Community Psychology Without Borders: Language Issues in Community Research

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Torres-Harding ◽  
M. Njoku ◽  
L. Jason ◽  
J. Goodkind ◽  
J. Yunyi Ren ◽  
...  
Author(s):  
Stephen B. Fawcett

AbstractCommunity research and action is an evolving field of practice with multiple influences. Its varied ways of knowing and doing reflect recombined elements from different disciplines, including behavioral science, community psychology, public health, and community development. This article offers a personal reflection based on my evolving practice over nearly 50 years. The focus is on three types of influence: (a) engaging with different communities, fields, and networks (e.g., discovering shared values, diverse methods); (b) building methods and capabilities for the work (e.g., methods for participatory research, tools for capacity building); and (c) partnering for collaborative research and action, locally and globally. This story highlights the nature of the field’s evolution as an increasing variation in methods. Our evolving practice of community research and action—individually and collectively—emerges from the recombination of ideas and methods discovered through engagement in a wide variety of contexts.


2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 105-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham Wandersman ◽  
Bret Kloos ◽  
Jean Ann Linney ◽  
Marybeth Shinn

Author(s):  
Ronald Harvey ◽  
Nikolay L. Mihaylov

International Community Psychology (ICP) is an exciting and growing development in our field and worthy of serious consideration as a career choice. However, ICP’s unique rewards come with additional challenges in the field. In this chapter, the authors interviewed five experienced international researchers to describe past, current, and future community research and action in the United States, South America, Kenya, Hungary, Bulgaria, Russia, and China. The interviewees discuss how they got started with international research, found international collaborators, what it is like to do ICP research, and how they addressed practical issues encountered in the field like overcoming language barriers and working effectively with collaborators with limited resources and differing attitudes toward social problems. The authors argue that doing ICP is a methodology in itself: international work can expose one’s hidden assumptions about theory, context, and implementation. Conducting ICP research requires a level of creativity and humility that generates unique satisfaction.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 448-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher C Sonn ◽  
Caterina Arcidiacono ◽  
Urmitapa Dutta ◽  
Peace Kiguwa ◽  
Bret Kloos ◽  
...  

This article explores critical directions for forging new disciplinary traditions within community psychology, as discussed by a panel at the conclusion of the 6th International Conference on Community Psychology (ICCP 2016). The conference itself was constructed as an enactment of a decolonizing approach, looking at the entire globalized system from the African continent and centring knowledges produced by Africans and the diaspora. Several panellists were invited to offer their reflections on the emerging discussions, and absences or silences they observed at the conference, as well as how community research and action can develop a research and teaching programme that is liberatory. Panellists’ comments pointed to the importance of the decolonization project globally and the implications of decoloniality for community research and action. The challenge for community research and action is to build alliances and networks across space and time, and with various social movements. The discipline needs to centre and draw out the voices of those who have been excluded, to retrieve and reclaim ways of knowing, being, and doing because these are key to tackling the coloniality of power and to forging new ways of doing ethical and just community research and action.


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