Natalie Kivell - Indaba (Or Is Community Psychology Just Colonial Psychology?)

I was going to ask about the goals, but I'm actually curious about one of the episode topics you just mentioned with participatory action research and ancestors.

Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah, it was kind of in the critical response.

It wasn't something we had intentionally brought.

But we had had this beautiful kind of listen between...

I'm trying to remember who all the guests were on that first episode.

It was Beng Ishimo and Amy Smoke from Waterloo.

It was Puleng Sahalo from South Africa.

KJ...

KJ, just going to call you KJ, because I can't actually remember what the J stands for, from Melbourne, working with Chris Son.

And in listening to that, it kind of helped open some of our conceptions or rigidities of how science or research or knowledge, even when we're coming at it from decolonial and critical perspectives, still has colonial limitations or blind spots.

So that was just an example that one of our guests provided, but specifically it was in critique.

So it's also this really beautiful vulnerable moment where, you know, Michelle Fine, for many of us, has been and still is the person we look to for critical participatory action research.

I mean, the public science project out of CUNY with Michelle Fine and colleagues has been the kind of pushing, cutting edge of critical participatory action research.

And so for her to have a moment where someone was like, actually, here's a boundary for which, like you constructed a boundary that doesn't need to be there and to reflect on what that means for her work.

But then also for those of us who look to Michelle's work or look elsewhere for critical approaches, it's like one of those moments rupture moments in how we think about knowledge.

Because of course we have other methodologies around, I don't know, archival reclamation looking at, you know, in the South Africa episode, but also just in the work of community psychology.

We have Chris Sonnegar-Stevens who built the Apartheid Archive Project in South Africa.

So there are many methodologies that ask us to engage with those who came before us, but to specifically think about it as par, to specifically think about what it means to be in relational engagement with those knowledges, with those stories, with those ways that we've been able to document and build relationships with ancestors or elders was, I think, a moment in those episodes that pushed us all to take a breath and realize, you know, I mean, I'd like to think we all know there's still so much to learn, but kind of rupturing some of our assumptions about how we do research.

Yeah, it seems like one of those moments where even when you think you're being radical, there's a moment when, oh yeah, you might still be just upholding like a structure and trying to keep things neat and palatable rather than actually meeting people, how they actually navigate through the world.

So leaving out the ancestors from any consideration of, Participatory action research is essentially putting people into an easy scientific box, not actually looking at how people relate to their families and loved ones and their entire societies and cosmologies rooted in ancestors and for them to be complete and for them to be a non-factor in participatory action research is Yeah, it's the coloniality of even community psychology where communities only count in the ways that community psychology, as is defined in the global north, can define people.

It can only study communities.

I'm using quotations that it can understand through its own internal mechanisms and theories.

Absolutely.

And as someone who is very chatty and loves hosting podcasts, I had to be very aware of how much space I was taking up because the entire purpose originally was And I fit into kind of the last category was like, how do we center Black, Indigenous, racialized scholars, marginalized scholars, and then my category of young and emerging scholars whose voices are not necessarily the kind of center of our journals, the center of our, you know, so we're still expected to cite... old white men to be able to talk about power, to be able to talk about, you know, relationality.