Abstract

The racialised, classed and patriarchal coordinates of coloniality are observed in the various ways that social, material and psychological life in South Africa are articulated, enacted and understood. Accordingly, praxes for decolonial feminist community psychologies must consider not only the persisting symbolic and discursive iterations of coloniality, but also its grammar, which acts both explicitly and covertly to shape and detotalise people’s meaning-making capabilities. Situated in this way, community psychologies are challenged to interrogate their complicity in the construction and perpetuation of patriarchal, and other colonially-informed epistemes. In speaking to this, we examine in this chapter how, in a participatory film-making project, young people were, and were not, able to come-to-voice within the ebb and flow of hegemonic power structures intrinsic to coloniality. To this end, we reflexively consider the manner by which the youth participants, at three distinct stages of the project, embodied, negated and engaged ambiguously with decolonial feminist community psychological praxes. We conclude by examining the inherent challenges and successes of undertaking community-centred work of this kind.