(De)colonizing Culture in Community Psychology: Reflections from Critical Social Science

Since its inception, community psychology has been interested in cultural matters relating to issues of diversity and marginalization.
However, the field has tended to understand culture as static social markers or as the background for understanding group
differences. In this article the authors contend that culture is inseparable from who we are and what we do as social beings.
Moreover, culture is continually shaped by socio-historical and political processes intertwined within the globalized history
of power. The authors propose a decolonizing standpoint grounded in critical social science to disrupt understandings of cultural matters that marginalize others. This standpoint
would move the field toward deeper critical thinking, reflexivity and emancipatory action. The authors present their work
to illustrate how they integrate a decolonizing standpoint to community psychology research and teaching. They conclude that
community psychology must aim towards intercultural work engaging its political nature from a place of ontological/epistemological/methodological
parity.