Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Foreword -- The Community Psychology Book Series: A Dialogical Decolonising Space -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Contributors -- Part I: Conceptions of Engagement for Community Psychology -- Towards A Decolonial Community Psychology: Derivatives, Disruptions and Disobediences -- A Fundamental Quest for Social Justice -- A Critical Focus on the Marginalised and Oppressed -- Epistemic Disobedience and Transdisciplinarity -- Embracing A Decolonial Aesthetic -- A Critical Assembly of Theoretical, Methodological and Praxical Resources -- Conceptions of Engagement for Community Psychology -- Modes of Enactment and Praxes for Community Psychology -- References -- Liberatory Africa(n)-Centred Community Psychology of Psychosocial Change -- Introduction -- A Note on A Method of Thinking and Writing Together -- How to Situate Africa Within Community Psychology to Re-write the Discipline? -- In What Ways Might Neville Alexander Be Useful in Unearthing Socially Just Africa(n)-Centred Critical Community Psychologies? -- How Can Africa(n)-Centring Psychologists Within Communities Locate the Psychological Within Social Change? -- Concluding Thoughts -- References -- Decolonising Participatory Action Research in Community Psychology -- Introduction -- Decolonial Thinking and the Decolonial Turn -- The Roots of PAR -- The Western Approach -- Perspectives from the Global South -- Decolonising Participation, Action and Research in PAR -- Participation Not Tokenism -- Action-Oriented Transformation -- Research Justice for Decoloniality -- Ten Axioms for a Decolonial PAR Praxis -- Participatory Relational Engagement -- Socio-historical Inquiry -- Interrupting Power -- Critical Reflexivity -- Sovereignty -- Tensegrity as Balance -- Co-constructing Knowledge -- Community Determined Applied Action -- Emancipatory Transformational Praxes.

The issue of peace and its drivers is central to erudition on Hind Swaraj and associated texts dealing with liberty, self-rule, world order and social integrity. In this article, we therefore aim to describe a specific articulation of peace, embedded in peace psychology and the Global Peace Index (GPI), which was first initiated in 2007 and subsequently revised in 2008 and 2009. The GPI, which places countries according to their levels of peacefulness, offers insights into the determinants of peace. We explain the origins and scope of the GPI, examine how it expresses peace and assess its usefulness. We suggest specific modification to the three key measures used by the GPI to evaluate a country's peacefulness. Focusing on South Africa, India, Brazil and the United States of America (USA), we recommend that indices of globalisation may be incorporated to enhance the currency of the index. Throughout the article we emphasise human security as a key element of peace.

Offering a unique set of case studies that invites readers to question and reimagine the concept of community engagement, this collected work provides an overview and analysis of numerous, creative participatory research methods designed to improve well-being at both the individual and societal level. In a world where there are enormous differences in the wealth and health of people, it is increasingly recognized that sustainable peace requires both a broad---based public commitment to nonviolence combined with noticeable increments in the wellbeing of people who occupy the lowest socioeconomic strata of societies. This volume focuses on the latter-how to use qualitative research methods to improve well-being of research participants, and thus, the wider society. The participatory research examples described in these chapters are meant to encourage researchers, scholars, and practitioners to question assumed knowledge about community engagement research and practice, and to inspire social justice-oriented scholarship. The cases studies and methods portrayed are as varied as the situations and cultures in which they take place. In most of the case studies, the personal is linked to the political with a social justice imperative as participants from marginalized communities express an understanding of their own position within power hierarchies, deconstruct power relations, and experience a sense of agency. In other instances, the methods are no less participatory but the aim is more focused on inner and outer harmony, psychological wellbeing, conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation. In all the cases studies, there is a strong emphasis on methods in which community members are at the center of efforts to promote social change. The methods described include group storytelling, community arts, asset mapping, dialogues, creative writing, embroidery, filmmaking, Photovoice, "writing back" to power, and other means of engaging in emancipatory praxis and promoting personal wellbeing. Taken together, the chapters illustrate creative ways in which community members, embedded in disadvantaged contexts, can engage in a dynamic process that stimulates individual and collective agency. Ultimately, this volume will provide readers with a deeper understanding of a wide range of creative, qualitative research methods, and will encourage establishment of an effective social justice agenda essential to human wellbeing and sustainable peace

Abstract
Researchers have played a significant role in influencing the public's critical engagement with the South African Police Service (SAPS). Resultantly, SAPS officers tend to be wary and/or untrusting of researchers. In the present study, we sought to understand how this climate of suspicion impacts policing research in South Africa. To do so, we employed a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis on emails leading up to a study with SAPS officers, and on the transcripts of three focus group discussions with SAPS officers. We identified three discursive strategies that SAPS employed: Security Stall (i.e. blocking research through bureaucratic procedure), Eliciting Sympathy (i.e. winning sympathy for the struggles of SAPS officers) and Undermining the Researcher Subjectivity (i.e. rendering legitimate knowledge on protest violence the sole product of police officers). These strategies destabilize police research while challenging the broader discursive terrain within which SAPS is located. We conclude by offering some insights for police research.

In the context of a call for public health research to address social challenges and transform communities and society, research translation has increasingly become an imperative in South Africa. Research translation seeks to improve real-world settings and enhance quality of life by applying research-generated knowledge. These goals are shared by proponents of participatory action research (PAR). However, the way in which research is pursued constitutes a major focus for PAR, where the paradigmatic position influences how we relate to knowledge and people, and whether and how we achieve the goals concerned. This article contrasts the meta-theoretical positioning of PAR with that of research translation as it is pursued within public health circles, and then argues how PAR both challenge and optimise the espoused goals of research translation through its accent on co-learning, knowledge co-construction, social action and the dialectic between research and action. We offer two African-centred examples of community-engaged research focusing on violence prevention, and safety and peace promotion to illustrate how the participatory mechanisms of empowerment and agency, knowledge co-construction and knowledge sharing foster research translation. Attention to power dynamics, exemplified through researcher reflexivity is emphasised as a key challenge for researchers wishing to address public health challenges.

Emerging out of a larger study whose main focus was to identify the risk and protective factors in male interpersonal violence, and based on analysis of local and global empirical and theoretical literature, the main aim of this article is to develop a conceptual foundation for understanding and preventing male interpersonal violence in South Africa within the context of responsive local manifestation and dynamics of male violence. The conceptual foundation developed has been informed by both public health and social science perspectives. The impetus for the development of a conceptual foundation is not only the scale of the problem of violence in the country but, more importantly, the urgent need for a theoretically sound, locally-grounded and better-integrated understanding of male interpersonal violence and violence generally. The article describes violence in a global context before turning to violence in South Africa. Then it briefly looks at different theoretical approaches on violence before focusing on the public health approach to violence generally, and male interpersonal violence more specifically. Next it describes the ecological framework, given that this perspective tends to accompany the public health studies in violence. A critical appraisal of this approach is then offered. Finally, the article attempts to bring together these disparate perspectives in the process of developing a locally responsive, social science-informed critical public health conceptual framework on male interpersonal violence, drawing on and including a focus on the political, economic and social history of South Africa.