Conferencias

Christopher Sonn is based at Victoria University, Australia, with Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Centre and the Institute of Health and Sport, and the Community Identity Displacement Research Network (CIDRN), which he cofounded.  He holds a visiting position at the University of the Witwatersrand.  His research have focused on the lived experience of migrant populations, racialized people, and other marginalized groups in Australia and South Africa. Through his publications, he has contributed to the understanding of apartheid through the lenses of liberation and community psychology, in addition to understanding the psychosocial and political praxis of apartheid, and others forms of oppression/resistance in Australia.  Recent work has focussed on decoloniality, placemaking, and fostering solidarities through critical community engaged research and action.  Christopher is co-author of numerous publications that appear in leading journals and books including the book Social Psychology and Everyday life (2nd ed.; 2020), and co-editor of Decoloniality, Knowledge Production and Epistemic Justice in Community Psychology (2021 with Garth Stevens). He is also an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Community Psychology and Community Psychology in Global Perspective. Christopher was the co-chair of the 8th International Conference on Community Psychology in Melbourne, Australia.

Abstract
Critical and community psychology in different contexts and countries have offered theories, methods, and practices to respond to issues of oppression, marginalisation and exclusion.  In more recent times critical and decolonial scholars have challenged the disciplines to look inward and outward, to examine its role in reproducing privilege and dispossession.  Central questions for those in university settings are, how and where is coloniality emboldened, whose knowledge count, whose knowledge is absent, who are we accountable to, and how do we reimagine possibilities otherwise — in and from place.  In this, presentation, I draw on work with the South African and other diaspora and Indigenous people in our efforts of place and community making inside and outside our university within the longer history of settler colonial relations in Australia.  Narrating through these projects that centre art, creativity, and culture, I show the persistence of dominant racialised lies in the lives of those constructed as other, and how these also become the basis for coalition. The examples highlight practices of reimagining archives, interrogating absences, restoring and reinventing ways of being, and pushing beyond disciplinary boundaries in the efforts to achieve collective dignity, structural equity, and safety in solidarity.