The Routledge International Handbook of Community Psychology

Facing Global Crises with Hope

Carolyn Kagan, Jacqueline Akhurst, Jaime Alfaro, Rebecca Lawthom, Michael Richards, Alba Zambrano, Carolyn Kagan, Jacqueline Akhurst, Jaime Alfaro, Rebecca Lawthom, Michael Richards, Alba Zambrano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000511666
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

Part iCommunity Psychology through a critical lens

DOI: 10.4324/9780429325663-2

1Epistemicide and epistemic freedomReflections for a decolonising Community Psychology

Nick Malherbe, Shahnaaz Suffla and Mohamed Seedat

DOI: 10.4324/9780429325663-3

Abstract

Community Psychology has, in the main, contributed to different modes of epistemicide, that is, the destruction, distortion, marginalisation and silencing of other-than-Northern knowledges and ways of knowing. Increasingly, however, decolonising enactments of Community Psychology have resisted the discipline’s complicity in entrenching unequal knowledge hierarchies that depend on epistemicide. (Re)inspired by the latest iterations of the decolonial turn, which have sought to mobilise epistemologies of the South in an attempt to advance epistemic freedom, we critically appraise some of the epistemologically just praxes and the intellectual and political struggles intrinsic to a liberatory knowledge-making project. We then reflect on our own Community Psychology work. Specifically, we recount how re-membering conflict, struggle and everyday care within a low-income South African community with whom we collaborate has been able to cherish epistemic freedom, while guarding against epistemicide. In this, we offer a critical consideration of the messiness, hybridity and contradictions, as well as the radical solidarities and agency that accompany work of this sort. We conclude by reflecting on what epistemic freedom, and its associated challenges, could mean for a decolonising Community Psychology that seeks to resist the coloniality of knowledge.

Resumen

La psicología comunitaria ha contribuido, principalmente, a diferentes modos de epistemicidio, es decir, a la destrucción, distorsión, marginación y silenciamiento de conocimientos y formas de conocimiento que no son del Norte. Sin embargo, cada vez más, las representaciones descolonizadoras de la psicología comunitaria han resistido la complicidad de la disciplina en fortalecer las jerarquías desiguales de conocimiento que dependen del epistemicidio. (Re)inspirados por las últimas iteraciones del giro descolonial, que han intendado movilizar las epistemologías del Sur por promover la libertad epistémica, evaluamos críticamente algunas de las praxis epistemológicamente justas y las luchas intelectuales y políticas intrínsecas a un proyecto por la construcción de conocimiento libertador. Luego reflexionamos sobre nuestro propio trabajo en la psicología comunitaria. Específicamente, contamos cómo recordar el conflicto, la lucha y el cuidado diario, dentro de una comunidad sudafricana de bajos ingresos con la que colaboramos, ha sido capaz de apreciar la libertad epistémica, mientras evitando al epistemicidio. En esto, ofrecemos una consideración crítica del desorden, la hibridación y las contradicciones, así como las solidaridades radicales y la agencia que acompañan a este tipo de trabajo. Concluimos reflexionando sobre lo que la libertad epistémica y sus desafíos asociados podrían significar para una psicología comunitaria descolonizadora que busca resistir la colonialidad del conocimiento.

Introduction

If we understand power as constituted along colonial cartographies, then it follows that colonial centres hold immense influence over which knowledges are made to seem legitimate, coherent and rational, and which are not (see Masaka, 2018; Poks, 2015). In considering the nuances of colonialism and knowledge production, it is perhaps insufficient to conceptualise power and knowledge as merely representing a single hybridised entity à la Foucault (1980). It may be more useful to explore how contemporary colonial power structures (i.e. coloniality) not only shape the creation of knowledge systems (i.e. epistemologies), but in fact depend on the destruction of other-than-Northern knowledges and ways of knowing. Indeed, if coloniality is to secure ideological hegemony as well as lay claim to what comprises the human, it must work to deny the intellectual life of the colonised by destroying their knowledge systems (de Sousa Santos, 2016). This process of imposing colonial epistemologies onto – and almost destroying – knowledges generated within colonial territories is known as epistemicide (Masaka, 2018).

Despite community psychologists becoming increasingly concerned with the coloniality of knowledge (Seedat & Suffla, 2017), and epistemic violence (Malherbe et al., 2017), few Community Psychology engagements have focused on epistemicide as such. Relatedly, there is little work that has sought to understand how community psychologists concerned with epistemic justice are able to support grassroots community-led initiatives in their efforts to resist epistemicide. Nonetheless, and as we demonstrate in this chapter, there is a growing body of Critical Community Psychology that addresses itself to epistemic freedom (e.g. Ali-Faisal, 2020; Carolissen & Duckett, 2018; Kessi, 2017; Reyes Cruz & Sonn 2010; Suffla & Seedat, 2017). Situated within this critical tradition, we draw on our own work, in a South African community, to illustrate some of the complexities, challenges and limitations that community psychologists face when attempting to resist epistemicide.

Epistemicide, coloniality and knowledge production

Coloniality represents the structures of power that were established during the era of so-called classic colonialism in the late fifteenth century, but that survive today in dominant cultures, labour relations, intersubjective interactions, social systems, institutions and knowledge-making practices (see Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Thus, in addition to addressing itself to power and being, coloniality is also concerned with knowledge (see Maldonado-Torres, 2016), which is to say that coloniality seeks to ensure that all models of thinking, seeing and interpreting – no matter how alienating – cohere with the rules and norms of a supposedly universal Western modernity (Mignolo, 2007).

How does epistemicide fit into coloniality’s broader matrices of social domination? In his pioneering work on this topic, de Sousa Santos (2005, 2016) argues that modern science, as it has been conceived in the colonial centres, has always sought legitimacy through the destruction of those knowledges produced in the Global South. Certainly, much scientific “progress” is premised on the regulation, control and sometimes destruction of colonised peoples and their knowledge systems, all while staking claim to the values of impartiality, objectivity and Truth (Bennett, 2007; Teo, 2019). In undermining, asphyxiating and destroying indigenous knowledges, epistemicide looks to neutralise, invisibilise and efface the people to whom these knowledges belong (see Masaka, 2018). Once knowledges of the colonised are erased, the coloniser is able to assume a benevolent, paternal role either in imparting knowledge or as the sole bearer of “valid” knowledge (Bennett, 2007; Mills & Lefrançois, 2018). The notion of epistemicide helps us understand how epistemology connects with coloniality, that is, how the destruction of indigenous knowledges relates to the cheapening of the lives of those who created these knowledges (de Sousa Santos, 2016; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). It is apparent, then, that we cannot consider epistemicide and coloniality separately.

De Sousa Santos (2016) has argued that when knowledge creation relies on epistemicide, what emerges is abyssal thinking, where that which is deemed legitimate is infused with an imperial modality of reason that reduces colonised peoples to the status of sub-human. Sub-human colonial subjects are effectively constructed as irrational, incompetent non-knowledge holders who are underdeveloped, undeveloped and/or developed wrongly, and therefore must have their interests determined through “superior” colonial knowledges (Mills & Lefrançois, 2018; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2009). As such, and because being makes possible knowing, epistemicide is enacted with a view towards erasing the ontological density of colonised peoples (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), thereby relegating these peoples to a zone of non-being wherein their humanity is refused (see Fanon, 1967). In this sense, coloniality operates at intrapsychic and structural levels, where colonised people may act to silence their own knowledges in order to receive the kinds of recognition necessary to survive within systems of coloniality (Bennett, 2007).

There is, of course, a bitter irony to epistemicide. Colonial powers always depend upon the indigenous knowledges that they denigrate and destroy (see Masaka 2018). How, for instance, could settler colonialists survive in unfamiliar conditions without drawing from local knowledges? Herein lies one of the central contradictions of epistemicide, and indeed coloniality more broadly. It is also important to note that epistemicide usually fails in its mission to destroy indigenous knowledge forms in toto (Masaka, 2018). This failure signifies that epistemicide is always met with insurgent decolonial resistance (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, 2021), much of which challenges the inherent contradictions of coloniality. Thus, we do not adequately consider coloniality and epistemicide if we do not also synchronously and actively engage with the pursuit of decolonisation and epistemic freedom.

Epistemic freedom

To resist epistemicide is to struggle for what Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) calls epistemic freedom. He maintains that epistemic freedom differs from academic freedom in that it is not about proclaiming whatever one wishes, and has little to do with institutional autonomy. Rather, epistemic freedom insists on both the right to interpret the world from one’s locus of enunciation – which sits at the intersection of knowledge and the politics of place (Mignolo, 1999) – and to use methodologies that actively oppose coloniality. Epistemic freedom seeks to liberate reason from coloniality (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018) through an epistemic delinking from the logic of modernity and its naturalised assumptions (Poks, 2015). Therefore, struggles for epistemic freedom may entail working outside of the kinds of narrative linearity and supposed rationality that have, in large part, been favoured by Western modernity since the Enlightenment (Poks, 2015; Teo, 2019). In this way, we can reclaim suppressed knowledges from Otherness (see Gqola, 2010), and build pluriversal futures that, in rejecting coloniality’s partialised humanism, stress the fullness of humanity (see Fanon, 1967). The privileging of indigenous knowledges may then not only open up pathways for decolonisation, but also reveal how dominant knowledges – far from de facto universal – are, in fact, indigenous to their own contexts (Teo, 2019).

The centuries of violence enacted in the name of coloniality’s cognitive empire, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2021) argues, indicate the imperative of epistemic freedom. Yet, if it is to serve as an opening into other freedoms, epistemic freedom cannot constitute an end in and of itself (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). Epistemic freedom is a deeply personal project that entails learning to unlearn, and then relearning in order to create and build (Tlostanova, 2015; Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012). It requires the cultivation of a decolonial attitude on the part of knowledge-making subjects, as well as a conviction that everyone is a legitimate knower and producer of knowledge (Maldonado-Torres, 2016; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). This decolonial attitude entails an openness to knowledges that exist outside of the European and North American canons (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012), as well as a commitment to working across and beyond epistemic borders (Mignolo, 2007). In considering these twinned pillars of the decolonial knowledge-making attitude, Anzaldúa’s (1987) concept of border thinking is useful. Border thinking entails a literal “thinking from the borders”, or learning to know with and through knowledges that are not necessarily recognised under coloniality’s cognitive empire. Through border thinking, we can begin to deconstruct and look beyond the artificial borders by which coloniality entraps knowledges (Poks, 2015). Border thinking allows us to approach that which has not always been understood as knowledge – or whose status as knowledge has been muted through epistemicide (e.g. affects, spirituality, quotidian practices and movement) – as legitimate ways of knowing. To think on, with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Facing global crises
• Part I Community Psychology through a critical lens
• PART II Community Psychology through a praxis lens
• PART III Community Psychology through an ecological lens
• PART IV Community Psychology through a reflective lens
• PART V Community Psychology through the lens of hope
• Index