EMPHASIS IN COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY, LIBERATION PSYCHOLOGY, AND ECOPSYCHOLOGY
This specialization is a bold initiative to forge interdisciplinary transformative approaches to personal, community, cultural, and ecological challenges of our time. While grounding students in psychoanalytic, Jungian, archetypal, and phenomenological lineages of depth psychology, Euro-American depth psychological theories and practices are placed in dynamic dialogue with ecopsychology, cultural studies, critical community psychology, and indigenous and liberation psychologies from diverse cultural settings.
To study community and ecopsychology in the light of liberation psychology is to commit to the exploration of the profound effects of injustice, violence, and the exploitation of others and nature on psychological, communal, and ecological well-being. It is a commitment to create paths to peace and reconciliation, justice, and sustainability.
Through community and ecological fieldwork and research, students work in the area of their calling, while deepening their ethical discernment, reflecting on their own positionality, widening their repertoire of dialogue and arts-based approaches, and gathering the theoretical insight and practical skills to conduct participatory action research and community and organizational program evaluation.
Praxis classes mentor students in innovative group approaches: council/circle, appreciative inquiry, theater of the oppressed, public conversation, open space technology, community dreamwork, liberation arts, restorative justice, somatic approaches to trauma healing, conflict transformation, and imaginal and ritual approaches to community health and healing.
Students in the Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, Ecopsychology specialization develop scholarly and creative writing skills
- Learn innovative approaches to trauma healing, restorative justice, ecological sustainability, community building, economic justice, forced migration, alternatives to violence, peacebuilding, and reconciliation
- Practice participatory action research and program and organizational evaluation, while deepening ethical discernment regarding issues of power and privilege
- Train in a wide variety of group approaches to cultural and ecological work
- Develop scholarly and creative writing skills
- Conduct community and ecological fieldwork and research in the area of one’s own interest
- Develop the capacity to teach in academic and community learning environments
- Apply insights to a wide variety of professions and leadership positions
Conduct community and ecological fieldwork and research in the area of one’s own interest
Classes take place in nine three-day sessions (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday), approximately once each month during fall, winter, and spring. In the first and second summers, students complete fieldwork and research in their home communities or other off-campus sites. In the third summer and subsequent year(s), students are involved in writing their dissertations in their home communities.
Some areas our students and alumni work in are education (high schools, colleges, universities, prisons, alternative learning centers, youth programs); prison reform and restorative justice initiatives; arts-based community building; trauma healing; advocacy and grassroots coalitions; social justice; organizational development and transformation; peacebuilding and community dialogue; health services (including hospice); NGO’s (nongovernmental organizations); planning and evaluation; land preservation, peak oil planning and sustainability issues, local food initiatives; philanthropy; microlending and economic alternatives.
