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The materialist conception of art understands art in relation to the material conditions within and by which art is produced and consumed. For cultural psychology, the materialist conception of art has been useful for developing insights into how individual perceptions are shaped, and are shaped by, culture as a collectively produced and historically embedded site of meaning-making. However, in much of cultural psychology, the relationship between progressive politics and the materialist conception of art remains under-appreciated. In this article, I consider how cultural psychologists might strengthen this relation through artistic shock, that is, a subjective, perceptual, and/or historiographical rupture brought about through the experience of art. In particular, I outline how Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin theorised and practiced artistic shock, and examine what the work of these thinkers could mean for cultural psychologists working with political collectives to grapple with psychopolitical questions related to subjectivity, contradiction, and memory. I conclude by reflecting on how future work that seeks to politicise cultural psychology might engage with the materialist conception of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout its history, capitalism has undertaken its extractive, imperial, and expropriative operations under the sign of democracy. Psychology has played a part in the ideological consolidation of capitalist democracy, adapting people to this system while also legitimising it. However, what of radical democracy as an always-contested grassroots organisational form that stands in opposition to both capitalism and the capitalist co-optation of democracy? Radical democracy of this sort remains a psychologically fraught function of anticapitalist resistance, one that has the potential to produce fracturing among comrades building such democracy. In this article, I consider how critical psychologists can work with those undertaking the difficult work of building radical democracy into political and quotidian life. I consider what critical psychology praxis could mean for those practicing radical democracy and how critical psychology might reconstitute itself through radically democratic formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consciousness-raising denotes the process of using people's experiences of oppression to inform their collective political activity. The role of psychology in the history of consciousness-raising has been double-edged. On the one hand, mainstream psychology has recuperated consciousness-raising, depoliticizing it so that it reflects little more than a therapeutic mode of self-help that adjusts subjects to – rather than challenges – oppressive social systems. On the other hand, those working within the liberation psychology paradigm have sought to harness consciousness-raising for the kinds of politically progressive purposes for which it was initially intended. Through what I call unconsciousness-raising, I consider how those working within the psychoanalytic tradition of liberation psychology can stretch the political capacities of the consciousness-raising process by using this process to recognize how the unconscious structures emancipatory political organizing. Unconsciousness-raising has the potential to shift the activist subject's relationship to unconscious identifications in accordance with a democratically conceived political agenda, and to harness the emancipatory potential of desire to advance this agenda. I examine what the unconsciousness-raising process can mean for the collective constitution of political subjectivity, and how this process can trouble static conceptions of reflexivity theory. Following this, I offer an example of unconsciousness-raising from the community-engaged work with which I am involved. I conclude by reflecting on some future directions for unconsciousness-raising as a community-engaged and a thoroughly political psychological process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those working from within the liberation psychology paradigm strive to remould psychology so that it might be put to work for the task of liberation – a task with which most psychologists have, historically, been wholly unconcerned. In practice, liberation psychology tends to be porous, multiple, and under-resourced. Indeed, much of what we might think of as liberation psychology is not referred to as such by its practitioners. Surfacing liberation psychology, then, requires reading into its undocumented histories. In this article, we attempt to develop a picture of liberation psychology in South Africa (SA) by reading the archives of Mohamed Seedat, a pioneering practitioner of liberation psychology. Grounded in the working-class south of Johannesburg and underwritten by expansive global commitments to liberation, Seedat’s archive spans almost four decades, passing through many disciplines, communities, political traditions, and affective registers. We suggest that his archive offers us insights into the affective components of history, developing community praxis in apartheid and post-apartheid SA, and humanising knowledge-making. We conclude by reflecting on how liberation psychology archives like Seedat’s serve as under-appreciated resources for grappling with the psycho-political constitution of emancipatory struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coloniality represents the contemporary patterns of power and domination that emerged in the late 15th century during the so-called classic era of colonialism. Although much of psychology and psychological thought has adhered to the logic of coloniality, there is also a considerable body of work that has sought to decolonize psychology. It is within this latter tradition of decolonizing psychology--which seems to have gained increasing attention in recent years--that we situate this article and its attempt to articulate a decolonial Africa(n)-centered psychology that addresses itself to antiracism. While we concede that there are myriad ways by which to practice and theorize such a psychology, we focus specifically on collective antiracist struggle and everyday antiracist resistance. We conclude by considering questions of universalism and epistemology as they relate to a decolonial Africa(n)-centered psychology of antiracism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departing from the position that critical African psychology is an endeavour whose objective is to harness psychological knowledge in, by, for, and with Africa, as well as the world, but also to critically think Africa into psychology, this article considers space as a key idea to consider in the further development of African psychology, and more specifically, a critically inclined African psychology. Taking critical African psychology as one of the orientations within Africa(n)-centred psychology, we argue for constructing and enlarging space so as to resist ruling epistemes in psychology in and of Africa and to create oppositional spaces that adduce alternative readings and makings of psychology-in-place. We outline three pathways, namely, (1) collective thinking and writing, (2) transdisciplinarity, and (3) affective community building, via which to realise and work from a critical African psychological position. These by no means exhaust all the pathways that can be charted by critical African psychologists and are instead offered as illustrations with which our collective has been engaging, thinking together, and experimenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his pioneering work on liberation psychology, Ignacio Martín-Baró describes de-alienation as a subjective process of recovering fragmented historical pasts for the purpose of reconstituting and liberating ourselves from an oppressive, alienating present. In this article, I argue that although de-alienation is typically understood as a political concept, it also lends itself to psychoanalytic readings. To this end, I draw on Marxist notions of material alienation, as well as Lacanian conceptions of subjective alienation, to offer a psychopolitical interpretation of de-alienation. More specifically, I use Marx and Lacan to consider how liberation psychology work can advance de-alienating processes within political organising, the production of art, and knowledge creation. I conclude by urging those working within the liberation psychology paradigm to consider how other psychopolitical lenses might avail emancipatory insights into collective resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By considering how psychologists are able to hold (that is, support distinctive ontologies) Liberation Psychology (LP) with Marxisms, this article interrogates psychological approaches to liberation in two ways. First, against the foundations of LP and Marxisms, as well as attempts to formulate psychological Marxisms and Marxist psychologies, the paper examines how holding LP with Marxisms facilitates a necessarily expansive, innovative, and democratic conception of liberation. Second, by exploring matters related to history, epistemology, reflexivity, and the State, a theoretical holding of this kind is shown to permit psychologists nuanced ways of engaging complex psychosocial phenomena in their work. It is concluded that by holding LP with Marxisms, psychologists employ a sensitivity towards a local–global nexus of interlocking liberation struggles, while taking seriously matters of power, space, time, identity, violence, and freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within psychology, love is typically understood in fundamentally psychological terms. Even those critical psychologists who have interrogated the sociopolitical dimensions of love seem unable to break from conceptions of love as romantic, familial, and/or private. In this article, I argue that in understanding love as a disposition, rather than a feeling, political psychologists are able to bring nuance to mainstream psychology's engagement with the emancipatory potentialities of love while, simultaneously, instating a critical reorientation of political psychology. To this end, I offer two pathways through which political psychologists can work with love: rooting counter-hegemonies in the love ethic, and enunciating love knowledges across contexts. I conclude by reflecting on future directions for critical political psychologists who are concerned with a multifaceted, materialist, psychopolitical and contextually-bound notion of love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]