Rachael Fox
At Volume 30, Australian Community Psychologist finds itself experiencing a bit of a birthday. The journal is older than 30 years in fact: it began as Network: The Bulletin of the Board of Community Psychologists in 1984. In some ways it is also younger; it became Australian Community Psychologist in 2006. During all this time it has remained one of the few community psychology peer reviewed journals which is open access. It was started in 1984 by Art Veno, who sadly died earlier this year. Heather Gridley has far more knowledge than I of both Art and the history of the journal, and so the first piece of this issue is a Guest Editorial by Heather. As part of our birthday and as tribute to Art, we have uploaded scanned copies of the back issues of Network to our archive page – the archive is almost complete – if anyone has copies of Volume 1 which we were unable to locate, please do get in touch (we are also missing Vol. 3 No. 1 (1987) and Vol. 6 No. 3 (1990)).
This issue includes a special section on Australian migration with 4 papers that describe migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in Australia. Puvimanasinghe et al. describe experiences of service providers offering trauma counselling to refugees and asylum-seekers. Khawaja and Hebbani examine factors impacting life satisfaction of refugees in Australia. Hartley and Pedersen examine attitudes towards people seeking asylum in Australia. Fierro Hernandez and Sonn explore experiences of Colombian Migrants negotiating identity and settlement. At a time where Australia’s migration policies and rhetoric are as problematic and controversial as ever, as thousands of asylum seekers and refugees are held in detention around Australia, work which seeks to unmask, contest and disrupt is vital.
Finally, we have a very thought provoking paper by Nikki Harre: Let’s assume people are good: Rethinking research in community psychology, which examines community psychology assumptions around research and how we might act differently. We also have a book review of Nikki’s latest work; The Infinite Game.