Implicit knowledge, critical reflection, and social change

Much current research on immigration and intercultural contact adopts a relatively static and apolitical position, typically the position held by the dominant group. This is unfortunate, as it fails to account for the effect of historical and power-related issues (Perkins & Procentese, 2010; Sonn & Green, 2006). This themed issue is designed to begin to redress this prevailing trend by focusing on intervention theory, research, and methods that recognize the political dimensions inherent in intercultural interactions, as well as the power differentials inherent in these interactions that take place on the edge of different stories, traditions, and communities. Intercultural, liberation, and critical community psychologies are assumed as the bedrock of this intercultural perspective.

The articles in this themed issue acknowledge the central role that culture plays in the analysis of, and intervention in, social settings. Consistent with Kral et al. (2011), these articles adopt “a cultural approach [to community psychology] that values the community’s points of view and an understanding of shared and divergent meanings, goals, and norms within a theory of empowerment” (p. 46). The articles herein view culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which [people] communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life” (p. 89) (Geertz, 1973). From this point of view, culture is also embodied in implicit knowledge and unconscious common sense. Hence, efforts to understand intercultural interactions and to intervene in culturally cognizant ways necessitate the creation of opportunities for conscientization. The projects described in each of the articles in this themed issue aimed to create such opportunities for critical reflection and analysis through dialogue.

To unpack the processes involved in critical reflection and analysis, the analyses offered in these articles devote special attention to intersubjectivity (O’Donnell & Tharp, 2012). In Italy, Mantovani (2000, 2010) has offered a unique understanding of cultural psychology that places intersubjectivity at its core. Mantovani’s (2010) view is focused neither on inter- nor intra-group comparisons, but rather on the analysis of shared contexts, “the borders” where people, even if geographically close, still have an us–them perspective. This approach opens new paths to examining intercultural relations by highlighting elements of conciliation and negotiation as well as elements of difference and conflict. In this regard, intersubjectivity is a tool to share knowledge in common settings; shared activities lead to shared meanings among participants.

To further unpack the processes involved in critical reflection and analysis, and to shape social change strategies, the authors of the articles in this issue draw on liberation and critical psychology. Maritza Montero (2009), in particular, has based her approach on the paradigm of Critical Transformation and Construction, while using a generative, participatory and critical community and social psychology approach. Her thought is consistent with Martín-Baró, Aron and Corne (1994) and Fals Borda’s (2001) methods for raising critical consciousness, each of which focuses on those psychosocial processes that overcome alienation and counteract the reduction of social problems to natural causes while developing different consciousness. Indeed, Montero’s work opens new paths for critical community psychology that assumes in full the principles of the South American Psychology of Liberation (Montero, 2009) understanding the interaction among well-being, power, and social oppression, including critical thinking, the pursuit of social justice, and individual and collective empowerment.

This themed issue presents articles that focus on politics, research, and intervention at a community level. Taken together, these articles illustrate how critical and liberation psychology can bring innovative perspectives to intercultural research and community intervention, augmenting traditional research methods and intervention rules. These articles merge the principles of liberation psychology in a dialectic and synergic fashion with the latest developments of the ecological model in community psychology to interpret migration processes and other intercultural interactions. The articles further illustrate that many social problems and intervention strategies—including the building of social capabilities—are productively understood as rooted in intercultural interaction. A common goal across the projects presented in these articles is to identify strategies that promote social cohesion and wellness in culturally pluralistic societies (García-Ramirez, de la Mata, Paloma, & Hernández-Plata, 2010).

Many of the authors in this issue have found participatory action research (PAR) methods (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013; Reason & Bradbury, 2013) a natural complement to the critical and liberation psychology frameworks they have adopted. They share significant principles and strategies of intervention from a PAR perspective, shedding light on a number of crucial procedural factors, including: (a) trust among researchers, participants and local inhabitants; (b) importance of gatekeepers, people as actors and actresses of the research; (c) the importance of acquiring power issues, defining power profiling in the context under studies and among different participants and stakeholders; (d) the relevance of opportunities of shared events and debates among people belonging to different communities as instruments to overcame stereotypes and prejudices; (e) the role of observation as a conscientization tool; and, (f) the role of reflexivity to enhance relations among people with different backgrounds and experiences in the research team, among researchers and local participants or stakeholders, as well as among local groups of different tribal or various cultural traditions and habits. In fact, we assume the absence of reflexivity is an obstacle to change, in that it places social actors in conflict, which is usually unconscious, thereby hindering the development and promotion of transformative actions, as we shall see in the next pages.

The Manchester University team (Lawthom et al.) offers a rich description of an intervention with Chinese migrants in the UK. They focus on the issue of power within every phase of the research project.

The Neapolitan research team (Arcidiacono et al.) focuses its contribution on the need to improve and develop a set of methodological tools for participatory research, that is, context observation, focused interviews, think-tank discussion, and social mediation, as well as negotiation, and power profiling. These tools have all been put into work in an area rife with intercultural conflict in Southern Italy.

Dutta and Aber’s critical ethnography also incorporates participatory action research. Their article interrogates the meaning of everyday violence in the Garo Hills in northeast India. It describes the creation of new social spaces through PAR that afforded people belonging to different groups opportunities to engage in critical dialogue and community research aimed to address reciprocal stereotypes, prejudice and violence. The project interrogated the meaning of the concepts of community, participation, and belonging, each foundational to intercultural engagement, through the lens of enacted cultural critique. For example, community is a multi-level construct with cultural, psychological, ethnic and geopolitical elements. When the boundaries of communities (psychologically and geopolitically constructed) are uncertain, belonging is complicated and contested. Community, then, has multiple referents and is used in discordant ways. Dutta and Aber start by discussing the challenges to participation posed by conflicting notions of “community” and what an enacted cultural critique means under those conditions. They then provide an example of enacted cultural critique by the youth participants, which concludes with an illustration of successful intercultural engagement—the reframing of community in more inclusive terms.

Francesca Esposito’s report (Istituto Superior de Psicologia applicata of Lisbon) shares her experience in a Migrant Identification and Expulsion Center (CIE). Following the Schengen treaty (1995), these centers have become widespread all over Europe. Although they cannot be regarded as prisons, “irregular” migrants are still detained there. These places illustrate the arrogance of European power in dealing with migrants who are seeking jobs as well as refugees asking for asylum. The detailed description of daily life activities, the use of doors and keys to move from a site to another, represents another example of “the banality of evil.” The contribution also advocates “the role of reflexive engagement in the research process in order to challenge power relations.” This article specifically aims “to foster a reflexive community psychology practice, incorporating feminist goals, and a dialogue about ethnography in community psychology.”

Recently, Case, Todd, and Kral (2014) have argued for the value of observation based in ethnographic principles as a tool, which gives community psychology new elements for transformative and participatory research and practice. The Esposito article provides a detailed account of observation as a powerful tool for social research, illustrating how our research evidence and facts reflect the individual perceptions, stereotypes and representation of both the researcher and people involved in the observation.

Taurini et al. develop further tools to reach for social justice and well-being. Their Italian–Spanish joint research experience analyzes the determinants of well-being in the migrant life. Drawing on the work of Natale, Arcidiacono, and Di Martino (2013), Taurini et al. examine the quality of social relations, the recognition of every identity, and power-based dynamics as influences on social well-being and social malaise. To better understand the epistemological and methodological aspects of those contexts marked by psycho-social oppression, it is useful to adopt a perspective that takes into account these psycho-social interchanges along with the relationship between the subject and “the Other,” and power-based dimensions within the local community. In the same vein, Paloma, García-Ramírez, and Camacho (2014) are developing a predictive model of well-being by taking into account Moroccan migrant life experience in Spain and therefore giving suggestion for its improvement.

This final article by Acosta-Mosquera et al. makes us aware of the fact that intercultural competence is strictly connected with vision and competences of health and social personnel. We then assume the importance of training to foster and improve their competencies.

Competencies for intercultural dialogue are at stake in all the articles in the themed issue. In our view, the process of reflexivity assumes a central role for its capacity to encompass the whole area of experience while comprehending it. Reflectivity, trust and participatory procedure are in fact widely described as significant factors in the proposed intercultural perspective. In this framework, the relationships built between the participants, various stakeholders, and the researchers turned out to be the pivotal elements in the research methodology itself. Creating and sustaining these relationships constituted a specific method of investigation and action in the local setting based on the continuous co-construction of meaning and negotiation of the sense of the intervention itself among all the actors involved in the process.

Finally, we believe the articles in this themed issue demonstrate that psychological investigations into decolonizing intercultural interventions provide new insights across a variety of social settings. The articles reveal that interpersonal negotiation of personal and collective stories in specific historical moments functions to make possible the construction of shared narratives (Mantovani, 2010) that will “transform both people and societies, acknowledging their denied potential” (Martín-Baró, Aron, & Corne, 1994, p. 22). The study of power and the problems deriving from it, in all relational and social settings, provides a fruitful perspective from which to understand social conflicts and their representation, giving to critical community psychology a peculiar hallmark. Finally, promoting conscientization and social awareness, investigating justice and power at the relational and institutional levels, and promoting well-being using participatory methodologies are tools for sharing and disseminating knowledge and actions for social change pursuing justice and democracy.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Salvatore Di Martino, who helped us with the English version and Filomena Tuccillo, who helped with editing of the volume. A special thanks to our friend and colleague, Adrian Fisher, who set and reviewed a preliminary version of the issue.