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FriA09: Symposium |

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Room C209
Friday, June 26, 2020
10:45 AM - 11:45 AM

Presentation

Critical Solidarity and Community Psychology Praxes | Malherbe


Presenter(s)

Mr Nick Malherbe
University Of South Africa-South African Medical Research Council

Critical Solidarity and Community Psychology Praxes

10:45 AM - 11:45 AM

Abstract

Solidarity praxis is a critical resource in struggles against coloniality’s interlocking systems of oppression. However, enactments of solidarity from inside and outside community psychology are at risk of being deployed in the interests of maintaining inequalities and dominance, and atomising seemingly distinct experiences. This raises a number of dilemmas and questions about the practices and politics of solidarity, with tension inherent to connecting - rather than artificially segregating - different peoples and struggles. Critical articulations of solidarity highlight that solidarity relations are spaces in which privileges exist; that building, negotiating, and even transgressing relations across sites of colonial difference are integral to solidarity praxes. Solidarity engagements can challenge and break colonial orders of relations and of consciousness. Following this, and given community psychology’s proximity to coloniality and institutional power, we ask three questions: 1) how do we enact critical solidarity praxis in our work?; 2) in doing solidarity work, what are the ways in which we theorise, interrogate and disrupt our potential complicities in the production and maintenance of community psychology’s institutional power?; and 3) what are our ethics of care for scholars, practitioners, students, and activists at the frontlines of variously positioned, but interconnected struggles? In addressing each of these questions, the speakers’ presentations will be structured around the following topics: closing the gap on otherness in solidarity; border crossings and solidarity praxis; resisting settler colonialism in community work and in our relationships; and building solidarity through emancipatory methodologies; and the makings of solidarity through reflexivities of justice. The symposium presentations will be integrated through commentary and reflections from a discussant that both underline and trouble the expressions towards epistemic justice and emancipatory praxis underlying the different presentations. In this symposium, the speakers seek not to advance an understanding of solidarity per se, but rather to explore the very texture of solidaritous engagements in our work, in our relationships, and in our struggles, as well as what de-centering community psychology’s disciplinary locatedness means for how, where, and with whom we stand in solidarity.
Devin Atallah

Critical Solidarity and Community Psychology Praxes

10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
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Senior Lecturer Deanne Bell
Nottingham Trent University

Critical Solidarity and Community Psychology Praxes

10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
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Urmitapa Dutta
University of Massachusetts

Critical Solidarity and Community Psychology Praxes

10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Shose Kessi
University of Cape Town

Critical Solidarity and Community Psychology Praxes

10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Mohamed Seedat

Critical Solidarity and Community Psychology Praxes

10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Shahnaaz Suffla
University of South Africa & South African Medical Research Council

Critical Solidarity and Community Psychology Praxes

10:45 AM - 11:45 AM

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