Community Psychology in Global Perspective

CPGP, Comm. Psych. Glob. Persp. Vol 2, Issue 2, 1 – 20

SITUATING AND CONTESTING STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE IN

Urmitapa Dutta*, Christopher C. Sonn** and M. Brinton Lykes***

Structural violence refers to social systems as well as the mechanisms through which
they produce and normalize marginalization, exclusion, and exploitation. It is intricately
tied to cultural violence, that is, systematic assaults on the human dignity and self-worth
of individuals and communities. This latter violence operates through culture, language,
ideology, and knowledge production in academic disciplines and in scientific canons.
Cultural violence serves to justify, legitimize, mask, and naturalize both direct assaults
on human beings and systems of oppression and inequality. This special issue highlights
new approaches to interrogate the processes and mechanisms between individual and
collective suffering and the macrosocial matrices in which the experiences are
configured. In this introduction, we argue that an understanding of structural and
cultural violence has significant potential for reinvigorating some of the longstanding
but often under-engaged goals of community psychology. We explore the challenges
facing community psychologists committed to social and transformative change towards
wellbeing for all in a global context characterized by gross inequities, thereby
establishing the context for this special issue on situating and contesting structural
violence in community psychology.

Keywords: structural violence, cultural violence, community psychology, social

1. Introduction
This special issue takes up a set of challenges facing community psychologists committed to
social and transformative change towards wellbeing for all in a global context characterized by
gross inequities due at least in part to systems and structures of violence. Structural violence
includes the production, maintenance, and reproduction of social inequalities and oppressions.
The concept refers to social systems as well as the mechanisms through which they produce and

*
University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA
**
Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
***
Boston College, Massachusetts, USA

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normalize marginalization, exclusion, and exploitation along lines of “race1”, class, gender,
ethnicity, nationality, and other invidious categories (Galtung, 1969; Farmer, 2003; Martin-Baró,
1994; Scheper-Hughes, 2004). Although racial, ethnic, and gender-based categories, among
others, are systematically used to deprive certain groups of basic rights, and therefore are deeply
implicated in considerations of human suffering, they are also the bases for social justice
organizing that contests inequalities, marginalization, and oppression (Duncan & Bowman,
2009; Farmer, 2009; Scheper-Hughes, 2004; Yuval-Davis, 2006a). Some trace the use of the
term “structural violence” to the renowned peace scholar Johan Galtung. Galtung (1969)
advocated for an expanded concept of violence as “the cause of the difference between the
potential and the actual” (p. 168); in other words, violence impedes the shrinkage of the distance
between what exists and what could be possible. Structural violence is not always manifest and
may be normalized and naturalized as status quo, obscuring circuits of privilege and
dispossession (Fine & Ruglis, 2009). It operates by erasing social and political origins of
psychosocial problems, instead of placing the blame on struggling individuals and communities
for their problems (Scheper-Hughes, 2004; Stoudt et al, 2016). Common examples of structural
violence include racism, sexism, poverty, hunger, discriminatory policing, and health
inequalities.
Structural violence is intricately tied to cultural violence, that is, systematic assaults on the
human dignity and self-worth of individuals and communities (Scheper-Hughes, 2004). Cultural
violence operates through aspects of the symbolic sphere including culture, language, ideology,
and knowledge production in academic disciplines and in scientific canons (Bourdieu, 1991;
Galtung, 1990; Scheper-Hughes, 2004). Cultural violence serves to justify, legitimize, mask and
naturalize both direct assaults on human beings and social hierarchies that regulate proper
behaviors, language or “talk”, codes of conduct, and ways of developing and carrying out
relationships. It is not only the ways in which violence is materialized that matters, but also the
legitimation and naturalization of that use. The discipline of psychology, for example, is
complicit in facilitating and legitimizing racial and class stratifications through a plethora of
diagnostic labels. This medicalization of injustice has serious psychosocial and material
consequences for those who systematically bear the brunt of such “diagnoses.” As community
psychologists we are challenged to understand and document how structural violence gets
“under the skin”. Fanon (1952/2008) characterized similar colonization processes in Martinique
as epidermalization and others including the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond have
described it as internalized racial oppressions (www.pisab.org)—capturing both the internalized
racial inferiority of those who suffer marginalization and oppression as well as the internalized
racial superiority of those who think they are passive witnesses, who benefit from and/or
perpetrate structural and cultural violence.
Galtung (1990) characterized the different forms of violence in the following terms: “Direct
violence is an event; structural violence is a process with ups and downs; cultural violence is an
invariant, a permanence, remaining essentially the same for long periods, given the slow
transformations of basic culture” (p. 294). Both structural and symbolic violence systematically

1
Quotation marks are used to indicate the deeply constructed nature of race—to mark its non-biological, non-
genetic base and to underscore the ideological and institutional formations that hold the notion in place.

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violate individual, economic, social, and cultural rights through exploitation, abuse, and
epistemic violence built into institutional, cultural, and research practices (Farmer, 2003, 2009;
Lykes, 2001). Both structural and cultural violence are inextricably intertwined with and
causally implicated in social inequality and injustice (Farmer, 2003, 2009; Freire, 1970; Galtung,
1969; Martín-Baró, 1996). Community psychologists are committed to promoting social justice
by fighting oppression and working to reduce social inequalities through addressing both the
embodiments and performances of violence, as these are manifested as symptoms of human
suffering and reflect its structural and intersectional roots in history and policy (Evans, Duckett,
Lawthom, & Kivell, 2017; García-Ramírez, Balcázar, & de Freitas, 2014; Prilleltensky, 2014;
Shinn & McKormack, 2017). Understandings of structural and cultural violence can inform both
public analysis of the root causes of social problems and direct action, both of which are core
components of social intervention in community psychology (Rappaport, 1977). We argue that
an understanding of structural and cultural violence have significant potential for reinvigorating
some of the longstanding but often under-engaged goals of community psychology (Dutta, 2016;
Langhout, 2016; Trickett, 2015). Historically, community psychologists have demonstrated their
appreciation of structural violence in terms of their writings about social inequality and
oppression (e.g., Albee, 1999; Prilleltensky, 2003, 2012; Watts, Griffith, & Abdul-Adil, 1999).
However, theory and research that directly engages the concept of structural violence is less
common in the field and is often found in the work of those at the intersections of community
and social, cultural, liberation, and/or peace psychologies (e.g., Christie, 1997, 2006; Lykes,
2001; Lykes, Banuazizi, Liem, & Morris, 1996; Sonn, Smith, & Meyer, 2015; Weis & Fine,
2012). This special issue represents an effort to demonstrate possibilities for re-centering
structural violence in community psychology research, teaching, and practice.
The special issue has been shaped by liberation psychology, especially its emphasis on
understanding and deconstructing the role of power and histories of colonization in shaping
individual and community responses to violence(s) (Martín-Baró, 1996; Moane, 2009; Montero,
2007; Sonn & Lewis, 2009). Montero and Sonn (2009) defined liberation as “a process entailing
a social rupture in the sense of transforming both the conditions of inequality and oppression and
the institutions and practices producing them” (p.1). There are also other developments that
provide support for a more significant engagement with structural violence. For example, the
calls for decolonial enactments of psychology in the “global South” are concerned with engaging
with and/or responding to structural and cultural violence in specific contexts and also disrupting
hegemonic influences of Unitedstatesian2 and Eurocentric psychology (see, e.g., Adams, Dobles,
Gomez, Kurtis & Molina, 2015). In contrast to its exclusive use to refer to a geopolitical
location, we use the term global South in this article to refer to communities and contexts
dominated by systematic and unjust human suffering produced by global capitalism,
colonialism, and patriarchy, inclusive of communities and groups in the global North who

2
The term is a translation from the Spanish term “estadounidense” (see Gugelberger, 1996, p. 4, also Note 4, p.
119). It is used here rather than the more common “American” since this latter term reflects the appropriation of an
identifier that includes all citizens of the Americas, that is, of Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and the
United States of America.

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continue to experience marginalization and oppression (Eisenstein, 1998; Esteva & Prakash,
2014; Hernández-Wolfe, 2013; Mohanty, 1991, 2003; Santos, 2007). Some critical scholars also
use the term “two-thirds worlds” or “social majority” to draw attention to the vast majority of the
world’s population who do not have access to goods, services, and overall quality of life (e.g.,
Esteva & Prakash, 2014). We note that neither term refers to a homogenous category. Both
include epistemologies, experiences, and disparate power relations characterizing the relations
within and between communities, societies, and nation-states. In these contexts, new approaches
are being developed that are anchored in the voices of those who have been excluded and
marginalized (see also Connell’s volume called Southern Theory, 2007; Santos, 2007).
One example from the global South of psychologists who have mobilized a politically
engaged, relevant, and activist psychology is the Apartheid Archive Project (AAP)—a
collaborative research project that documents personal stories and narrative accounts of ordinary
South Africans in order to capture the ongoing reverberations of apartheid racism in South
Africa (Stevens, Duncan, & Hook, 2013). The AAP interrogates racism as grounded in
psychosocial processes (e.g., exclusion, negation, and inferiorization) as well as macro-political
processes (e.g., historical, material, symbolic, and structural), thus elucidating linkages between
structural inequities and individual suffering. The project simultaneously engages white
subjectivities that benefitted from and were privileged during Apartheid and the various
responses to post-Apartheid including accommodation and resistance. Another example is
Researchers for Fair Policing, an intergenerational participatory action research project with and
by youth of color. A collaboration of Make the Road New York (see www.maketheroad.org) and
the Public Science Project at the City University of New York (see
www.publicscienceproject.org), this initiative was developed collaboratively with multiple local
actors engaged in community resistance to New York City’s “stop and frisk policies” that
disproportionately targeted communities of color (see e.g., The Justice Committee
www.justicecommittee.org, among others). Community organizers, young people, university
professors, and students joined to study and respond to “what it means to grow up heavily
policed in NYC” (Stoudt et al., 2016, p. 328) and to collaborate with young people in the
production of their own knowledge about and responses to growing up policed. Both the
Apartheid Archive Project and the Researchers for Fair Policing exemplify critical engagement
with structural violence, mobilizing and producing perspectives grounded in transformative
psychosocial praxis from the global South. Each initiative documents some of the ways in which
structural violence installs and sustains inequalities that privilege some while marginalizing and
oppressing others. Through naming and deconstructing some of the ways in which the identified
“problems” are structural concerns, these projects document how all involved are affected—
although some benefit while others pay a huge price.

2. Envisioning the Special Issue

The subtle, naturalized, and all too often taken-for-granted quality of structural violence poses
a serious challenge to community psychology research and action despite the field’s
commitment to social change. Our journals contain many research articles that focus on the
deleterious effects of structural violence (e.g., youth violence, “underachievement” among youth

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of color, school- to-prison pipelines, health inequalities, discrimination) without fully explicating
or adequately elaborating the political, economic, social structural processes that facilitate,
sustain, and/or undergird such outcomes. Structural violence is deeply ingrained in different
societies and often reduced to “the way things are;” instances of structural violence become
integral to the social fabric and are no longer questioned. These “everyday” situations echo
Ignacio Martin-Baró’s war-time construct of “normal abnormality” (Martin-Baró, 1994, p.125).
If we are to make good on community psychology’s commitment to transformative rather than
ameliorative social change (Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2010; Prilleltensky, 2014), it is imperative to
build on and develop new approaches to interrogate, confront, resist, and address structural
violence through our research and practice, which include documenting critique and excavating
radical possibilities. This desire motivated a number of us (Urmitapa Dutta, Joseph Gone, M.
Brinton Lykes, Bradley Olson, and Christopher Sonn) to organize a symposium at the 2015
Biennial Conference of the Society for Community Research and Action held in Lowell,
Massachusetts. Our goal was to illuminate how structural violence has been addressed either
explicitly or implicitly through research and action.
Several examples were presented that illustrated efforts to engage structural violence in
community research and action. Drawing on extensive collaborative research with several
American Indian communities, Gone (2015) interrogated the trope of historical trauma that
informs discourses of “mental health disparities”. Arguing that historical trauma involves an
inward (e.g., personal experience or community life) rather than outward focus (e.g., unequal
societal relations or constrained opportunities for economic viability), Gone proposed the
concept of (post)colonial distress as a more viable way of confronting structural violence
perpetuated against American Indian communities. In Lykes and Crosby’s (2015) presentation,
we glimpsed how the “the everyday work of repair” (Das, 2007) with women survivors of
violence and gross violations of human rights in postgenocide Guatemala requires attention to
deep-seated structural impoverishment. They underscored the potential of using creative and
embodied resources such as drawing, collage, dramatization, and body sculptures to elicit more
complex and contested stories through which Maya protagonists who survived gendered and
racialized violence during the armed conflict spoke to this everyday violence in their lives. Dutta
(2015) approached the topic in relation to her critical ethnographic research of ethnic conflict in
her home community—the Garo Hills region of Northeast India. Foregrounding the embodied
experiences of youth as they witness, experience, perpetuate, and/or resist endemic ethnic
conflict, she elucidated the sociocultural and political structures underlying normalized ethnic
violence in Garo Hills. She presented the example of a youth participatory action research
project and the radical possibilities such work hold for everyday peacebuilding. Sonn’s
presentation was based on a participatory project (see Sonn, Quayle, McKenzie & Law, 2014)
that sought to foster dialogue between young people of immigrant background and Aboriginal
people in Australia. Drawing our attention to complex interconnections between cultural
violence (coloniality) and structural violence (racism), Sonn demonstrated the liberatory
potential of disrupting taken-for-granted narratives through participatory arts practice. The
session concluded with Olson (2015) bringing our attention back to the structural violence in our
own “backyard”—the deplorable and persistent history of APA’s involvement in and defense of

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interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, whereby psychologists have been involved in the torture of
those positioned as cultural, religious, or ethnic “others.”
The session prompted conversations around structural violence and community psychology
across domains of theory, research, and social and political action. The topic resonated with a
diverse group of people working in a variety of contexts and issues, all of whom shared a
commitment to dismantling structures and dominant discourses that produce and maintain
injustice. This response reiterated our rationale for having organized the symposium—that
conceptions of structural violence can extend community-based praxis to incorporate more
sophisticated analyses of injustice. We (Dutta, Lykes, & Sonn) envisioned this special issue—
Structural Violence and Community-based Research and Action—as a vehicle to explore some
of these possibilities through critical interrogations of diverse forms of structural and cultural
violence. As co-editors, we had several goals in mind when we undertook the special issue
project. Primarily, we envisioned it as way to push the boundaries of community psychology
research and action by including exemplars of theoretical, empirical, and/or practice-based
explorations of how structural and cultural violence operate and/or are produced and reproduced
in communities. We sought papers that would offer a glimpse into contexts and social
formations that produce diverse forms of violence along with the ways in which practitioners
and researchers in community psychology and allied fields confront, resist, and address
structural and cultural violence. Thus in this special issue we reject what many have called
“downstream” analyses and encourage instead what Weis and Fine (2012) call “critical
bifocality” in which psychologists are challenged to document history, structures, and lives to
construct an account that never severs lives or outcomes from history and structures.
Framed by our individual and collective understandings of and praxis as community
psychologists, we identified three interrelated goals. One was to see theoretical and
methodological undertakings that appreciated, studied, and illustrated the links between
individual experiences and the macrosocial matrices in which the experiences are configured.
We asked that authors unpack the processes or mechanisms through which unequal and
oppressive structures are internalized as individual experiences. Structural injustices are
embodied, moving under the skin, and also resisted, negotiated or contested. Specifically, we
hoped to see theoretical and empirical examination of how intersecting social axes are
implicated in structuring social injustice. We were interested in pushing authors to
simultaneously consider various social axes and expand our methodological repertoire of how
that can be done. A second goal focused on intervention (theory and praxis) that is informed by
understandings of structural and/or cultural violence that aim to disrupt, confront, resist, and
address structural and/or cultural violence. We hoped to see articles that explored innovative
possibilities for strategies of survival, protagonism, and social transformation. Finally, we sought
articles that might critique and chart new directions in community-based research and action that
emerge from these critical perspectives of analysis and engagement. Within these priorities, we
hoped for papers that would move beyond positivist and postpositivist understandings of
“scientific” research, to excavate the manifold ways in which structural violence is deeply
ingrained in multiple sites in which community psychologists work, including the academy.
To achieve the goals outlined above, we called for papers from scholars, educators,
practitioners, and activists interrogating community-based action and research through analytic
framing and critique of cultural and structural violence. We were interested in interdisciplinary

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and transdisciplinary scholarship, especially from the global South, that would contribute to a
critical, international, activist scholarship on community-based praxis. Research in the global
South is systematically imbued with a recalcitrant particularity—which is in part a function of
colonial, imperialist, and racialized legacies of psychology. Therefore, it was imperative that we
did not reproduce the kinds of epistemic violence our special issue aimed to confront.

3. Global Perspectives: Contexts, Participants, and Authors

This special issue brings together a diverse set of papers from around the world—Australia,
Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Pakistan, and the United States. The
compilation of articles is also diverse in terms of the disciplinary backgrounds of the authors. In
addition to community and critical social psychology, authors have their disciplinary homes in
anthropology, human development, sociology, and education, as well as areas of practice such as
community arts and cultural development. The articles cover topics including human rights
violations in postcolonial Jamaica; dynamics of exclusion and betrayal for young black people in
Haiti and the United States; structural violence in the lives of Pakistani Christians; the
accumulation of dispossession among Aboriginal people in Australia; state sponsored violence,
gendered migration and Maya young women in Guatemala; and, structural violence in a
sheltered workshop in the United States.
The authors who describe their social locations, occupy diverse positionalities, and hold
varied and complex relationships to their community or research context. For example,
Chaudhry conducts research in Pakistan, her country of origin, but from a privileged position
that stems from her dominant status as a Muslim as well as her affiliation to a United States
university. Ilyes brings a lens of interrelationality—a dialogic relation that is “structurally and
temporally situated, both in the past, the present, and the future, challenging assumptions of
individuality embedded in traditional research.” Bell relates to oppression from “a dichotomous
social location,” critically conscious of the privilege stemming from her middle class, mixed
race heritage in Jamaica. Yet the same embodiment, being Black in the United States, evokes
discrimination. Sánchez Ares and Lykes are explicit about being human rights activists and the
differential power afforded by their social positions as “mestizo and white, Galician/Spanish and
U.S. citizens, and highly educated outsiders…” to the indigenous population with whom they
partner. Notably, all the papers in this special issue espouse the value of activist scholarship,
whether it is explicitly stated (e.g., Ilyes; Sánchez Ares & Lykes) or not.
Across these various contexts and issues, the papers reiterated the criticality of attending to
subjugated voices, foregrounding the perspectives, stories, and experiences of those in positions
of alterity, not assuming homogeneity at the margins but centering the deeply rooted critique and
desire spoken from the periphery. For Quayle, Sonn, and van den Eynde, this meant identifying
community narratives from the stories of Noongar elders through which they explicate their
experiences of oppression in the postcolonizing Australian context. Chaudhry used a life history
methodology to foreground Pakistani Christians’ description and analyses of the structural
violence they face as a religious minority in Pakistan. Sánchez Ares and Lykes’ paper report on

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a collaborative photovoice project through which young Maya women in rural Guatemala were
able to enhance and exchange their knowledge about migration and everyday violence against
the Maya in Guatemala and in the United States, and its intersections with gender, poverty, and
social class. Langtiw and Heidbrink’s analyses of the betrayals of Haitians in the Dominican
Republic and African Americans in the United States highlight the risks of silencing or talking
over Black youth’s local efforts of speaking truth to power through mobilizations such as Black
Lives Matter in the United States and Reconoci.do in the Dominican Republic. We see a
different iteration of voice in the papers by Bell and Ilyes. Bell’s paper urges us to consider what
happens in cases where oppressed people lose access to their voice “in the absence of listeners
who valorize their voice,” as was the case of community members of Tivoli Garden in Kingston,
Jamaica. Ilyes performs and problematizes the voice emergent through her dialogical
relationship with “The Boss’s” letters, words through which we are invited into her lived
experiences of and resistance to her “intellectual disability” as situated at the interstices of
cultural and structural violence. Thus articulated and troubled, the notion of voice is louder than
words or utterances and demands a listener. These papers underscore the multiplicity of voice,
not simply as a generalized democratic process to be valued, but as a critical cultural
performance of or despite the speaker’s racialized, gendered, and class-based location.
Significantly the articles in this special issue also resituate community psychologists as listeners,
interlocutors, and/or intermediaries (Merry, 2006) in pragmatic solidarity (Farmer, 2003), and/or
psychosocial accompaniment (Watkins, 2015) with the individuals and communities with whom
they live, write, and/or work. The latter take on roles as archivists, historians, and collectors of
stories not told in order to challenge and contest the dominant or “official lies” (Martín-Baró,
1996).

4. Theoretical and Methodological Contributions to Special Issue Goals

In mapping out this special issue project, we were keen on theoretical and methodological
undertakings that explicated the links between individual and collective suffering and the
macrosocial matrices in which experiences are configured. The various papers offer diverse and
innovative ways of understanding the mechanisms and processes through which unequal and
oppressive structures are embodied and performed as individual experience. Chaudhry uses the
lens of structural and cultural violence to examine the pervasive violence and oppression that
mark the daily lives of Pakistani Christians, as a religious minority group in Pakistan. She
accentuates these linkages by foregrounding the analysis of Pakistani Christians as they explicate
how institutional and cultural policies and practices impinge upon and constrain their day-to-day
life. Crucially, Chaudhry’s paper highlights the importance of intersectional analysis. Following
Third World and women of Color feminist theories, she demonstrates how the lived experiences
of Pakistani Christians are mediated by intersecting axes of class, caste, gender, and educational
background. Sánchez Ares and Lykes show how young women’s understandings of transnational
migration shape their fears, aspirations, hopes, and dreams. Through their engagement with
various images of their daily experiences that the youth themselves produced through

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photography, the authors showed how these young Maya women understood and experienced
racialized gendered discrimination as it intersects with state violence and migration. Within their
participatory project they utilized intersectional theory (Anzaldúa, 2012; Crenshaw, 1991) to
“situate Mayan migrants at the interstices of indigeneity, gender, class, and state power as they
grapple with how their subjectivities and circulations of power are continuously negotiated…”.
Quayle, et al.’s paper draws on stories of Aboriginal Elders shared as part of a community
arts project to explore how Aboriginal people make sense of colonial and racialized oppression
and the psychosocial legacy of historical and continuing oppression in post-colonizing Australia.
Guided by theoretical and methodological tools from liberation psychology, decolonizing
methodologies (Smith, 1999) and Fine and Ruglis’ (2009) work on circuits of dispossession and
privilege, the authors elucidate the accumulation of dispossession as narrated by Aboriginal
Elders. These community narratives capture the manifestations of structural, cultural, and direct
violence, that have been unleashed on Aboriginal people by paternalistic and assimilationist
policies. Quayle, et al. mobilize these narratives to challenge dominant (White settler) cultural
narratives that minimize, deny, or silence Aboriginal people’s histories of dispossession. Their
work underscores the importance of listening to and sharing stories from positions of alterity as a
means of understanding how colonial oppression is embodied in everyday experiences. Bell’s
paper in this issue is an interesting contrast to that of Quayle and colleagues, where we see
Aboriginal Elders discussing the psychosocial impact of dispossession on their subjectivities.
Synthesizing insights from psychoanalytic social theory, depth psychology, postcolonial thought,
and liberation psychology, Bell turns to historical silences in the face of gross human rights
violation in Tivoli Gardens located in Kingston, Jamaica. Bell shows us how diacritical
hermeneutics (Kearney, 2012) may be employed as an interpretive methodology to mobilize
unarticulated experiences and latent meanings of social suffering. In trying to understand the
linkages between macropolitical structures and individual suffering, Bell underscores the
criticality of attending to silences along with speech emanating from positions of alterity.
Understanding the ways in which individuals and communities suffer under oppressive regimes,
she argues, has the potential to expand the possibilities of psychosocial work with people whose
subjectivities are discounted by dominant narratives.
Ilyes takes up a much-understudied area of psychological research and even less so within
community psychology, that of people labeled as “intellectually disabled”. She situates the arts-
based Alternative to Employment (ATE) program that she developed in what she describes as a
warehouse or factory-like institution designed to provide vocational training for those previously
diagnosed as intellectually disabled. The program brought artists and their families –those not
labeled as intellectually disabled– to a shared space in which she and The Boss, a participant in
ATE, developed a dialogic relationship over time. Drawing on Opotow’s (1990) theory of moral
exclusion, Ilyes illuminates how the deinstitutionalization movement heralded by, among others,
community psychologists not only failed to address the structural exclusion of the intellectually
disabled but invisibilized or naturalized their exclusion in community-based housing and day
programs. The Boss’ voice emerges in the radical reimagination of the sheltered workshop as an
assemblage with potential for job, poetry, and love despite the official “container” in which she
was sealed. Ilyes’ careful analysis of some of The Boss’s writing as well as her critical

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positioning and interrogation of herself and this work exemplifies the uncomfortable reflexivity
(Pillow, 2003) that is essential for a liberatory and critical community psychology.
Langtiw and Heidbrink explore the removal of Black youth from social spaces in two distinct
contexts –Haitians in the Dominican Republic and African Americans in the United States– to
argue for the interrelationship and globalization of human rights violations that contributes to the
marginalization and exclusion of certain groups of people from the human polity. Through
critical historical analyses of Black youth in each of these contexts, they not only document the
failures of public policies to ensure these youths’ rights to health, education, and wellbeing but
also the dramatic ongoing and prevalent attacks on Black youth in these two contexts. They
document the structural and cultural violations of their rights and argue that these youth have
been “betrayed by agents of the very systems upon which they rely for survival”. As
importantly, they argue that despite these attacks youth are organizing, joining together to resist
these multiple forms of racialized injustice. They caution community psychologists to critically
analyze this “institutional trauma betrayal” or risk the ongoing marginalization of Black youth as
well as the failure to ally ourselves with the important youth movements that resist and seek to
transform this betrayal, including, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United
States and Reconoci.do in the Dominican Republic.

4.2 Criticality, Interventions, and the Creation of Alternative Settings

In this issue, Hernandez and Galletta use structural violence as an analytical device to show
how circuits of dispossession “become operational through the loss of public protections”. They
use a community case study approach drawing on different disciplines including law, economics,
sociology, and social psychology to illustrate structural violence as a phenomenon based in
historical processes and moments that set up the present and future realities, as well as the
opportunities for communities that continue to be excluded. The authors build on the work of
Galtung and Farmer connecting it to Opotow’s theory of moral exclusion. Their article
highlights the dynamics of privilege and dispossession as enacted in school closures and the
pivotal role of mobilizing cultural explanations that work to sustain white privilege. Crucially,
this piece documents the slow violence inherent in the erosion of public spaces. Sánchez Ares
and Lykes’ project makes visible through feminist infused participatory work the networks of
power and forms of structural violence that impact upon young women’s lives. Much of the
migration literature emphasizes the migration of young men – or of girls and young women who
travel with them. They show the various everyday ways in which a group of Maya young
women not only resist these forms of everyday violence but how they envision and perform
alternative survival strategies. This participatory project is an example of the creation of safe
settings in which young women can not only exchange previously silenced knowledge about
their hopes and aspirations but also unpack the various forces that constrain these life choices.
Quayle et al.’s paper is a deliberate intervention that chips away at dominant cultural
narratives that pathologize Aboriginal people and represent them as problems to be “fixed.”
They not only amplify the voices of Aboriginal Elders but also turn the focus on
to whiteness/coloniality and its implications for the material and psychosocial realities of
Aboriginal people. In doing so they disrupt the cultural violence that distorts, silences, and

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constrains the psychosocial possibilities of Aboriginal people through language, policies,
culture, ideology, and empirical social science. Bell’s paper troubles the notion of
“unspeakability” in trauma theory, which is often deployed to explain the apparent voicelessness
rendered by traumatic experience. She offers a theoretical intervention, a way of comprehending
how oppression structures people’s psychosocial worlds. Rather than assuming “unspeakablity”,
Bell interprets silences through the lens of what Martín-Baró (1996, p. 188) called the “social
lie”, which refers to reality that is aligned with the dominant class and which “puts a ceiling on
the growth of social consciousness”. Intentionally attuned to participants’ interior life as well as
the historic and psychosocial conditions that shape their subjectivities, Bell punctuates
community members’ silences with tentative interpretations to attend to what has been rendered
invisible by oppressive structures. Ilyes disturbs the waters of deinstitutionalization and
community-based responses to the intellectually disabled while urging us to rethink not only
these interventions but also the diagnosis as a performance of structural and cultural violence.
She further demonstrates how an arts-based program provided her the opportunity to listen
deeply, de-construct, and co- construct knowledge(s) alongside one woman who resisted these
multiple and intersecting forms of violence over nearly a lifetime. Taken together these articles
cross transnational spaces with rich particularity-in-place and demonstrate how circuits of
dispossession that cut across national borders are reconstituted through struggles that are
distinctive yet intersectional. They make visible:

(T)he slow violence of institutionalization, how immigration became illegal, and

4.3 Emerging Questions and Future Directions

The articles in this special issue offer directions in and for community psychology and
community-based research and action that are informed by analyses of and responses to
structural and cultural violence. In this section, we discuss some ways in which these papers map
critical directions for community psychology research and action.
First, all the papers in the special issue offer a critical analysis of the historical,
sociopolitical, and cultural contexts in which their work unfolds. The authors do not simply
describe the “background” context that is typical of much postpositivist and psychological
research. Instead they foreground the context; their analyses illuminate, confront, and dismantle
the interlocking systems of racism, colonialism, neoliberalism, classism, ableism, and/or sexism
that shape those contexts. This unapologetic centering of specific community or cultural contexts
represents a marked departure from postpositivist conventions that place a high premium on
generalizability. These papers also demonstrate and elucidate the importance of interrupting
epistemic violence inherent in hierarchical binaries such as local-global and particular-universal.
The cultural critique in these papers unsettle taken-for-granted assumptions by shedding light on
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obscure circuits of power and social control—a vital step towards deconstructing mechanisms of
structural and cultural violence. They illuminate the multiple contexts in which and processes
through which those deemed deficient, unworthy, unreliable or disposable turn a critical gaze
back on the knowledge producers and speak truth to power. Thus we view the papers in this
issue as forerunners, charting different ways of centering contexts, mapping power, and
articulating alternative positionalities.
Second, the papers in this issue bridge diverse disciplinary standpoints to develop innovative
theories or methodologies to engage structural and cultural violence, illustrating
transdisciplinary approaches to community-based research and action. While many community
psychologists posit transdisciplinary research as ideally suited to creative problem solving
valued by the field (e.g., Christens & Perkins, 2008; Stokols, 2006), a review by Neal, Janulis,
and Collins (2013) indicates that the field’s cross-disciplinary endeavors are far from ideal. The
papers in this special issue thus make an important contribution to community psychology by
demonstrating diverse possibilities of engaging within and across multiple disciplines to create
new research methodologies and theorizing. Psychology has strong foundations in colonialism
and imperialism, and has an ongoing attachment to postpositivist methodologies (Bhatia, 2002;
Bulhan, 1985; Martín-Baró, 1994; Okazaki, David, & Abelman, 2008; Stevens, Duncan, &
Bowman, 2006; Teo, 2005). In order to examine how structural and cultural violence operate
and/or are produced and reproduced in communities, we recognized the need to draw on and to
look beyond the narrow limits of psychology for exemplars of the work we sought to represent
here—something that was reinforced as the issue took shape.
Third, the papers in this issue elucidate the importance of engaging complex machinations of
power as integral to interrupting structural and cultural violence. They offer distinct illustrations
of what it means to adopt a lens of “critical bifocality” from educational research (Weis & Fine,
2012):

A way to think about epistemology, design, and the politics of educational research,
as a theory of method in which researchers try to make visible the sinewy linkages or
circuits through which structural conditions are enacted in policy and reform
institutions as well as the ways in which such conditions come to be woven into
community relationships and metabolized by individuals (p. 174).

Rather than an exclusive focus on studying “down” steep gradients of power as is typical of
psychology, these papers interrogate dynamic workings of power to make claims about what is
designed to be invisible or imperceptible (e.g., racism, patriarchy, neoliberalism, and
colonialism). Taken together, the papers in this issue make a compelling case for community
psychology to tackle the coloniality of power defined by Maldonado-Torres (2007) as “long-
standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor,
intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial
administrations” (p. 243; also see Quijano, 2000). In order to reinvigorate community
psychology’s longstanding goal of social transformation, we need to move away from
traditional, apolitical notions of power and explore ways in which we can interrogate, illuminate,
and interrupt invisible and insidious workings of power in the academy and beyond. In other
words, we have to dismantle those disciplinary norms of community psychology that are still

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tethered to colonial and racist foundations of European and Unitedstatesian psychology. As we
take on this challenge, we have much to learn from the struggles of and theories and methods
outlined by decolonial feminism, Women of Color feminisms, and Third World feminisms (e.g.,
Collins, 1998; Hurtado, 1996; Mohanty, 2003; Pillow, 2003; Villenas, 1996; Visweswaran,
1994; Wynter, 2003; Yuval-Davis, 2006b) and the powerful scholarship by authors from
colonized and postcolonial worlds (e.g., Connell, 2007; Fanon, 1986; Smith, 1999).
Finally, the various papers point to the important matter of ethics beyond the typical
considerations of confidentiality, anonymity, and beneficence. These are important, but there are
broader considerations including the politics of location, the politics of representation, and
knowledge production processes within which ethical relations and notions of justice are
produced (see Serrano García, 1994; Sonn, 2009). Equally critical are considerations of our
obligations to circulate stories that resist and dismantle dominant discourses. These issues are
reflected in the careful attention authors give to positionalities, processes for ensuring
collaboration across different facets of projects, prioritizing the stories of participants and
collaborators, and also wrestling with the tensions and challenges produced by enacting
dialogical or relational epistemologies and ethics in research and action. These epistemologies
are anchored in mutuality, connectedness, and social justice and a recognition that knowledge
production is always also about expressions of power and privilege. An ethical stance thus
requires ongoing attention to what is at stake, a collective engagement with questions of praxis
such as: of whom, by whom, for whom, on whose terms, and in what ways. The papers in this
issue urge us to reposition our ethical commitments within the broader sociopolitical, global
context of our everyday lives.
When we circulated the call for this special issue, we expected papers that would critique
existing work in community psychology and community-based research. However, this was not
treated directly in the articles we received. The pattern we observe in the articles included in this
special issue could partly be a function of the diverse disciplinary orientations of contributing
authors but could also be indicative of a shift in the wider field of community psychology as
evidenced by the recent edition of the APA Handbook of Community Psychology (see Bond,
Serrano-García, & Keys, 2017) as well as recent conferences. For example, at the 2016
International Conference on Community Psychology held in Durban, South Africa (see
http://iccp2016.co.za), there was an emerging emphasis on crafting new terrains and roles—a
move that is certainly informed by a critique of existing disciplinary norms but which moves
beyond a critique of absences to proactively forge new ways of enacting ethical and just
community research and action.

5. Concluding Remarks

Although not timed deliberately, this special issue emerges in the wake of a seemingly global
re-assertion of colonial and imperial regimes as evident first and foremost in the massive and
growing gap between the 1% and the majority population in the United States and in the
constrained choices reflected in the presidential elections. The latter have unleashed a vitriolic

13





marginalization of migrants, Muslims, and people of color and predatory misogynist
objectification of women. Despite the possibility of shattering the glass ceiling through the
election of a woman as president of the U.S., activists, anti-colonial organizers and peacemakers
cannot take much solace in the multiple ways in which the woman candidate has positioned
herself within and alongside powerful economic and political forces that offer the global South
very little hope for social transformation. European countries as well as Australia seem to rival
the U.S. for first place in closing their borders to the millions of refugees and asylum seekers
fleeing war and economic desperation in African countries, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Meanwhile U.K. citizens voted to leave the European Union in part due to policies, which,
despite growing E.U. limits on receiving refugees, seem to reflect more of an “open door policy”
than those of the U.K.
Recent events in the global South suggest equally disruptive circulations of power. In South
Africa there have been ongoing protests and calls for the transformation of educational
institutions. Despite the arrival of democracy in 1994 in that country, lives of a majority of the
Black population continue to be marked by poverty and income disparities reminiscent of
Apartheid South Africa. Student movements such as #Rhodes Must Fall and #Fees Must Fall are
protesting against fee hikes that make higher education inaccessible to many, and calls to
decolonize universities including curricula and teaching practices have been met with violence
and the closure of major universities. In India, repressive, neoliberal, and conservative regimes
continue to reproduce and exacerbate widespread exploitation, displacement, and violence
against religious minorities, Dalits, and tribal groups; the ascendency of Hindu fundamentalism
is poorly disguised by claims of a secular nation. At the same time, radical transgressive
people’s movements (e.g., National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights http://www.ncdhr.org.in,
Adivasi Resurgence, and #ChaloUna) have emerged to fight against state repression and
violence, but also to emphasize subjugated people’s assertion and resistance—the power to
narrate their own stories. Elsewhere, the unpredicted outcome of those who exercised their
suffrage within Colombia and rejected the historic peace accord negotiated by the country’s
president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC (Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army) followed on the heels of the recently elected
Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte. Despite the latter’s resistance to 21st century overtures of
imperial and economic power, his “war on drugs” has resulted in the murder of over 1,000
Filipinos and accompanied by his outright rejection of human rights. We are also reminded of
the ongoing struggles for survival and human and land rights of indigenous peoples around the
world. Their struggles are borne out of a history of colonialism and dispossession, its
continuities, and the enduring human suffering it has produced. At the time of writing among
those we are witnessing are the civil resistance by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe that has been
met by uncivil militarized responses from police and security firms, while in Australia
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to fight for self determination and social
justice including a Treaty that can aid in this and other processes.
These are some of the global-local dynamics shaping everyday contexts in which we as
community psychologists are partnering with individual and communities “on the margins” and
with whom we seek to generate knowledge “from the bottom up” through which they contest
their oppression while pressing for transformative change. We are increasingly living in a world
characterized by a state of exception, which, “contrary to the old forms of state of siege or state

14






of emergency, restricts democratic rights under the guise of safeguarding or even expanding
them” (Santos, 2007, p. 57). The erosion of civil, political, and cultural rights disguise structural
violence with nationalism and rationality, rendering it legitimate. These realities challenge us to
rethink what it means to be critically engaged researchers, educators, and activists in these
troubling times whence contemporary and historic structural and cultural violence are being
played out on a global/translocal stage. Rather than generating more prescriptive guidelines or
criteria, community psychologists are called to pay close attention to the motives, concerns, and
knowledge brought to the research process (Gordon, 2011; Swadener & Mutua, 2008). In many
cases this entails centering ways of knowing, doing, and being that have been marginalized,
silenced or excluded and engaging each other through processes of intercultural dialogue,
critique, and translation that decolonize and expand our ecologies of knowledge (Santos, 2007;
Sonn, 2016).
As community psychologists we must also critically interrogate the subjectivities of those
among us with privilege, that is, those who benefit from whiteness, from educational, economic,
and gender privilege and who, while working alongside or accompanying the communities
centered in this issue, need to critically and reflexively expose the processes and mechanisms
through which structural and cultural violence have seeped into our skins, sustaining and
benefiting us and being performed as internalized superiority. Critically interrogating structural
and cultural violence implicates each of us, challenging us to interrogate the subjectivities of
elites, how our views of “Others” constrict the latter’s life options. Such interrogation may lead
to ruptures of these privileges, and when and if they do, facilitate relationships among nos-otras
(Anzaldúa, 2012), energizing or enabling cross-community and cross-context organizing, social
movement building, policy that transforms, and/or radical collective experiments such as those
emerging throughout the world.
Each of the contributions in this issue offers a modest attempt to reconceptualize the theory
and praxis of community psychology alongside one or more groups of people with whom the
authors have partnered to reduce social suffering and press for a more equitable social comity.
Pending are a range of further challenges that might move the field of community psychology
and community psychologists towards repositioning ourselves as suggested here and in some of
the articles in this issue. We hope this special issue is the first of many provocative, critical
conversations about the possibilities engendered by community psychology in the face of direct,
structural, and cultural violence and a humble recognition of its limits.

Acknowledgement
We would like to thank all the reviewers who generously reviewed the various submissions
that we received for the special issue and our editorial assistants Rama Agung-Igusti, Amy
Quayle and Gabriella Santoro for their work finalizing accepted papers. We are also grateful to
Michelle Fine for her critical feedback on an earlier draft of this introduction.

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