This handbook offers a unique critical and cross-disciplinary approach to the study of Community Psychology, showing how it can address the systemic challenges arising from multiple crises facing people across the world. Addressing some of the most pressing issues of our times, the text shows how Community Psychology can contribute to principled social change, giving voice, enabling civic participation and supporting the realignment of social and economic power within planetary boundaries. Featuring a collaboration of contributions from world-leading academics, early career researchers and community leaders, each chapter gives theory and context with practical examples of working with those living in precarious situations, on matters that concern them most, and highlights positive ways to contribute to progressive change. The editors examine economic, ecological, demographic, gender, violence, energy, social and cultural, and political crises in relation to psychological theories, as well as public policy and lived experiences, presenting an approach situated at the intersection of public policy and lived experiences. Viewed through four different perspectives or lenses: a critical lens; a praxis lens; an ecological lens and a reflective lens, this compendium of critical explorations into Community Psychology shows how it can contribute to a fairer, more just, resilient and sustainable world. Also examining the lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic about the pervading nature of social inequality, but also the potential of solidarity movements ranging from local to international levels, this is ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars in Community Psychology and related areas, including social psychology, clinical psychology and applied psychology.

This edited volume in the Community Psychology Book Series emphasizes applications of community psychology for disrupting dominant and hegemonic power relations. The book explores domains of work that are located within critical community psychology, as well as work that is conventionally not self-defined as community psychology but which draws on and contributes to the foundations and enactments of critical and liberatory community psychology. Specifically, the book advances conceptions and praxes for community psychology grounded within a decolonial framework. The volume heeds the call for a generation of approaches to community psychology that link local struggles to broader questions of power, identity, and knowledge production, bringing together examples of praxes from different contexts as a political project of highlighting indigenous struggles toward self-determination. Collectively, the chapters in this book embody a decolonial agenda for community psychology that foregrounds social justice; the lives and knowledges of the marginalized and oppressed; epistemic disobedience and transdisciplinarity; and decolonial aesthetics. The book is divided into two parts - Part I: Conceptions of Engagement for Community Psychology delves into the conceptual framework for a decolonial community psychology, and Part II: Modes of Enactments and Praxes for Community Psychology builds on these theoretical advancements through examples of praxis in different contexts. The audience for the book includes scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists, and students located within community psychology specifically, as well as disciplines within the health and social sciences, and arts and humanities more broadly.

This edited volume seeks to critically engage with the diversity of feminist and post-colonial theory to counter hegemonic Western knowledge in mainstream community psychology. In doing so, it situates paradigms of thought and representation that capture the lived experiences of those in the global South. Specifically, the book takes an intersectional approach towards its reshaping of community psychology, centering African, black, postcolonial, and decolonial feminist critiques in its 1) critique of existing hegemonic Euro-American community psychology concepts, theories, and practice, 2) proposal of new feminist, indigenous, and decolonial methodological approaches, and 3) real-life examples of engagement, research, dialogue, and reflexive qualitative psychology practice. The book concludes with an agenda for theorization and research for future practice in postcolonial contexts. The volume is relevant to researchers, practitioners, and students in psychology, anthropology, sociology, public health, development studies, social work, urban studies, and women’s and gender studies across global contexts.

Posthuman Community Psychology is an exploration of mainstream psychology through a critical posthumanity perspective, examining psychology’s place in the world and its relationship with marginalised people, with a focus on people with disabilities. The book argues that the history of modern psychology is underpinned by reductionism and individualism, which is embedded within the contemporary psychology that we know today despite the challenges from critical and community psychologists who seek a more empowering, inclusive, and activist psychology. The posthuman community psychology ideas that emerge in this book examine and intersect with mainstream psychology, critical and community psychologies, critical posthumanities and disability studies to propose an imaginative, reflective, and relational new psychology that represents a collection of possibilities that do not remain entrenched in older ways of thinking about humans and human connections. Richards proposes that psychology has the potential to evolve and make a powerful and profound difference for marginalised people, but a genuine desire for change from psychologists is essential for this to happen. Illustrating the important considerations needed when examining the relationship between the discipline of psychology and marginalised people, this book is fascinating reading for community psychology students and academics, aspiring professional psychologists, community workers, and policy makers.

This visionary textbook is the third edition of a trusted and highly respected introduction to community psychology. The editors have focused on three contemporary social issues in order to illustrate key concepts throughout the book: climate change, affordable housing and homelessness, and immigration. Featuring a wide range of critical perspectives from international scholars and practitioners, Community Psychology encourages students to consider theories and methodologies in light of how they might be applied to different cultures and settings. It develops students' ability to think critically about the role of psychology in society, and about how the work of community psychologists can aid in the liberation of oppressed groups, promoting social justice and flourishing both for people and for our planet. This book is essential reading for students taking both undergraduate and graduate courses in community psychology and its related fields. New to this Edition: - New chapters on power and racism - Coverage of the latest research in the field, with numerous new concepts, theories, and references - An approach which takes three critical issues as illustrative examples throughout the book: immigration, affordable housing and homelessness, and climate change. Accompanying online resources for this title can be found at bloomsburyonlineresources.com/community-psychology-3e. These resources are designed to support teaching and learning when using this textbook and are available at no extra cost.

This handbook highlights a range of ground breaking, radical and liberatory clinical and critical community psychology projects from around the world. The disciplines of critical community psychology and clinical psychology are currently experiencing radical innovations that in this book are characterised as moving from the individualising practice realm toward an altogether more contextualising orientation. Both fields are responding to an array of political, social and economic injustices and a global political context. Community and clinical psychologists have found themselves reorienting their practice to confront, resist and subvert the structures that are so damaging to the lives of the vulnerable people they work with. This text posits that these approaches refute and resist the psychologising that has strengthened oppressive structures. Such practices are starting to engage in the political character of power-knowledge relationships that demand a more ‘action-oriented’ and less ‘clinical’ psychology praxis and there is a growing interest in, and commitment to, social justice in the field of mental wellbeing. Using examples of scholar, activist and practitioner work from around the world, this collection explores and documents those practices where the traditional remits of community and clinical psychology have been subverted, altered, stretched, changed and reworked in order to reframe practice around human rights, creativity, political activism, social change, space and place, systemic violence, community transformation, resource allocation and radical practices of disruption and direct action.

This book centres and explores postcolonial theory, which looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial supremacy. It argues that disability is a constitutive material presence in many postcolonial societies and that progressive disability politics arise from postcolonial concerns. By drawing these two subjects together, this handbook challenges oppression, voicelessness, stereotyping, undermining, neo-colonisation and postcolonisation and bridges binary debate between global North and the global South. The book is divided into eight sections i Setting the Scene ii Decolonising Disability Studies iii Postcolonial Theory, Inclusive Development iv Postcolonial Disability Studies and Disability Activism v Postcolonial Disability and Childhood Studies vi Postcolonial Disability Studies and Education vii Postcolonial Disability Studies, Gender, Race and Religion viii Conclusion And comprised of 27 newly written chapters, this book leads with postcolonial perspectives – closely followed by an engagement with critical disability studies – with the explicit aim of foregrounding these contributions; pulling them in from the edges of empirical and theoretical work where they often reside in mainstream academic literature. The book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies and postcolonial studies as well as those working in sociology, literature and development studies.

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.

Anti-capitalist political struggle is a site of struggling psychologies. Conscious political action is never far from unconscious desire, and the fight for material justice is always also the fight for dignity and psychological well-being. Yet, how might community psychologists conceive of their discipline in a way that opposes the very capitalist political economy that, historically, most of the psy-disciplines have bolstered in return for disciplinary legitimacy? In its consideration of an anti-capitalist psychology of community, this book does not ignore or try to resolve the contradictory position of such a psychology. Instead, it draws on these contradictions to enliven psychology to the shifting demands - both creative and destructive - of a community-centred anti-capitalism. Using practical examples, the book deals with the psychological components of building community-centred social movements that challenge neoliberal capitalism as a political system, an ideology, and a mode of governing rationality. The book also offers several theoretical contributions that grapple with how an anti-capitalist psychology of community can remain attentive to the psychological elements of anti-capitalist struggle; what the psychological can tell us about anti-capitalist politics; and how these politics can shape the psychological.