- Title
- Overcoming essentialism in community psychology: The use of a narrative-discursive approach within African feminisms
- Creator
- Mavuso, Jabulile M-J J, Chiweshe, Malvern, Macleod, Catriona I
- Subject
- To be catalogued
- Date
- 2019
- Type
- text
- Type
- book chapter
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434131
- Identifier
- vital:73033
- Identifier
- ISBN 978-3-030-20000-8
- Identifier
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20001-5_2
- Description
- A decolonial feminist community psychology approach understands individual experience as being embedded in, enabled and shaped by discursive and social power relations, and that transformative change is only possible through this contextualised understanding of individual experiences. African feminisms have been concerned with the challenging task of exploring and producing accounts of the complexity and multiplicity in womxn’s (and mxn’s) experiences of localised, multiple forms of oppression and the resistances enacted against them. We demonstrate how the utilisation of a narrative-discursive method in research that is guided by poststructural and postcolonial African feminist theorising may be a useful tool in realising the goals and aims of both decolonial feminist community psychology, and African feminist theorising. In this chapter, we draw on research that explored Zimbabwean womxn’s narratives of abortion decision-making and South African womxn’s and healthcare providers’ narratives of their experiences of the pre-abortion counselling healthcare encounter in the Eastern Cape public health sector. We also draw on our own intervention, a policy brief that had been developed into pre-abortion counselling guidelines which were informed by womxn’s narrated experiences. We argue that applying a narrative-discursive approach to African feminist theorising enables understandings of African womxn’s experiences and resistances which are informed by definitions of racial identity and culture, womxnhood, and social reality as dynamic social concepts and practices. These kinds of understandings facilitate community psychology interventions that are relevant and ‘emancipatory’ as they stem from the multiplicity of participants’ narrated experiences and the social and discursive power relations implicit in these narratives.
- Format
- 15 pages, pdf
- Publisher
- Springer
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Mavuso, J.M.J.J., Chiweshe, M.T. and Macleod, C.I., 2019. Overcoming essentialism in community psychology: The use of a narrative-discursive approach within African feminisms. In Decolonial feminist community psychology (pp. 11-26). Cham: Springer International Publishing
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the SpringerLink Terms of Use Statement ( https://link.springer.com/termsandconditions)
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Macleod, Catriona Ida (Distinguished Professor)
RU DST/NRF SARChI for Critical Studies in Sexualities and Reproductions Research (CSSR) Programme
RU Department of Psychology
SDG 05. Gender Equality
SDG 03. Good Health and Well-Being
RU Books and Book Chapters
SDG 10. Reduced Inequalities
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details | SOURCE1 | Overcoming essentialism in community psychology.pdf | 609 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |