Concepts of Social Justice in Community Psychology: Toward a Social Ecological Epistemology

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R. Fondacaro ◽  
Darin Weinberg
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret I. Davis ◽  
Josefina Alvarez ◽  
Carmen Curtis ◽  
Lucia D'Arlach ◽  
Joseph Ferrari ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 526-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flora Cornish ◽  
Catherine Campbell ◽  
Cristián Montenegro

The field of community psychology has for decades concerned itself with the theory and practice of bottom-up emancipatory efforts to tackle health inequalities and other social injustices, often assuming a consensus around values of equality, tolerance and human rights. However, recent global socio-political shifts, particularly the individualisation of neoliberalism and the rise of intolerant, exclusionary politics, have shaken those assumptions, creating what many perceive to be exceptionally hostile conditions for emancipatory activism. This special thematic section brings together a diverse series of articles which address how health and social justice activists are responding to contemporary conditions, in the interest of re-invigorating community psychology’s contribution to emancipatory efforts. The current article introduces our collective conceptualisation of these ‘changing times’, the challenges they pose, and four openings offered by the collection of articles. Firstly, against the backdrop of neoliberal hegemony, these articles argue for a return to community psychology’s core principle of relationality. Secondly, articles identify novel sources of disruptive community agency, in the resistant identities of nonconformist groups, and new, technologically-mediated communicative relations. Thirdly, articles prompt a critical reflection on the potentials and tensions of scholar-activist-community relationships. Fourthly, and collectively, the articles inspire a politics of hope rather than of despair. Building on the creativity of the activists and authors represented in this special section, we conclude that the environment of neoliberal individualism and intolerance, rather than rendering community psychology outdated, serves to re-invigorate its core commitment to relationality, and to a bold and combative scholar-activism.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Bennett

Transformations towards sustainability are needed to address many of the earth’s profound environmental and social challenges. Yet, actions taken to deliberately shift social–ecological systems towards more sustainable trajectories can have substantial social impacts and exclude people from decision-making processes. The concept of just transformations makes explicit a need to consider social justice in the process of shifting towards sustainability. In this paper, we draw on the transformations, just transitions, and social justice literature to advance a pragmatic framing of just transformations that includes recognitional, procedural and distributional considerations. Decision-making processes to guide just transformations need to consider these three factors before, during and after the transformation period. We offer practical and methodological guidance to help navigate just transformations in environmental management and sustainability policies and practice. The framing of just transformations put forward here might be used to inform decision making in numerous marine and terrestrial ecosystems, in rural and urban environments, and at various scales from local to global. We argue that sustainability transformations cannot be considered a success unless social justice is a central concern.


Author(s):  
Four Arrows

This article offers recommendations for deepening and expanding the important ideas about social justice that are presented in the current CPED social justice framework for the EdD. One suggestion is to better articulate the fact that social justice is ultimately inseparable from ecological justice, sustainability and diversity. I also argue that it is best if the proposed framework’s reference to the knowledge economy include awareness of the possibility that it can be as destructive as a material-based one. Although the framework report does mention community as a target for social/ecological justice, sustainability and diversity (SEJSD), it tends to focus primarily on its application in education settings. This paper emphasizes a greater expansion of SEJSD into the world of social/ecological justice education. Finally, I suggest a foundation for CPED’s framework that includes “project-based learning” whereby work on the EdD program’s final project, whether a capstone or dissertation, start “from day one” and be the focal point for all coursework. Such a process, common in most International doctoral programs, will assure SEJSD and mastery of a chosen topic area are at the highest level of interdisciplinary and will help encourage the kind of praxis in the real world the EdD should require, especially in the Trumpian era we entered on January 20, 2017.


Author(s):  
Raul Espejo

In this chapter, the author proposes an enterprise complexity model (ECM), which is visualized as a methodology to achieve the distributed governance of an ecology of evolving enterprises. Governance is understood as guiding the enterprises self-organization towards policies creating, regulating, and producing products and services for society. Self-organization is grounded in the communications and interactions of stakeholders. The purpose of an ECM model is not institutional development but guiding, enabling and facilitating interactions of all kinds with the support of current and disruptive technologies to increase society's requisite variety to deal with social, ecological, and economic challenges. An enabling context helps the branching of the enterprises' creativity into all kinds of innovations, forms of coordination, and operational alignment of their interests. Quality of life, fairness, and social justice are the values driving this ecology of enterprises towards a deeper and wider appreciation of issues of social concern.


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