This article serves as the introduction to the Special Issue on Liberatory and Critical Voices in
Decolonising Community Psychologies. The Special Issue was inspired by the Sixth International
Conference on Community Psychology, held in South Africa in May 2016, and resonates with the
call for the conscious decolonisation of knowledge creation. We argue that the decolonial turn in
psychology has re-centred critical projects within the discipline, particularly in the Global South, and
offered possibilities for their (re)articulation, expansion, and insertion into dominant and mimetic
knowledge production. In the case of Africa, we suggest that the work of decolonising community
psychologies will benefit from engagement with the continent’s multiple knowledge archives.
Recognising community psychologies’ (dis)contents and the possibilities for its reconstruction, and
appealing to a liberatory knowledge archive, the Issue includes a distinctive collection of articles
that are diverse in conceptualisation, content, and style, yet evenly and singularly focused on the
construction of insurgent knowledges and praxes. As representations of both production and
resistance, the contributions in this issue provide the intellectual and political platforms for social,
gender, and epistemic justice. We conclude that there are unexplored and exciting prospects for
scholarly work on the psychologies embedded in the overlooked knowledge archives of the Global
South. Such work would push the disciplinary boundaries of community psychologies; help produce
historicised and situated conceptions of community, knowledge, and liberation; and offer distinctive
contributions to the global bodies of knowledge concerned with the well-being of all of humanity.Institute for Social and Health Studies (ISHS
