Collectively and relationally, in this session we invite panelists and attendies to reflect critically upon our respective engagements with the decolonial turn (Maldonado-Torres, 2018) across our respective contexts and facets of our professional trajectories. Through these conversations, we engage with the decolonial turn from our respective positionalities. Because we understand the decolonial turn as an on-going process and project, which refers to the theoretical, methodological and epistemological contributions of Global South scholars toward the deconstruction of knowledge, power and being (Maldonado-Torres, 2018), we see value in forging space at international gatherings for critical conversations.
Building upon these prior gatherings, we propose an international innovative session that brings together panelists whose scholarship seeks to re-imagine and work toward decolonial critical community psychologies of the Global South. In this roundtable, panelists and audience members will consider questions about coloniality and its implications for community, research, and action. We will explore the implications of the resurgent decolonial turn from our respective contexts by responding to several interconnected questions, such as:
1. How does decolonial work diverge/converge with other critical projects in community and applied social psychology?
2. How can we create a space where we can engage dialogues on the decolonial turn?
3. What are the tensions/challenges between our values and decolonial orientation?
By attending to these questions the roundtable will push CP disciplinary regimes toward working new perspectives of the field, as well as adding to prior conversations on the decolonial turn. Decolonial epistemologies that honor and credit the body of scholarship from the Global South will strengthen the field as it strives toward intersectional, transnational, and transdisciplinary paradigms.