Tracking the Decolonial Turn in Contemporary Community Psychology: Expanding Socially Just Knowledge Archives, Ways of Being and Modes of Praxis

Abstract

The current chapter provides a context for this volume that sets out to critically interrogate the biases in Western modernist thought concerning community and related applied psychologies. A specific focus is to illuminate and consolidate current ontological and epistemic alternatives that contribute to the possibilities of emancipatory futures in various local and global contexts. Across the collection of chapters within the book, decoloniality is articulated in multiple ways, and is manifested in interrelated practices, processes, and knowledge production activities towards social change. Through a review of chapters, we distilled three interrelated categories that refer to practices and principles that are aimed at enacting decoloniality and epistemic justice in community and applied psychologies: (1) Archival reclamation and expansion for onto-epistemic disruption, (2) Knowledge from below and centring voices and subjects from the margins as epistemic justice, and (3) Modes of praxis that encompass critical mutual accompaniment, acknowledge intersectional identities, and are premised upon dialogical ethics. These three categories of decoloniality being enacted are contextual, varied, and must be understood within the circumstances of moving and changeable power relationships that are always socially operant in knowledge production processes, interventions and forms of praxis.