Finding community, placing psychology: Reflections on the 6th International Conference on Community Psychology

Abstract

The 6th International Conference on Community Psychology was held in the city of Durban in South Africa in 2016. The conference theme ‘Global Dialogues on Critical Knowledges, Liberation and Community’ reflected the country’s current political struggle for transformation and the connection to issues of social and economic inequality internationally. Guided by storytelling as a methodology, this paper draws on individual reflections of delegates from NAME University to explore the implications of the conference for us individually and collective in terms of teaching, research and action. We organise our collective reflections on our conference experience around two themes: the constraints and challenges of psychology teaching and training, and the value and challenges associated with critical and contextualised approaches to community psychologies. Drawing on these reflections, the implications for teaching, research and practice is discussed as well as the importance of forging spaces for networking, support for contextualised approaches to community psychology.

Keywords

• Community psychology, curriculum, reflection, criticality, decoloniality