Using the “third eye” to promote community wellbeing: A photovoice study

African Americans face the brunt of the obesity epidemic in the United States largely due to the multi-level barriers such as structural racism, poverty, and living in under resourced communities that impede their ability to attain a sustainable healthy lifestyle. Despite these barriers, there are many existing and potential assets in their communities that are too often overlooked in traditional research due to its tendency to use a deficit approach. Methods developed in the global south that focuses on empowerment and participatory action informs the design of this research. Using a participatory framework, African American residents identified and captured images of things, people, and places in their communities that highlighted existing assets and barriers to wellbeing within their environment. Nine community residents received training in the photovoice method and were provided with cameras. Additionally, residents participated in focus groups where they presented and assigned meaning and context to their images. The main findings are that community residents were activated by the captured images indicating how their daily encounters within their built environment severely limits their ability to be physically active and obtain healthy, inexpensive food. Residents provided many innovative suggestions for how potential assets could be repurposed. Findings were presented by the residents at a community event with key stakeholders in hopes of laying the groundwork to identify actionable steps to create culturally relevant and sustainable solutions to promote healthy living. Critical reflection on their built environment through the lens of a camera provided an effective means for mobilisation to promote community well-being.

Microgrants: An effective and empowering approach to creating a landscape change

Significant oral health disparities exist in the United States and reducing these disparities is a major goal for many health promoting organisations. Paradoxically, many within health promoting organisations including the general public would not immediately consider oral health as a major health disparities concern. However, there are significant oral health disparities experienced especially amongst those who are low-income, uninsured, underinsured, as well as those with insurance who cannot afford dental co-pays. Addressing this disparity requires academics to foster alliances with community organisations to develop in-depth local knowledge of barriers and to build capacity for advocacy for oral health integration with overall health. The goal of this current study was to empower local organisations to design their own oral health agenda focusing on education, policy and advocacy applicable to their cultural context. To support their work, an academic-community partnership was developed and provided microgrant funding to nine community organisations over the past three years. These micrograntees have been instrumental in changing the landscape of oral health in their local district. Activities have ranged from designing their own educational materials, training residents as oral health champions, conducting “house chats” in homes; and meeting with legislators to advocate for equitable oral health policies. These micrograntees are now either leading or deeply integrated in several oral health efforts at the local and statewide level. Universities providing microgrants to local organisations is a highly effective approach to fostering alliances that are empowering and results in the emergence of local knowledge, advocacy and integration of oral health as part of overall health.

Tension between Community Psychology and Social Policies: Analysis of three programs

Within the framework of the academic and professional link between Community Psychology and social policies. Expanded in the context of social policy approaches such as Social Risk Management, Capabilities and Rights Perspective, also crossed with the debates in Latin America on the State-citizenship relationship. This work is placed in the academic discussion of complexity, complementarity and risks in the disciplinary effects of the link between Community Psychology and Social Policies.

The configuration of the psychologist's technical field in social policies is analyzed in the Chilean case. Using Grounded Theory and Policy Frames Analysis categories. With documentary analysis and individual interviews of political and technical agents of the design and implementation of three programs (towards extreme poverty, children in social risk and mental health of children), by means of descriptive, relational, axial and selective coding, the policy frames were identified as they build a problem and a solution integrating facts, values, theories and interests.

The results show that each policy is configured and transformed according to socio-political positions presented in the multiple actors, with a clear and direct impact on intervention strategies and the psychologist's technical field in each program. In this(setting), debates on the multidimensionality of poverty, social risk management and focus on capacities, which define the understandings of the phenomena object (poverty and childhood), play a central role.

Thus, the technical definition of the psychologist's professional work is affected and modulated by the various policy frames that are part of the formulation of the policy, configuring technical norms that order and interpret the notions of reference of the program, which in turn mediate and modulate the emphases that define the professional tasks, in terms of their object, their objectives, the levels of intervention, the strategies, and the ways of interdisciplinary relationship.

Policing violent public protest in South Africa: Narratives of complex policing identities

Protests in South Africa are characterised by increasing violence, often involving clashes between the police, protestors. The effects of this violence extend beyond the immediate protest event, and have repercussions for community-police dynamics and trust more broadly, and subsequent community policing. Much of the extensive body of South African research on protests explores the narratives and constructions of protestors or community members living in areas with high levels of protest. However, little research has examined the perspectives and experiences of officers of the South African Police Service (SAPS) who are called to police protests. In this study, we conducted focus group discussions with SAPS officers who respond to protest in a low-income community in Gauteng Province, South Africa which is considered a “protest hotspot”. The focus groups were analysed drawing on Faull’s (2017) conceptual lens for understanding how South African police officers’ identities, and the kinds of police work enacted in community contexts, are shaped by the overlap and entanglement of personal, organisational and national narratives. Applied to the current study, this framework illuminated both affinities and dissonances in the police officers’ narratives of policing violent protest. The study revealed the complexity and fluidity of police identities and their relationship with the communities they serve, and how these are positioned spatially and temporally in relation to collective violence. Furthermore, the findings illustrated how the participants navigate their multiple identity positions to support and legitimise dominant organisational and national discourses on the policing of protest, while simultaneously configuring a sympathetic approach towards communities in their policing choices and enactments. This study offers insight into the construction of police officers’ identities, the dynamics of their interactions with protestors in the context of protest violence, and adds to the growing body of research seeking to understand protest violence.