locally and transnationally. Underpinned by an ethic of care, solidarity relationships are simultaneously unsettling dominant forms of knowledge and embrace ways of knowing and being that advances dignity, community, and nonviolence.

Disability organizations as empowering settings: Challenging stigmatization, promoting emancipation.

This study investigated how a local disability organization in Yogyakarta Province, Indonesia, has functioned as an empowering setting for its members. This article discusses, in particular, the context specific features that have enabled members of this organization to resist the pervasive stigmatization commonly imposed upon people with disabilities. The research data was collected through interviews with 18 members of the organization and analyzed using the method of constructivist grounded theory. The findings suggest that this organization exists as an empowering setting because it functions as a mindset changer, an alternative resource center, and fosters supportive and courageous allies. Through this empowerment, members can challenge the normalized stigmatization and promote more emancipatory identities, particularly in a rural context where some socio-cultural aspects may further complicate the disadvantages of people with disabilities. Implications for future research and disability interventions are discussed.

Amplifying the Voices of Indigenous Elders through Community Arts and Narrative Inquiry: Stories of Oppression, Psychosocial Suffering, and Survival.

Researchers and practitioners in community psychology have an important role to play in supporting decolonial work including promoting opportunities for reclamation, healing, and acknowledgment of history. In this article, we discuss research undertaken alongside a community arts and cultural development project that sought to support Aboriginal people in Western Australian to create an archive of their stories for current and future generations; stories that could serve as resources for healing, reclamation, and for examining a painful and unjust past. Narrative approaches have been promoted in community psychology to advance empowerment research and practice alongside marginalized, excluded, and minoritized groups. We report on findings from a critical narrative inquiry of the stories shared through the project and in conversational interviews with four Noongar Elders to explicate the history and ongoing legacy of racialized oppression in their lives as well as cultural continuity and survival evident in the stories. Community researchers and practitioners can play a role in amplifying those stories as part of the co-intentional work of decolonization.

Swampscott in International Context: Expanding Our Ecology of Knowledge.

In this paper, I offer reflections as someone from outside the United States about the Swampscott conference. I refer to Fryer and Fox's (The Community Psychologist, 24, 2014, 1) critique of the "Swampscott discourse" and its role in fixing the birthplace of community psychology. While the critique is important, I note the growing references to international community psychology and the need to view the discipline as a product of social political realities in different contexts, as well as dynamics of dominance and marginality in knowledge production in psychology. The work in the Global South presents opportunities to contribute to developing a decolonizing community psychology through expanding the ecology of knowledge.

Picturing the Wheatbelt: exploring and expressing place identity through photography.

Community arts and cultural development is a process that builds on and responds to the aspirations and needs of communities through creative means. It is participatory and inclusive, and uses multiple modes of representation to produce local knowledge. 'Voices' used photography and photo elicitation as the medium for exploring and expressing sense of place among Aboriginal and non-Indigenous children, young people and adults in four rural towns. An analysis of data generated by the project shows the diverse images that people chose to capture and the different meanings they afforded to their pictures. These meanings reflected individual and collective constructions of place, based on positive experiences and emotions tied to the natural environment and features of the built environment. We discuss community arts and cultural development practice with reference to creative visual methodologies and suggest that it is an approach that can contribute to community psychology's empowerment agenda.

(De)colonizing culture in community psychology: reflections from critical social science.

Since its inception, community psychology has been interested in cultural matters relating to issues of diversity and marginalization. However, the field has tended to understand culture as static social markers or as the background for understanding group differences. In this article the authors contend that culture is inseparable from who we are and what we do as social beings. Moreover, culture is continually shaped by socio-historical and political processes intertwined within the globalized history of power. The authors propose a decolonizing standpoint grounded in critical social science to disrupt understandings of cultural matters that marginalize others. This standpoint would move the field toward deeper critical thinking, reflexivity and emancipatory action. The authors present their work to illustrate how they integrate a decolonizing standpoint to community psychology research and teaching. They conclude that community psychology must aim towards intercultural work engaging its political nature from a place of ontological/epistemological/methodological parity.

Identity and oppression: differential responses to an in-between status.

Oppression operates at various levels, with varying degrees of negativity, and groups respond in markedly different ways. In this paper, the in-between status of the colored South African group is used to illustrate issues of identity and oppression under the Apartheid system-and differing ways in which oppression was experienced and used. The colored group had many social advantages over Blacks, but were also used to oppress that group. Habituation, accommodation, and relative advantage were identified as dynamics within the broader context of power and privilege that contributed to cultural and psychological marginality and status ambivalence of the coloreds. These processes must be understood within the historical, social, and political context of the community. What is evident from the data is that groups and individuals can take up various positions along a continuum of oppressor-oppressed, depending upon the contexts, time, and social and legal relationships involved in their interactions.

The evolution of epistemology and concepts in an iterative-generative reflective practice: the importance of small differences.

Using a contextualist epistemology, it would be expected that regional differences in community psychology would develop over time. It is argued that the epistemology and theory of Western Australian community psychology, while largely based on North American approaches, has developed its own idiosyncracies. These developed through the integration of practice and theory in an "iterative-generative" fashion. The process of development is conceptualized in terms of Schön's and Altman's distinctions between foundational knowledge, and professional and socially responsive knowledge (I. Altman, 1996; D. A. Schön, 1983). It has also been characterized as an incremental development based on the reflection on tacit and conceptual knowledge. From the small differences that have developed between regions, a dialogue can emerge that will better allow understanding of how social forces shape people's actions.