Rachael Fox
This issue of the Australian Community Psychologist has been quite a while coming. The year has been very difficult on our authors, our reviewers, our Editorial team, and our production team, and I am grateful to all for getting through difficult times to complete the issue.
In January, in Australia the fires burnt an estimated 46 million acres. We have grieved the loss of an estimated three billion animals and some endangered species were believed to be driven to extinction. The pandemic of course has since then dominated all our lives, creating a shared situation for humans of the entire planet, albeit one which has not been shared equally in any manner. The injustices, violences and inequalities were already being experienced unequally and so this pandemic has deepened issues that were already present, caused a deepening of misery for many, and perhaps also made these issues more visible to privileged people than they were before.
The articles in this issue were all started before the pandemic, but I find them very relevant to the global issues we are presently facing and are a series of critical papers. The first two take a critical discursive approach to the dominant systems, technologies and meanings that construct psychological practice in problematic ways. Edwards and Watson examine the impact of heteronormativity on psychologists’ abilities to support LGBTQI youth – and find we have far to go. Stiles and Fox examine the impact of neoliberal discourse on Psychologists’ Self-care and construct a problematic picture of an individualised, responsibilised subject who maintains the status quo of efficient, overworked subjects. Long articles, but the reviewers in particular communicated that they are well worth the read and I quite agree.
Keast offers further critical discursive reflection, offering a valuable critical policy analysis based on Foucauldian theory, examining ways in which wellbeing has been constructed in Australian education policy. Finally Jeffrey, Duckett and Fryer offer a critical and very thought provoking paper on rethinking the contemporary community psychology subject, in response to a paper in our last issue by Harre.
As a close to the issue, we have a special practice section of 4 short practice papers, written by practitioners who work with young people, on the systems and challenges that they face. These are rich short insights into practice work. We would welcome further submissions – on topics people would like to submit, but perhaps in particular in relation to recent events, such as the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
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