Seeking utopia: Psychologies' waves toward decoloniality.

This paper provides a review of empirical studies published with a decolonial epistemic approach in psychology. Our goal was to better understand how decolonial approaches are being practiced empirically in psychology, with an emphasis on community-social psychology. We first discuss the context of colonization and coloniality in the research process as orienting information.

Critical realism methodology as a guiding framework for interdisciplinary theory enrichment: Reflections on a study of empowerment.

Philosophy of science and ontological assumptions underpin our work as scholars, explicitly, or implicitly. In this paper, we develop empowerment theory with a critical realism (CR) lens. Through the example of a study of empowerment, we examine how can it be used as a guiding paradigm for research in community psychology (CP).

Promoting institutional change to support public psychology: Innovations and challenges at the University of California.

Community partnerships are vital for the co-production, implementation, and dissemination of practice- and policy-relevant research to advance public psychology. Particularly in "Research 1" universities, the institutional infrastructure, culture, and criteria for faculty advancement are often a mismatch for impactful community-partnered research. Past and current efforts by psychologists and others at the University of California (UC) seek to promote partnerships, infrastructure, and practices for faculty development and advancement that align excellence and impact in scholarship with advancing the public mission of the UC and its campuses.

"Being a team of five strong women… we had to make an impression:" The College Math Academy as an intervention into mathematics education.

This paper, a first-person account, describes a community psychology-aligned intervention into a precalculus mathematics class at an Hispanic Serving Research Institution. The intervention was designed because the standard precalculus mathematics class had a high failure rate, especially for Latinx students, which was serving as a barrier for declaration of a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics major. The high failure rate indicates a structural problem that requires a structural intervention.

Toward the democratization of knowledge: Using photovoice, social biography, and the "five whys" in YPAR with children.

We assessed if using a biographical method, social biography, alongside photovoice, and the Five Whys could facilitate critical dialogue in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) context. In a YPAR program, we added social biography to photovoice and the Five Whys during the problem definition phase. We coded ethnographic fieldnotes to examine the quality of critical discourse.

The Roles of Settings in Supporting Immigrants' Resistance to Injustice and Oppression: A Policy Position Statement by the Society for Community Research and Action: A Policy Statement by the Society for Community Research and Action: Division 27 of the American Psychological Association.

In 2018, in response to increasingly oppressive and widespread federal immigration enforcement actions in the United States (U.S.) and around the globe - including family separation, immigration raids, detention, deportation of people who have lived in the country for much of their lives - the Society for Community Research & Action produced a statement on the effects of deportation and forced separation on immigrants, their families, and communities (SCRA, 2018).

"Did I see what I really saw?" Violence, percepticide, and dangerous seeing after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid.

We use a violence framework to describe an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid, and the subsequent cultural and structural violence that played out in one community after the raid. First, we focus on testimonies given about the ICE raids at two city council meetings, compared with how the raids were characterized in the local paper. We document cultural and structural violence in the newspaper reporting, through ideology and narratives (as forms of cultural violence) and percepticide (as a form of structural violence).

Living on the Margins of Democratic Representation: Socially Connected Community Responsibility as Civic Engagement in an Unincorporated Area.

We examine the civic engagement processes and practices among Viva Live Oak! photovoice project participants residing in an unincorporated area with limited local democratic representation and institutional resources. Eight individual interviews and thirty-one group photovoice meetings were conducted, audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. We describe how social structures of unincorporation shaped community life, and how this unique context informed participants' civic engagement.

Sensitive Topics, Missing Data, and Refusal in Social Network Studies: An Ethical Examination.

We describe our ethics-driven process of addressing missing data within a social network study about accountability for racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, ableism, and other forms of oppression among social justice union organizers. During data collection, some would-be participants did not return emails and others explicitly refused to engage in the research. All refusals came from women of color.

This is Not a History Lesson; This is Agitation: A Call for a Methodology of Diffraction in US-Based Community Psychology.

Agitation, as deployed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), occurs when imaginations and curiosities are piqued, and self-interest is made visible. In this framework, agitation is a step in creating change. In this paper, I outline two agitations within US-based community psychology.

Considering Community Psychology Competencies: A Love Letter to Budding Scholar-Activists Who Wonder if They Have What It Takes.

Recently, community psychologists have re-vamped a set of 18 competencies considered important for how we practice community psychology. Three competencies are: (1) ethical, reflexive practice, (2) community inclusion and partnership, and (3) community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness. This paper will outline lessons I-a white working class woman academic-learned about my competency development through my research collaborations, using the lens of affective politics.

"A community with diversity of culture, wealth, resources, and living experiences": defining neighborhood in an unincorporated community.

To obtain a better understanding of how people living in an unincorporated region define their neighborhood, a long-term photovoice project was conducted. Thirty-one photovoice sessions and eight structured interviews were coded and analyzed to assess participants' neighborhood definitions. Participant's difficulties in identifying the geographic, physical and demographic characteristics of their neighborhood led them to use social interactions, place-mediated values, and civic engagement to define neighborhood.

Examining relational empowerment for elementary school students in a yPAR program.

This paper joins relational empowerment, youth empowerment, and Bridging Multiple Worlds frameworks to examine forms of relational empowerment for children in two intermediary institutions-school and a youth participatory action research after-school program (yPAR ASP). Participants were twelve children, most of whom were Latina/o and from im/migrant families, enrolled in a yPAR ASP for 2 years. A mixed-method approach was utilized; we analyzed children's interviews, self-defined goals, and their social networks to examine their experiences of relational empowerment.

The praxis assignment: experiential learning in a large social-community psychology class.

In this article, a faculty member, a graduate student teaching assistant, and four undergraduates describe their experiences with a "Day of Social Justice Praxis Assignment" as a form of experiential learning in a 120-person social-community psychology course. The faculty member lays out the goals of the course and her hopes for the specific assignment. The undergraduates reflect on their experience with the assignment, and the graduate student contextualizes how their work is reflective or not reflective of the work produced in the class and course concepts.

How we became the Schmams: conceptualizations of fairness in the decision-making process for Latina/o children.

The current study examines 16 Latina/o fifth grade children's desires for a decision-making structure within a youth participatory action research (yPAR) program. When given the choices of consensus, majority rule, authoritarian rule, delegation, and random choice models, children chose random choice. Procedural, distributive and emotional justice were heavily weighted in their reasoning around fairness and decision making.

Youth empowerment in context: exploring tensions in school-based yPAR.

In much of the youth empowerment literature, researchers focus on the relationship between youth and adults involved in empowerment programs while neglecting the broader social framework in which these relationships and the program itself functions. Utilizing an ecological model, the current research examines the tensions that surfaced in attempts to create an empowering setting in an after-school PAR program with fifth-graders. Challenging assumptions about youth, structural challenges, and conflicting theories of change are highlighted.

A recess evaluation with the players: taking steps toward participatory action research.

This playground study conceptualizes recess as a time and space that belongs to students; their inclusion in this evaluation is a notable difference from other recess/playground research. The goal was to help elementary school students make the changes they felt were needed on their playground. After conducting structured observations and student and recess aide focus groups, a report was presented to all stakeholders, and recess changes were made.

Elucidating the power in empowerment and the participation in participatory action research: a story about research team and elementary school change.

Community psychologists are increasingly using Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a way to promote social justice by creating conditions that foster empowerment. Yet, little attention has been paid to the differences between the power structure that PAR advocates and the local community power structures. This paper seeks to evaluate the level of participation in a PAR project for multiple stakeholder groups, determine how PAR was adjusted to better fit community norms, and whether our research team was able to facilitate the emergence of PAR by adopting an approach that was relevant to the existing power relations.

Where am I? Locating myself and its implications for collaborative research.

This paper examines how a younger white female graduate student and an African American female undergraduate viewed the relationship between the graduate student and older African American working class women. This relationship was formed around a community garden project. The graduate student understood the relationship to be based on gender and class background similarities; the undergraduate viewed it based on race differences and unexamined white privilege.

Facilitators and inhibitors of positive school feelings: an exploratory study.

This paper brings together the educational psychology and place experience literatures to explore 8 children's experiences of school behavior settings. Within this framework, the goal is to think of school as a place comprised of multiple behavior settings, disentangle behavior and engagement, and problematize the construct of engagement. Results indicate that children liked places where the physical space was open, and they had some autonomy, independence, choice, opportunities for leadership, and social support.

Reconceptualizing quantitative and qualitative methods: a case study dealing with place as an exemplar.

A useful framework for understanding methods is to think of them as being on a continuum of holistic and pattern focused to particularistic and specific. This paper argues for this conceptualization rather than thinking of quantitative and qualitative methods as oppositional and potentially contradictory. A case study provides an example of using both quantitative and qualitative methods in a holistic and pattern-focused study, while also attending to the values and goals of community psychology.

The (un)reasonableness of reporting: antecedents and consequences of reporting sexual harassment.

This study places the reporting of sexual harassment within an integrated model of the sexual harassment process. Two structural models were developed and tested in a sample (N = 6,417) of male and female military personnel. The 1st model identifies determinants and effects of reporting; reporting did not improve--and at times worsened--job, psychological, and health outcomes.