Conundrums in teaching decolonial critical community psychology within the context of neo‐liberal market pressures

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, we provide empirically informed reflections on the difficulty of undertaking critically inflected, decolonial praxis in community psychology within the overdetermined global order of neo‐liberalism. Using interviews with 10 alumni of the Masters in Community‐Based Counselling (MACC) psychology program at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, we extend what have hitherto been largely theoretical debates about the fundamental constraints on teaching decolonial theory as an important touchstone of criticality in the context of the constraining forces of the free‐market economy. We focus on our participants’ attempts to navigate the inevitable tensions between the tenets of decolonial critical community psychology and neo‐liberal market pressures on employability. We analyze accounts of job‐seeking and employment experiences of the program alumni to ask whether we may have to contemplate the imminent evacuation of critical community epistemologies within the context of a market‐structured and professionally regulated psychology. We suggest that while the death knell of critical pedagogies and epistemologies has not yet quite arrived, more nuanced approaches to criticality may have to be adopted by the training programs that embrace them. We reveal that decoloniality's emergent traction within the academy is not mirrored by the world of professional psychology. We contend that our apparently ideologically bifurcated curriculum together with fundamental constraints on practice opportunities in the world of work, do not support an easy leap into the decolonial breach.