Between the Ruins and Otherwise: Liberatory community psychology as decolonial praxis

Abstract

I offer a critical-reflective account that advances a liberatory community psychology grounded in decolonial thought. It emerges from the lived contradictions of knowledge-making in South Africa. Written between the ruins of coloniality and the horizons of the otherwise, the article traces a praxis woven through decades of community-engaged scholarship, collective struggle, and methodological invention. I propose a psychology that reckons with its complicities while remaining answerable to those who enact life otherwise. Contributing to broader debates on decolonial and Global South psychologies, I situate liberatory community psychology as a praxis of epistemic accountability, relational ethics, and collective world-making. Two interwoven trajectories structure the argument: advancing knowledge as accountability through reframing violence, cultivating care-worlds, and enacting solidarities; and developing methodologies of refusal and relation through refusal as stance, relation as praxis, and collective authorship as insurgent knowledge-making. I conclude by turning to the university itself, read through the lens of emancipatory breaches, or insurgent openings where collective accountability and the unfinished labour of liberation can still take hold. In thinking from the ruins and towards the otherwise, I offer a vision of psychology remade through struggle, responsibility, and relation.