Colonised minds and community psychology in the academy: Collaborative autoethnographic reflections

We reflect on decolonization and in particular the process of decolonizing our own minds. We discuss the need for radical decolonization of psychology and for critique of community psychology's relationship to both psychology and the Academy, noting ways in which community psychology itself becomes appropriated for the colonizing project of the Academy. Using collaborative autoethnography (CAE), a method that involves “collaborative poetics,” which chimes with the emphasis on participatory research in community psychology and the decolonialist emphasis on rescuing repressed epistemologies, we review our own careers and identify ways in which our values have been compromised and our work assimilated into wider colonizing and oppressive practices that sustain the modern university. We conclude that community psychology can only decolonize if it is positioned in an agonistic relationship to mainstream psychology and exists as a radical, explicitly political, and ethical practice outside the Academy. The message of the decolonization and disalienation movements is that the biggest barrier to our effectiveness, and to social justice, is the fascism of our minds. Succumbing to the power and privilege embedded in the Academy and the oppressive and colonizing practices that sustain it conflicts with community psychology's purported values.