The destruction and distortion of particular knowledges, and their construction (see Fanon, 1963), casts colonised subjects as Other and ascribes to them dehumanising modes of being. Certainly, colonised peoples and their knowledge systems are rarely, if ever, able to sufficiently meet the ‘requirements of respectability’—or what is sometimes referred to as the master codes (Mbembe, 2001)—of a colonial world that is made largely in the image of wealthy, white, cisgendered, heterosexual, male able bodies. In this way, epistemic violence—the manner by which particular knowledge systems are arranged for the purposes of marginalising and subjugating particular groups (Spivak, 1988; Teo, 2018)—seeks to drain colonised subjects of autonomy and historical agency for purposes of control. Colonised peoples, subsuming all rendered as Other through historical and contemporary colonising forces, then become defined along colonial coordinates that afford them only partial humanism (see Said, 1978). However, the global history of popular resistance on the part of dominated peoples, which includes constructing alternative, liberatory knowledge-praxes, has demonstrated that systems of oppression, such as colonialism, are always incomplete attempts at full domination (Gordon, 2017). Through various politicised forms of resistance to foreclosed ways of knowing and being, understood as epistemic disobedience (see Mignolo, 2009), people can and have overcome seemingly omnipotent structures of domination.

Epistemic disobedience must be considered with respect to hegemonic knowledge-making spaces, such as the academy. In psychology, the discipline within which we are most dominantly situated, the revolutionary work of Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1963, 1967) ushered in what has been referred to as a decolonial turn (see Maldonado-Torres, 2017). Fanon’s work has been especially influential in the conceptualisations and enactments of certain psychologies, typically critical in orientation. Yet, mainstream psychology remains characterised by Euro-American-centrism, conservative individualism, false claims to an apolitical orientation, and a neoliberal agenda (Seedat & Suffla, 2017). Dominant psychologies thus remain tethered to coloniality, that is, existing systems of power that act to maintain colonial relations of exploitation and domination well after the period of ‘classic colonialism’ (see Maldonado-Torres, 2017). Even (critical) community psychologies—themselves a response to oppressive mainstream psychologies—have, in recent years, been increasingly institutionalised and largely denuded of their liberatory impulse (see Yen, 2008).

By examining a particular moment of community-driven epistemic disobedience, it is the purpose of this chapter to explore reflexively some of the tensions, regressions, contradictions and unevenness, as well as the creativities and imaginations, that are inherent to the ways in which critical community psychologies, and their numerous institutional restraints, approach decoloniality. Certainly, decolonising iterations of critical community psychologies, which attempt to remain vigilant to currents of epistemic violence in the field, do not discredit their own existence, but instead strive to constantly resist their disciplinary predispositions towards coloniality. We, therefore, propose that critical community psychologies commit to a relevant, historically sensitive mode of decoloniality that connects to other sites of civil, ideological, political and social struggle. Simultaneously, critical community psychologies are obliged to engage in the difficult, yet crucial, task of considering reflexively their liberatory ambiguities, which frequently act to reinscribe coloniality in different ways. Following this, we might begin to imagine critical community psychologies that are aware of and resist their disciplinary complicity in the coloniality of knowledge, power and being. These psychologies may also facilitate innovative and democratic means of envisioning, articulating and—most importantly—deploying decolonising knowledges for the purposes of psychosocial liberation (Fanon, 1967), and challenging colonial conceptualisations of justice (see Gordon, 2017).

Psychologies and the Decolonial Turn

In his book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1967) demonstrates that the foundations of colonised peoples’ collective psychological anguish are not to be located exclusively in individual psyches. Rather, such anguish is to be expected when one lives in a world structured by coloniality, wherein one’s very being is perceived as a kind of anti-social violence towards normative colonial structures and conceptions of respectability (Gordon, 2017). Fanon (1967) thus asserts that a decolonising psychology will support colonised subjects in uncovering the societal connections to their psychological well-being and foster among them the decolonial attitude imperative to remaking a world in which their humanity is recognised and cherished (Maldonado-Torres, 2017). Through the fostering of a decolonial attitude, psychology’s decolonial turn therefore strives to unhinge various available modes of being, power and knowledge from systems of coloniality. In this way, if we are to consider coloniality as the dismemberment of a colonised people from their consciousness, history, land, memory, being, the body, and fellow colonised subjects (see Ngũgĩ wa, 2009), then a decolonising psychology must look to establishing a collective re-memberment in the service of psychosocial emancipation.

Underscoring this conception of a decolonising psychology is an awareness that coloniality is not a conclusive or closed system and can be, as has been the case throughout history, resisted by movements that seek to critique and transform. It would then appear that the decolonial attitude is always alert to the fact that colonialism is only an attempted erasure of people’s agency and humanity (see Gordon, 2017), through, for example, imposing closed systems of organised knowledge—such as fixed identity categories—on to people in order to predetermine their ways of being and knowing (see Fanon, 1963; Oyěwùmí, 1997).

While community psychologies, specifically, are a response to some of the inadequacies of mainstream psychologies, not all forms of community psychology are critical and those that are, are not by definition also decolonising. We contend that a decolonising community psychology is one that is marked by a sharp criticality, characterised by emancipatory consciousness, knowledges and praxes.

In May 1965, the Boston Conference on the Education of Psychologists for Community Mental Health, held in Swampscott, Massachusetts (United States) advocated a proactive, prevention and strengths-orientated approach to extending psychological services to vulnerable and disenfranchised populations (Viola & Glantsman, 2017). Today, this conference, usually referred to as the Swampscott Conference, is widely understood as having disciplinarily officiated community psychology in the United States. However, there have been numerous criticisms levelled at the Swampscott Conference (e.g., Fryer, 2008; Seedat & Suffla, 2017) for instituting an apolitical, unreflexive and somewhat myopic conception of community psychology, wholly uncritical of the very construct of ‘community’, the capitalist system in which communities are forged (Coimbra et al., 2012), as well as the unequal power relations intrinsic to enactments of community psychology. Furthermore, early iterations of community psychology in the US tended to overlook more radical, anti-capitalist articulations of community psychology throughout Latin America (see Gokani, 2011). During the 1970s, however, community psychology work began employing an increasingly critical approach than that envisioned at Swampscott, referencing itself against political repression, bourgeois government policy, complacent mainstream psychologies, and the globalised exclusion of vulnerable populations from apparatuses and systems of power (Fryer, 2008; Yen, 2008).

With specific reference to South Africa, the location from which we offer this contribution, critical community psychologies emerged in the late 1980s, forming part of the popular resistance to the turbulent psychosocial landscape instituted and maintained by the oppressive apartheid State. Today, South African critical community psychologies have accrued institutional recognition and legitimacy. Notwithstanding, they have also had much of their liberatory impulse subdued (Yen, 2008), recast to suit or—at best—antagonise only minimally, the arrangements of a neoliberal capitalist global ordering (Seedat & Suffla, 2017).

Decolonising Critical Community Psychologies

The fostering of decolonial attitudes is not requisite of even the most committedly critical enactments of community psychology. In this way, critical community psychology is certainly not impervious to the shifting ebb and flow of coloniality and may in fact, contradictorily, even serve to acclimatise people to particular social norms, rather than promote the conditions by which to resist and remake these norms and their governing master codes. For example, community psychologists played a role in pacifying resistance to both neoliberal austerity in 1970s Britain and the second Intifada in Palestine during the early 2000s (Coimbra et al., 2012). We would, therefore, do well to heed Gordon’s (2017) insistence that conceptions and applications of justice are not exempt from the urgency of decolonisation. Critical community psychologists who seek to decolonise their work, along with the forms of justice that they endeavour to promote, must engage with a range of social actors, as well as reflect on and trouble their own collusion with the coloniality of being, power and knowledge.

There is an increasing scholarly focus on the revitalisation of the decolonial turn in psychology, including, in many instances, critical community psychologies. Specifically, in the introduction to the Special Issue of the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Adams et al. (2015) outline three central approaches to decolonising psychological praxis: indigenisation, denaturalisation and accompaniment. Expanding on each of these praxes in a subsequent article, contained in the Special Issue of the South African Journal of Psychology, Adams et al. (2017) argue that although they conceptualise each of these approaches as discrete, they typically do not manifest as such in one’s decolonising engagements. Further, these approaches are not absolutely or immanently decolonising in and of themselves. Instead, it is how they connect to wider struggles and forms of resistance that exemplify their decolonising aspirations. We would also add that the three approaches do not speak comprehensively to the complexities and messiness of community engagement and decolonising work, both of which call for critical forms of compassionate and sustained activism. Below, we provide a brief outline of these three approaches.

Indigenisation

Indigenisation is concerned primarily with dominant epistemic arrangements. It sees researchers and practitioners attempt to (re)claim indigenous wisdom in order to produce knowledge forms that are more suited to particular communities’ realities, thereby serving them better than the kinds of Euro-American-centric knowledges that are frequently imposed by mainstream psychologies. It follows then that in taking seriously and normalising indigenous knowledges, indigenisation highlights the inability of apparently universal mainstream psychologies to serve all people. Yet, indigenisation remains highly community-specific in its scope and risks essentialising cultural knowledges by collapsing into an attempt to identify and romanticise ‘authentic’ indigenous knowledges, without problematising these knowledges (Adams et al., 2015).

Denaturalisation

Denaturalisation encompasses a contextually sensitive re-thinking of that which is posited as natural—including the coloniality of being, power and knowledge—by mainstream psychologies and broader hegemonic formulations of social science, as well as numerous master codes. Denaturalisation does, however, risk ignoring issues of direct and/or structural violence by focusing predominantly on epistemic violence (Adams et al., 2015). Further, there lies the danger of not connecting denaturalisation processes to other political struggles for social justice, thereby limiting its change-making capacities (see Gordon, 2017).

Accompaniment

In seeking to acknowledge the experiences of others and make possible new forms of interaction (Sacipa et al., 2007), accompaniment is defined, broadly, as an encounter between people from a given community and community psychologists—who are, generally, outsiders to the community—with the ultimate goal of constructing liberatory knowledges and praxes (Rodríguez et al., 2009). In rearranging the conventional relationship between researcher/therapist and participant/patient, accompaniment fosters a mutual being and sharing, which concludes only once a predetermined task has been completed, irrespective of whether such completion takes place within the confines of a specific project. In this way, researchers lend what expertise they can to those fighting coloniality so that, in standing alongside others, feeling and action occur together in the service of social action (Adams et al., 2015; Sacipa et al., 2007). There are, of course, myriad limitations to accompaniment. For instance, beyond a somewhat hollow acknowledgement, it is difficult to navigate the fact that the accompaniers are usually privileged outsiders who set the terms of accompaniment, its duration, as well as when it is to be initiated and concluded (Watkins, 2015). Accompaniers may also fall into the ‘saviour’ trope that characterises so much community work, wherein power imbalances are used for self-gratifying purposes (Adams et al., 2015).

Considering these three approaches and their stated limitations, we argue that one of the central imperatives for decolonising critical community psychologies is the fostering of a reflexive stance towards the compound pursuit of the social justice ideals to which critical community psychologies commits. As Fanon’s (1963, 1967) work reminds us, this includes a consciousness about colonial and colonising designations of humanness. Maldonado-Torres (2016) elaborates that living in the zone of being (see Fanon, 1967) implies recognition of “one’s status as a full human being with a broad range of potentials and possibilities” (p. 13), whereas living in the zone of non-being denotes “not only that one is not meant to have easy access to basic means of existence, but also that it is normal for everything and everyone, including oneself, to questions [sic] one’s humanity” (p. 13). Community psychology, with its ability to construct that which constitutes ‘normativity’, the ‘pathological’ and even ‘community’ (Coimbra et al., 2012), holds the potential to signify that which is superior, human and socially respectable (see Grosfoguel et al., 2015), and therefore must at all times be considered in relation to zones of being and non-being.

Here, it is important to be cognisant of the positionalities of community psychologists themselves. Indeed, it the case that certainly, black community psychologists, for example, are positioned within zones of non-being. However, most psychologists, by virtue of their proximity to the discipline of psychology and its institutional embeddedness, are enmeshed within a practice that has historically configured, constituted and supported zones of being and non-being. Community psychologists who seek to interrogate critically the coloniality of knowledge and society therefore do so incompletely if they do not at the same time consider the discipline as well as themselves in relation to zones of being and non-being. It is thus through a continuous, critical and reflexive interrogation that we may begin to imagine liberating being, epistemologies and humanism from predetermined colonial zones.

The Ebb and Flow of (De)coloniality: A Reflexive Analysis

As a means of demonstrating the complexity inherent to the fostering of decolonial attitudes within critical community psychologies, we offer in this section an instance of community-driven epistemic disobedience that exemplifies the uneven terrain within which we find ourselves.

Context

For approximately two decades, residents from a South African township, located in the southern region of Johannesburg, have worked on numerous intervention projects with critical community psychologists from the research institute to which we are affiliated, the Institute for Social and Health Sciences (ISHS) at the University of South Africa and its Masculinity and Health Research Unit, co-directed by the South African Medical Research Council. Established in the 1980s, this particular community constitutes predominantly shack dwellings that are inhabited by South Africans as well as foreign nationals, most of whom identify as black. Although the community registers relatively high rates of crime, violence and unemployment (Statistics South Africa, 2011), residents have expressed dissatisfaction at being characterised within media reports and popular discourses by these descriptors exclusively, recalling colonial constructions of an Other who is to be managed and read solely on the terms set by these constructions (see Said, 1978). The community also has a rich history of social activism, such as petitioning and protest action, which has, at times, been met with violence from State actors.

Rather than episodic, brief and/or resource-dependent interventions, much of the critical community psychology work that takes place in this community strives for a sustained engagement that fosters a culture of safety and just peace within the community. Frequently drawing on innovative methodologies that, at different moments and to varying degrees, move between denaturalisation, indigenisation and accompaniment, much of our work in this community focuses on violence and injury prevention, safety and peace promotion, the privileging of subaltern voices, speaking back to dominant meta-narratives and epistemic violence, structural resistances and community cohesion. In practice, this sees community members drawing on a host of creative methodological and distributive procedures that strive towards collective mobilisation, speaking back to dominant State actors and the collective articulation of desired systemic changes. Although the work endeavours to intersect with and inform existing modes of grassroots activism, it must be conceded that institutional constraints, such as funding preclusions to address directly the immediate material conditions of the community, have limited our own capacities to support community-led activist efforts. It is, therefore, essential that the work is continuously evaluated and reconstituted through dialogical community feedback.

Scope

In attempting to complicate the simplistic, reductionist manner by which violence is frequently understood by mainstream community psychologies, our current interventions include several projects that cohere to facilitate social change at multiple levels. Taken as a whole, the work seeks to address three central dimensions of violence, each of which interlocks with the other in complex ways. First, direct violence—on which many mainstream community psychologies are usually focused—is understood against Galtung’s (1990) well-known conception, where it is defined as the physical and/or psychological violence that occurs between individuals or groups. Second, structural violence is contained within numerous intersecting systems that sustain disadvantage over certain communities and population groups (Galtung, 1969). Finally, epistemic violence, which forms the focus of this chapter, and as indicated earlier, refers to the marginalising capabilities of dominant knowledge systems (Spivak, 1988; Teo, 2018).

Although the scope of this work undoubtedly renders it a form of critical community psychology, we accept that it is only a partial signification of our decolonising praxis. By conceptualising the various ways by which the interlocking manifestations of direct, structural and epistemic violence sustain and legitimise structures of coloniality, and how such coloniality can be resisted, we are continually challenged to centre the Fanonian decolonial turn in our work. Below, we offer our interpretation of a moment of community-driven epistemic disobedience that was enacted at an event hosted by the ISHS for the community. We focus on this exemplar in order to demonstrate: how critical community psychology work can reinscribe the coloniality of knowledge, power and being; the importance of our own reflexive engagement throughout decolonising work; and the complex decolonising potentialities and regressions inherent to epistemic disobedience and its interpretation.

Community-Driven Epistemic Disobedience

On 6 December 2016, an annual event was held at the ISHS office in Johannesburg to acknowledge the community with which we collaborate, review the research activities for that year and jointly assess the year’s successes and challenges. Furthermore, several community-based groups were invited to discuss activities in which they had been involved that year. The event, therefore, harnessed the university’s discursive and material resources to officiate a formal, ceremonial and institutionally sanctioned interaction with the community. Importantly, the event was conceptualised as an enactment of relational accountability, which represents meaningful and ethical engagements with community partners in research (see Reich et al., 2017). This also entails a critical stance that is attentive to the relational dynamics inherent to the research encounter and the respective accountabilities of the actors concerned.

With staff members seated at the front of the room and community members and representatives at the back, the Head of the ISHS (the third author of this chapter) began his address, which was intended to inaugurate the event. However, as he began to speak, he was interrupted by a well-known member of the community, who is also recognised as a key community leader. It soon became clear that the interruption was not to be a brief remark, but a premeditated counter-inauguration of sorts. After greeting both staff and community members in his—and much of the community’s—first language (thereby symbolically and literally ushering in the very ‘community voice’ that the event acknowledged, but did not accommodate sufficiently), the community member presented the Head with a small clay pot, or calabash, known as an ukhamba . The community leader explained that the ukhamba represented an acknowledgement of the ISHS on behalf of the community and that it was to be received by the Head on behalf of the Institute on the basis that he is both its leader and a male-bodied individual. Despite the Head’s insistence that the ISHS as a collective should accept the ukhamba , the community leader asserted repeatedly that it was to be given to the male Head.

Retrospectively, considering the event’s initial constitution from a critical standpoint, it may be said that the event sought to consciously mobilise the university’s status, as well as its cultural, social and financial capital so that the event was established, self-referentially, as ‘important’ and to be taken seriously by both university staff and community members (the latter presumed as guests). The presentation of the ukhamba disturbed this particular arrangement of power between the researchers and the community, instituting a form of epistemic disobedience. When elaborating and building on understandings of the complicated and uneven contours along which decolonising praxes lie, such moments of epistemic disobedience that emerge from outside zones of being cannot be overlooked by researchers.

First, the presentation of the ukhamba at this moment must be located both culturally and temporally. In traditional isiZulu cultural practice, the ukhamba—a vertical, oval-shaped vessel, approximately 20–25 cm in height with a flat base and wide mouth (Fowler, 2006)—is utilised for serving, drinking, preparing, transporting and/or storing homemade beer as well as, albeit less frequently, medicine (Jolles, 2005). Although commercialised to an extent (it is sold as a decorative item to consumers outside of its cultural base), the ukhamba is an artefact that represents everyday or ceremonial cultural practice. In this way, it is inscribed with a plethora of meanings which become especially charged as we engage with this moment of epistemic disobedience.

In reading critically this moment, we also consider the ontological position of the disruptive subject, that is, the community member who presented the ukhamba , functioning here as a disruptive object. Throughout his time working with the ISHS, this particular community member has been open in his critique of many of our community intervention projects. Although we are not always in agreement with the form and content of his resistance, and given that limited work has been undertaken on community resistances to community psychology work, his dissenting voice is always encouraged and, where possible, provided with the requisite communicative platform. His frequent embodiment of the ‘disruptive actor’ role moves between centring the community and a centring of the self, and disturbing binaries between the two to problematic and progressive effects. However, in this particular instance, although he—as a single subject—handed over the ukhamba , he was insistent that the community, and not himself, be acknowledged in its display. In this way, he ensured that the legacy that the ukhamba signified was to be one characterised by an insurgence of community-driven voice, rather than individualised disruption.

As mentioned previously, in attempting to reify the perceived successes of numerous community projects, many of which were framed theoretically as both critical and decolonising, the event drew on the status and the resources of the university, an institution characterised by coloniality and, increasingly, a neoliberal agenda. Certainly, university spaces have been shown to subscribe to a regime of hegemonic knowledge-making and epistemic violence (see Campbell, 2011), much of which mimics dictums of coloniality that distort, disfigure and destroy the representations of colonised peoples (see Fanon, 1963). Indeed, for their participation in different projects, various community members were scheduled to receive certificates of acknowledgement which, in themselves, signify a kind of neoliberal metric of excellence within the university. By setting the terms of engagement within this space that sought to acknowledge what is clearly an incomplete conception of community members, we, as representatives of the university, may very well have limited the range of channels of agency and autonomy available to community members. The disruptive introduction of the ukhamba therefore came to insert and centre community voice within the university space—a re-memberment of sorts (see Ngũgĩ wa, 2009). Introducing the ukhamba into this moment shifted focus away from certificates and neoliberal metrics, towards regard, respect and—as was revealed to the Head in subsequent conversations with this community member—a form of epistemic justice that was located in African cultural practice. In this way, the community members did not simply introduce their voices temporarily within zones of being; rather, their interruption disturbed the very logic by which the existence of these zones is predicated, destabilising as well as exposing colonialities of power which, to function effectively, must take on symbolic, hidden formulations. This visibilising and partial reconstitution of the discursive contours of coloniality inscribed on to this space served to remind us that our decolonising work must push back against the very structures in which it is located and through which it finds expression. In short, this brief moment of epistemic disobedience demonstrates that decoloniality must challenge the coloniality written into the content, process and social actors pertinent to the spatio-discursive positions occupied by critical community psychologists.

In subjecting our work to a form of reflexive, decolonising critique, we examine this disruptive moment with reference to Adams et al.’s (2015) three modalities of decolonising psychological science. While we recognise that Adams et al. (2015) offered their conceptualisation with specific reference to approaches to decolonisation in psychological science, we find their contribution to be nonetheless a useful framework for analysing the micro-level elements of decolonising praxis, as encapsulated within a single moment of epistemic disobedience. Importantly, in our analysis, we understand that this framework does not sufficiently capture the complexities inherent to decolonising practice, but is nonetheless useful when interpreted as an interacting, shifting and disordered hermeneutic lens to interrogate (de)colonial praxes in critical community psychologies.

In considering indigenisation, the presentation of the ukhamba , its cultural signification and its spatio-temporal meaning within this setting centred—or indigenised—marginalised knowledge forms within the university’s hegemonic, epistemically violent and Euro-American-centric knowledge-making space. The space was then reconstructed to acknowledge ‘alternative’ knowledge forms which are typically muted or distorted under the university’s subscription to the coloniality of knowledge.

The spatial arrangement of the event and the manner by which it configured the knowledge-making and agentic capabilities of community members is particularly germane to considerations of denaturalisation. The room in which the event was held was arranged in a manner that situated most of the university staff at the front, a position from where they were able to address the audience. By interrupting the proceedings, the presentation of the ukhamba dislocated the geographies of power implicit to the ceremony’s spatial arrangement. In this way, the interjection of community voice denaturalised the functioning of particular master codes by exposing concealed dynamics of power, rendering their very constitution arbitrary, that is, not normal or natural.

In addition to exposing the event’s imbedded hierarchical structure, the interposition from the community member acted to undermine somewhat this unequal spatio-discursive arrangement. A levelling of this sort may be read as a kind of accompaniment, whereby the dominant meta-narrative was remade along lines of mutuality and inclusion. Indeed, the event’s aim of acknowledging the community was not wholly rejected; rather, the coordinates by which it attempted to do this were recast along engagement lines characterised by more of a dialogical exchange than was communicated through the opening of the event. In moving between each mode of decolonisation, participants enacted a kind of epistemic disobedience that did not wholly disregard our knowledge-making projects, but inserted their agency within it, thus transforming and partially decolonising it. While perhaps not a complete or full enactment of accompaniment, the presentation of the ukhamba allowed community members to momentarily move alongside researchers.

Finally, in appreciating the complexities of decolonising praxes, we may turn our attentions to the community member’s insistence that the Head as a leader and as a male-bodied subject was to receive the ukhamba . Decolonising conceptions of justice (see Gordon, 2017) entail nuanced, contextually sensitive discussions that endeavour to conscientise all parties, rather than impose the hermeneutic lens of, for example, an imperial feminism (see Amos & Parmar, 1984) on to the knowledge, power and being of one party. Therefore, although we attempted to implement a flat, ‘gender neutral’ structure in our receiving of the ukhamba , it became clear that it was to be the male leader that was to receive it on behalf of the ISHS. Our terms of engagement were resisted in this sense. Rather than assuming an essentialised interpretation of gendered performances, common to many Western bourgeois feminisms, we remain mindful that African feminisms resist monolithic representations of gendered enactments that tend to yield static and often oppressive readings of socio-cultural relations of the Other. As such, we continue to engage with undoubtedly gendered moments such as these through ongoing conversations with community members, who both critique and support community social justice efforts that are explicitly and implicitly undergirded by patriarchal assumptions and practices. It is through situated and participatory analyses that we may then develop gender equitable praxes that are sensitive to the “myriad gender relations, practices and identities in Africa” (Lewis, 2001 p. 4), while at the same time remain critical of patriarchal practice. All of this serves to remind that decolonisation is a project as much about race, as it is about gender, as it is about everyday enactments, and as it is about a host of organised knowledge systems. Accordingly, decoloniality must assume expansive approaches to liberation.

Concluding Remarks

Almost 60 years after Frantz Fanon’s death, the decolonial turn in psychology remains as urgent and relevant as ever. In this chapter, we grapple with the complexities of revitalising the decolonial turn in critical community psychology by reflecting on a moment of community-driven epistemic disobedience within the university, a setting that has traditionally been typified by coloniality and epistemic violence. We examine this moment not as a means of positing reflexivity as a decolonising end in and of itself, but rather to present the insidiousness of coloniality even within work that strives towards decoloniality. In this way, we also pronounce the importance that epistemic disobedience serves within the project of decolonisation.

Following our reflexive analysis, albeit a single moment interpreted through a decolonising lens, we suggest that our reading is instructive for the contributions of critical community psychologists whose liberatory praxes seek to transform knowledge arrangements and institutionalised practices, expose the ubiquity of coloniality and uncover the imprints of power that characterise our disciplinary and ontological positions. While it is not our intention here to offer formulaic recommendations, we encourage critical community psychologists to undertake what Teo (2018) refers to as meta-reflexivity. In our context, meta-reflexivity functions to problematise the social and epistemological order and entails reflecting on and assessing how, or if, community-engaged work appreciates the project of decoloniality. While meta-reflexivity requires that critical community psychologists continually challenge themselves and one another, we argue that the transformatory potential of the meta-reflexive process is enhanced considerably in and through the interpersonal and inter-subjective context inherent to our engagements with communities.

In this chapter, we examine a particular event, as well as the manner by which it was disrupted—neither of which was entirely decolonising in its constitution. Yet, considered together, both demonstrate the deep-seated complexities of decolonisation, which are not always identified by actors of decolonisation themselves. Instead of dismissing or revering in absolute terms moments such as these, we argue that they should be placed under dialectical scrutiny; that is, we should perceive them as moving between decoloniality and coloniality, sometimes simultaneously. In heeding these moments, we may gain greater insights into how better to enhance the decolonising potentialities of our work. The presentation of the ukhamba as a decolonising insurgence of community voice should not be interpreted as a pure or perfect kind of decolonising praxis. Rather, it may be considered as a means of understanding the uneven grounds of decolonisation, and as a platform through which to explore the role of epistemic disobedience—as well as (meta-)reflexivity—in challenging, reformulating and dismantling zones of being and non-being within and beyond critical community psychologies.