Samuel Keast

Collaborators – See image above

Project Overview

The RRD-CP Project is a transnational collaboration among critical community psychologists engaging in reflections and dialogues on decoloniality within and beyond community psychology, and allied disciplines. Our connections and collaborations are anchored in questions and tensions within community psychology and the direction of the discipline.

We, Jesica and Chris, were brought together by shared questions on the relationship between psychology, specifically community psychology and decoloniality, in relation to and distinct from liberation. In particular, we wanted to learn how community psychology, and community psychologists, engage in the decolonial turn. Furthemore, how a decolonial standpoint informs community psychology theory, research and practice, as well as decolonial critical community psychology praxis.

The purpose of the RRD-CP Project is to document these processes and practices, as well as orientations, standpoints and approaches toward decoloniality and decolonization within community psychology. Hence, the metaphor of the roots and routes, which we reference to underscore the foundations of community psychology that have strived toward de-linking from Western-Eurocentric logics and perspectives, as well as the coloniality of power. In doing so we seek to contribute to the development, cultivation and sustainability of decolonial, decolonizing and anti-colonial praxes within the discipline, and toward a decolonial critical community  psychology.

Through the development of our collaboration, we have engaged in organizing, planning and facilitating a roundtable/symposium and a workshop at conferences. These initial professional gatherings offered generative dialogues, reflections and connections among us and other colleagues toward continuing our learning, understanding and documenting of decoloniality and decolonization within our own praxis, and within the discipline.