Self, Community & Psychology

Self, Community & Psychology is a reader for students at UNISA studying community psychology. It brings together some of the best recent local work written from critical, social constructionist, participatory and liberatory perspectives.

The text was selected from two volumes dealing with social psychology and critical psychology respectively (Critical Psychology edited by Derek Hook, Nhlanhla Mkhize, Peace Kiguwa and Anthony Collins and Social Psychology: Identities and Relationships edited by Kopano Ratele and Norman Duncan). Both titles were published by UCT Press.

Self, Community & Psychology provides a broad introduction to community psychology and power and social formations and posits a liberatory response utilising critical analysis, self-definition and collective action.Key themes that the text explores include:

• the act of making knowledge about selves in communities
• the discourses, ideologies and cultures that shape communities and how they are understood
• change processes in the increasingly complex interactions between global and local communities
• poverty (as reflected in the lives of street children)
• HIV/Aids
• violence

This text addresses ideologies of race, gender and sexuality that together create particular South African post-colonial realities which legitimise oppression and cultural dispossession.