With the endorsement of the American Psychological Society (https://www.scra27.org/what-we-do/what-community-psychology/critical-community-psychology/), the publication of the second edition of Critical Community Psychology: Critical Action and Social Change (Kagan et al., 2019) and the global tendency amongst community psychologists to preface the term ‘community psychology’ with the term ‘critical’, whilst leaving theory and practice unchanged, ‘critical community psychology” has become the new orthodoxy.
The compatibility of qualitative research methods with first community psychology then ‘critical community psychology’ has also long been taken for granted. For example, the abstract of Critical Community Psychology and Qualitative Research: A Conversation by Nelson and Evans (2014) described the article as: “a conversation between two critical community psychologists about the compatibility and theoretical connections between their field and qualitative research”.
But does use of the term ‘critical’ as a prefix to ‘community psychology’ have no problematic metatheoretical implications for theory of method? This symposium will argue that it does!
Presenter 1 will argue that the critical project must engage radically with methodology and will explicate some challenges which emerge at the intersection of critical theory and theory-of-method i.e. critical methodology. A crucial element explicated will be the replacement for critical theorists of the modernist preoccupation with the philosophical discourse of epistemology by the critical history and sociology of knowledge and in particular inescapable regimes of truth within which no more can be done knowledge-wise, even / especially by critical scholars, than giving claims the status of truth, giving interlocking ‘truthed’ claims the status of knowledge and giving knowledged-how practices the status of evidence-based-practices within a historically contingent and non-necessary truthing-regime. A second crucial element explicated will be the replacement of the modernist stable, unitary, rational subject, whether the subject be the one being researched or the subject doing research, by the critical concept of the constituted subject in a perpetual flux of reconstitution.
Presenter 2 will focus on the presenter’s research which utilised ethnography and post-structural interview analysis, underpinned theoretically by the Foucauldian notion of the ‘apparatus’, to study the daily practices of activation in an employment services provider in a large urban Australian city. Having concluded that contemporary governmentality studies, which claim to present potential new pathways to avoid ‘reading off discourse’, actually (re)inscribed problematic notions of the ‘self’, the presenter will describe efforts to overcome these problems whilst in the process highlighting epistemic, ethical and political implications of the enactment of critical qualitative research methods in these spaces.
Presenter 3 will focus upon the presenter’s research which attempted to connect everyday social action with regards to, so-called, ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’ to a multitude of influencing historical social, institutional, political, and economic factors that played a role in conditioning the possibility of these everyday practices enact-able, utilising critical ethnography and Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian theory. Again, there was tension between mainstream ethnographic methods and Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian theory guiding their deployment in the field. Presenter 3 will discuss the use of rhizomatic ‘movement’ in a reconstructed discursive field as means of engaging with the tension.