Three Journeys in Feminism and Community Psychology
Hilary Lapsley, Heather Gridley and Colleen Turner
Reflections on life stories from those who began their journeys with psychology in the transformational decades of the 1960s and 1970s are now appearing, often with reflections on interrelationships between personal, professional, and political experiences and contexts.
In this article three women psychologists from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand with over 150 years of connection to psychology between them reflect on their career-long journeys with feminism and community psychology, and their shared commitments to social justice.
We recall our first encounters with psychology, our growing awareness of social inequities outside and within psychology, and the challenges and achievements that came from insisting that careers made room for values. We go on to consider how we are each continuing such efforts in our older years, and in different times from those that shaped us.
Our three life stories illustrate how creativity, effort, privilege, commitment, and luck allowed us to confront the mainstream and align our work and workplaces with values of inclusion, equity, and justice.
At the same time, we acknowledge that we are not entirely the authors of our own lives, which have been shaped by dear colleagues, by privilege and adversity, by changes achieved and resisted within psychology, and by the wider forces of social change over the decades.
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