Community Psychology's abuse of empowerment to further a white supremacist agenda.

When White people are predominantly in power and the discipline has yet to grapple with its own involvement in oppressive and racist ideologies, the concept of empowerment has the potential of being misused, or worse, abused. This is my experience and observation within Community Psychology (CP). In this paper, I interrogate the history of CP, especially the interplay of colonized knowledge production practices and the concept of empowerment, and uncover the use and abuse of well-meaning community psychological principles by scholars and leaders without the critical racial awareness to apply them to communities to which they do not belong. Lastly, I offer a "slash and burn" approach to starting over.

Identifying abolitionist alignments in community psychology: A path toward transformation.

Psychology is grounded in the ethical principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence, that is, "do no harm." Yet many have argued that psychology as a field is attached to carceral systems and ideologies that uphold the prison industrial complex (PIC), including the field of community psychology (CP). There have been recent calls in other areas of psychology to transform the discipline into an abolitionist social science, but this discourse is nascent in CP. This paper uses the semantic device of "algorithms" (e.g., conventions to guide thinking and decision-making) to identify the areas of alignment and misalignment between abolition and CP in the service of moving us toward greater alignment. The authors propose that many in CP are already oriented to abolition because of our values and theories of empowerment, promotion, and systems change; our areas of misalignment between abolition and CP hold the potential to evolve. We conclude with proposing implications for the field of CP, including commitments to the belief that (1) the PIC cannot be reformed, and (2) abolition must be aligned with other transnational liberation efforts (e.g., decolonization).

Being fractal: Embodying antiracism values in course-based participatory action research.

In the winter and spring of 2021, I-a White, female, graduate student-taught a six-month course surrounding the theme: Disrupting Systemic Racism at our University Through Action Research. I was challenged to lead a meaningful course in a two-dimensional virtual space, amidst rising death tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rhythmic beat of calls for racial justice pulsing through our Zoom class periods. This experience opened my eyes as an educator, budding community psychologist, and an antiracist White accomplice. In this critical autoethnographic case study, I recount my experience adapting the community organizing principle of fractals into a pedagogical framework that guided my instructional practices in a community psychology course. In doing so, I echo the call for community psychologists to connect our work more tightly to Black, Indigenous, and people of Color social justice organizers and movements to fortify the field's relevance in the struggle for racial justice.

A community psychology for migrant justice: Critically examining border violence and resistance during the COVID-19 syndemic.

This article explores the magnifying lenses of the COVID-19 syndemic to highlight how people racialized as migrants and refugees have been-and continue to be-disproportionally harmed. We use empirical evidence collected in our scholarly/activist work in Europe, Africa, South Asia, and the United States to examine migrant injustice as being produced by a combination of power structures and relations working to maintain colonial global orders and inequalities. This is what has been defined as "border imperialism." Our data, complemented by evidence from transnational solidarity groups, show that border imperialism has further intersected with the hygienic-sanitary logics of social control at play during the COVID-19 period. This intersection has resulted in increasingly coercive methods of restraining people on the move, as well as in increased-and new-forms of degradation of their lives, that is, an overall multiplication of border violences. At the same time, however, COVID-19 has provided a unique opportunity for grassroot solidarity initiatives and resistance led by people on the move to be amplified and extended. We conclude by emphasizing the need for community psychologists to take a more vigorous stance against oppressive border imperialist regimes and the related forms of violence they re/enact.

Ranking the community psychology research output of institutions and authors: A new system of evaluating the field.

There have been multiple efforts to evaluate the contributions of the field of Community Psychology, and one of the more popular methods has involved gathering citations and articles published in Community Psychology journals. In recent years, several sites have gathered citation analysis and article publication rates so that it is now relatively easy to summarize settings and scholar rankings. In the current study, articles published in the two major journals of the field of Community Psychology over the past five decades were evaluated for these publications and citations. Findings indicated that several of the settings with highest publication and citation rates have not developed Community Psychology graduate programs, thus indicating that many publishing authors are in settings without formal graduate programs in Community Psychology. The benefits and limitations of this method of ranking programs and individuals are reviewed.

"We make something with the flower, but feel like I make with myself something": The role of a community arts project supporting women who have experienced human trafficking.

Human trafficking can have multiple adverse effects on a victim's mental and physical health. The study explored how a small UK community arts project was experienced by individuals post-trafficking and the impact it had on well-being. Community-based participatory research was employed to increase understanding the experiences of six female participants taking part in a community arts project. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Themes of Authentic Care, Building Confidence, and Creative Expression were developed. Findings suggest the community arts organization played a vital role in supporting women to build trust and social connections, as well as to feel valued. Artistic activities helped participants express individuality, had therapeutic benefits, and provided motivation, routine, and space from worries. The role of community arts organizations is important in supporting individuals in the context of limited post-trafficking services.

The mediating role of social support in associations between childhood adversity, military sexual trauma, and homelessness in a nationally representative sample of US veterans.

Among veterans, availability of social support and histories of military sexual trauma (MST) and/or adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are particularly salient correlates of homelessness. Using path analyses, we investigated whether social support (i.e., interpersonal social support and community integration) would at least partially account for the relationships of MST and ACEs with any lifetime homelessness in a large, nationally representative sample of veterans (N = 4069, 9.8% female). Interpersonal social support and community integration partially explained the relationship between ACEs and any lifetime homelessness. However, they did not mediate the relationship between MST and any lifetime homelessness. Female veterans also reported higher trauma rates and lower perceived social support than male counterparts during correlational analyses. These results reinforce existing literature on the importance of research and interventions tailored to veterans with low social support and integration. Results have potential to inform interventions and policy for veterans experiencing and/or at risk for homelessness.

Then and now: A 50-year retrospective thematic analysis of Society for Community Research and Action presidential addresses.

The Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA) is the primary professional home for community psychologists in the United States and increasingly around the world. Since the formation of the American Psychological Association Division 27: Community Psychology in 1966, now SCRA, 54 people have served in the Presidential role. Presidential leaders' annual addresses both reflect the current state of the field and have the ability to shape the future of both SCRA as an organization and community psychology as a discipline given their positions as leaders. This commentary explores the trajectory of SCRA as an organization via 33 available presidential addresses, 28 of which were published in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP). Using thematic analysis and drawing on both dialectical and life cycle organizational processes, three periods of SCRA and community psychology more broadly were identified: defining community psychology, applying community psychology, and re-imagining community psychology. Themes speak to tensions between the ideals of the society and the work of the society. We conclude by offering a series of questions for consideration as SCRA positions itself for the future.

Seeking utopia: Psychologies' waves toward decoloniality.

This paper provides a review of empirical studies published with a decolonial epistemic approach in psychology. Our goal was to better understand how decolonial approaches are being practiced empirically in psychology, with an emphasis on community-social psychology. We first discuss the context of colonization and coloniality in the research process as orienting information. We identified 17 peer-reviewed empirical articles with a decolonial approach to psychology scholarship and discerned four waves that characterize the articles: relationally-based research to transgress fixed hierarchies and unsettle power, research from the heart, sociohistorical intersectional consciousness, and desire-based future-oriented research to rehumanize and seek utopia. Community-social psychology research with a decolonial approach has the potential to remember grassroots efforts, decolonizing our world.

Pride in our community: Reflecting on LGBTQ publications in the American Journal of Community Psychology.

In this Virtual Special Issue (VSI), we curate and discuss a set of 28 articles previously published in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP) focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. The purpose of this VSI is to bring visibility to this body of scholarship in AJCP and to reflect on how the strengths of our field have been used throughout this work in pursuit of supporting LGBTQ wellbeing. In this VSI, we first discuss articles that help to set the historical background for publications in AJCP. We then discuss papers under the broad themes of HIV/AIDS, identities within ecological context, and social activism among LGBTQ communities. We then reflect on opportunities for our field to further leverage our strengths in contributing to LGBTQ scholarship. Overall, this VSI celebrates the contributions to LGBTQ research already present in AJCP, and we hope inspires future contributions to the pages of AJCP and beyond.

Mixed methods in community psychology: A values-forward synthesis.

Mixed methods research (MMR) combines multiple traditions, methods, and worldviews to enrich research design and interpretation of data. In this virtual special issue, we highlight the use of MMR within the field of community psychology. The first MMR studies appeared in flagship community psychology journals over 30 years ago (in 1991). To explore the uses of MMR in the field, we first review existing literature by identifying all papers appearing in either Journal of Community Psychology or American Journal of Community Psychology in which the word "mixed" appeared. A total of 88 publications were identified. Many of these papers illustrate the pragmatic use of MMR to evaluate programs and to answer different research questions using different methods. We coded articles based on Green et al.'s classifications of the purpose of the mixing: triangulation, development, complementarity, expansion, and initiation. Complementarity was the most frequently used purpose (46.6% of articles), and nearly a quarter of articles mixed for multiple purposes (23.86%). We also coded for any community psychology values advanced by the use of mixed methods. We outline three themes here with corresponding exemplars. These articles illustrate how MMR can highlight ecological analysis and reconsider dominant, individual-level paradigms; center participant and community member experiences; and unpack paradoxes to increase the usefulness of research findings.

Contributions, missed opportunities, and future directions: A critical reflection on global climate change and environmental sustainability in AJCP over five decades.

In this contribution to the 50th Anniversary Special Issue, the authors consider how global climate change and environmental sustainability have been addressed in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP) over the last five decades. As we are increasingly exceeding critical planetary boundaries (global climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, etc.) with disastrous impacts on human well-being-especially for peoples already marginalized-it is timely to consider the treatment of environmental issues in the history of the AJCP and in community psychology more broadly. This review of relevant articles is clustered into three topics derived from our critical understanding of the articles themselves: (a) public participation and power; (b) community-level responses to environmental change, including its disproportionate impacts on marginalized groups; and (c) frameworks and worldviews that integrate the natural world as necessary context for research and action. The commentary on the featured articles is framed in terms of their key contributions, missed opportunities up to this point, and future directions for the field. While looking back at the past 50 years, the authors also have an eye to the years ahead and what work can be done to mitigate the harms of climate change, adapt to the emerging new environmental reality, and promote just and inclusive sustainabilities worldwide.

Sembrando Semillas, sowing seeds: Reflections on Latinx representations in US community psychology's AJCP.

Latinx have contributed to the foundation and formation of the United States, and as this demographic increases, overlooking their unique experiences and lived conditions can limit community psychology's potential to better support them in their wellbeing. Thus, in alignment with the call for a virtual special issue highlighting critical themes in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP), we take an exemplar approach to reviewing 15 articles published between 1979 and 2023. We highlight these articles for their unique contributions in laying the foundation or shifting the discourses of Latinx in the United States. We organize each article under one of the following themes: (1) Challenging notions of Latinx as passive victims or deficient; (2) Documenting the misrepresentation and invisibility of Latinx in community psychology; (3) Affirming Latinx as knowledge producers, protagonists, and agents of change; and (4) Centering Latin American epistemologies that foster liberatory praxis for and with Latinx. Via these themes, we illustrate where the discipline has been, and offer reflection for where it can move toward as it relates to Latinx. In doing so, we highlight perspectives grounded in Latinx communities. Our review is not exhaustive; however, it offers our subjective interpretation or curation of the articles we acknowledge as fundamental to the discipline's formation, and our learning and ongoing growth as critical community psychologists of Latin American heritage with affinities to Latinx communities in the United States. We offer this brief review as a semilla (seed) to the possibilities ahead as we remain open to reflection, dialog and learning.

The society for community research and action on a path toward conocimiento: From silences and statements to solidarities in action in U.S. community psychology.

A first-person narrative essay is presented through a critically reflexive auto-ethnography of a community psychologist's experiences as a member of the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA) and (as of this writing) co-chair of the Cultural, Ethnic and Racial Affairs council. Through this methodological orientation, an analysis of some of the discourses that circulated within the SCRA listserv in relation to the murder of Mr. George Floyd, and amidst an ensuing pandemic are analyzed and discussed in relation to Anzaldúa's seven stages of conocimiento. The intentions that guide and ground this first-person account are to animate deeper reflection, accountability, and solidarity-in-action, as well as an organizational shift in the culture of the SCRA. Guided by a set of questions-What accounts for the organizational silences within the SCRA? How did the SCRA respond or engage with the murder of Mr. Floyd, anti-Blackness, Black Lives Matter, and related racial justice efforts?-the purpose is to turn a critical social analysis gaze to the SCRA in order to align its purpose, values, and mission with liberation and a decolonial feminist praxis. Anzaldúa's seven-stage framework of conocimiento is utilized to describe the possibilities for an organizational cultural shift in the SCRA that aligns with racial justice and liberatory decolonial feminist praxes.

The global development of community psychology as reflected in the American Journal of Community Psychology.

This commentary presents a virtual special issue on the global growth of community psychology (CP), particularly, but not exclusively, as reflected in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP). CP exists in at least 50 countries all over the world, in many of those for over 25 years. Yet, aside from several early Israeli articles, AJCP rarely published work from or about countries outside the US and Canada until the early 2000s, when the number of international articles began to rise sharply. The focus of CP developed differently in different continents. CP in Australia and New Zealand initially followed North America's emphasis on improving social service systems, but has since focused more on environmental and indigenous cultural and decolonial issues that are as salient in those countries as in North America, but have drawn much more attention. CP came later to most of Asia, where it also tended to follow the North American path, but starting in Japan, India, and Hong Kong and now in China and elsewhere, it is establishing its own way. The other two global hotspots for CP for over 40 years have been Europe and Latin America. The level and focus of CP in Europe varies in each country, with some focused on applied developmental psychology and/or community services and others advancing critical and liberation psychology. CP in Latin America evolved from social psychology, but like CP in Sub-Saharan Africa, is also more explicitly political due to a history of political oppression, social activism, and the limitations of individualistic psychology to focus on social change, overcoming poverty, and interventions by (not just for) community members. Despite those differences, CP literature over the past 23 years suggests an increasingly common interest in social justice, multinational collaborations, and decoloniality. There is still a need for more truly (bidirectional) cross-cultural, comparative work for mutual learning, sharing of ideas, methods, and intervention practices, and for CP to develop in countries and communities throughout the globe where it could have the greatest impact.

Striving for safety, impact, and equity: A critical consideration of AJCP publications on formal youth mentoring programs.

In this virtual special issue (VSI) we curate and reflect upon 22 articles on formal youth mentoring previously published in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP). First, we provide historical context and highlight AJCP's 2002 special issue on mentoring, which played an important role in establishing youth mentoring as a vibrant area of research. Next, we review and discuss findings from subsequent AJCP studies in three interrelated lines of inquiry: (1) the importance of facilitating high-quality mentoring relationships; (2) associations among youth's presenting needs, relationship quality, and outcomes; and (3) program practices leading to stronger, more impactful relationships. Throughout, we highlight and expand upon critical commentary from AJCP contributors, calling on the field to move away from paternalistic models that overly localize risk with youth and families without interrogating structural oppression. Our recommendations include: (1) centering critical consciousness, racial equity, and social justice in program curricula and mentor trainings; (2) respectfully engaging grassroots programs developed for and by communities of color that are underrepresented in research; (3) making meaningful efforts to recruit mentors from marginalized communities and removing barriers to their participation; and (4) examining youth's racial, ethnic, and other areas of identity development processes during mentoring.

Racial reckoning, resistance, and the revolution: A call to community psychology to move forward.

This article introduces a special issue of the American Journal of Community Psychology that features racial reckoning, resistance and the revolution in the context of a syndemic, the historical subjugation of communities of Color (COC) to racial hierarchies and the coronavirus (COVID-19). More specifically, this special issue underscores the need for community psychology and other allied disciplines to address this syndemic facing COC. The special issue delivers on the stories of the lived experiences from researchers and community members as it relates to COVID-19 and COC. Twelve articles are illuminated to challenge the field to create social change.

Looking back, moving forward: 50 years of the American Journal of Community Psychology.

The American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP) was founded in 1973 and has since its inception has been the flagship journal for the Society of Community Research and Action. AJCP publishes leading scholarship in community psychology and social action research. This special issue celebrates the 50 years of scholarship in AJCP by curating and assembling previously published articles in virtual special issues (VSIs) with accompanying commentaries. Nine VSIs were compiled as part of this special issue. Each of these VSIs were organized around themes that are of critical importance to community psychology and each VSI summarizes what has been learned from their included articles and future directions for the field. In this paper, we introduce this special issue on this collection of VSIs, discussing how each of these VSIs endeavor to push the field forward.

Self-help/mutual aid groups for health and psychosocial problems: Key features and their perspectives in the 21st century.

In this virtual special issue, a set of 26 papers previously published in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP), focused on self-help/mutual aid groups (SH/MAGs), are being curated given their significant impact in this domain. SH/MAGs constitute an important component of the community psychology's proposal to address various psychosocial and health problems. The American Journal of Community Psychology has played an important role in exploring the characteristics of self-help/mutual aid groups in various fields. These articles cover important areas of the study of self-help/mutual-aid groups. More specifically, the selected articles address issues such as the definition and key characteristics of self-help/mutual aid groups, the main fields that are applied, such as mental health, addictions, and disabilities. The article also addresses important issues such as the place of self-help/mutual aid groups in health systems, the experiential knowledge generated within these groups and the relationship of health professionals with these groups. The aim is this VSI to contribute to contemporary discussion on self-help/mutual aid groups, their challenges, and their perspectives and to highlight the crucial role that community psychology has in this field.

The work experiences and needs of lone community psychologists: Exploring diversity of settings and identities.

Community psychologists (CPs) are committed to value-based praxis, an interdisciplinary orientation, and an ecological approach to community collaboration in pursuit of social justice and liberation. Because no setting is immune to the impacts of the intersecting systems of oppression in which we are embedded, CPs end up working in a wide array of settings, and often as the only CP in the setting. This dynamic-operating as a "lone" CP-may be rewarding as the CP is able to provide unique value at work, or may present specific challenges, particularly if the CP's sense of community or mattering is compromised. We interviewed n = 31 lone CP to explore their work experiences, including the benefits, challenges, and what they need to thrive in their current setting. Findings reveal a wide array of experiences among CPs, related to their community psychology, and other identities. Participants consistently discussed the important role of values in their decision-making and experiences at work, and provide specific recommendations as to how the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA) can ensure all CPs across all settings can thrive. This includes providing more tangible and relational support, changing SCRA's culture and priorities, and improving community psychology undergraduate and graduate training.