WHO'S LEFT OUT AND WHO'S STILL ON THE MARGINS? SOCIAL EXCLUSION IN COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY JOURNALS

Abstract

Although community psychology claims to have a social justice‐oriented value base, archival studies of publications in the field have identified deficits in marginalized group representation and a tendency for published work to perpetuate social exclusion. This disjuncture has implications for our understanding of power relations in community psychology scholarship. In this article, I analyze who is included and excluded in the participant choices of 895 empirical studies published in 4 international community psychology journals over a decade. The analysis shows that studies largely report on minority world populations that signify privileged social groups or fail to foreground groups affected by processes of social exclusion. I argue that understanding how knowledge creation may perpetuate social exclusion is fundamental to the role of community psychologists. The article highlights the consequences for the field of the choices of groups we choose to study and report on, as well as those we neglect, in knowledge‐making enterprises.