Decolonizing Critical Knowledges Borne in the Borderlands: From “Morbid Symptoms” to Critical Solidarities

Abstract

Resurrecting activist-scholar ancestors who have toiled in the 'borderlands' to produce knowledge alongside social movements, this essay calls up a buried legacy of twentieth century community psychology research collectives largely in the Americas that have been aligned with justice struggles, designed to document both the dispossession and the privileges unleashed by structural violence. These projects, rooted in universities, community research centers, prisons and folk schools, set out to theorize how injustice moves under the skin, into bodies and communities of poverty and wealth and to interrogate not only the downstream consequences, or morbid symptoms of oppression but also to chronicle what Jessica Ruglis and I have called circuits of oppression, privilege, and resistance (2012). The essay speaks in two registers, seeking to address the knowledge, affects and subjectivities cultivated in two kinds of 'borderlands': community based research collectives held by 'contact zones' of academic researchers and community members/activists, and an ethnographic sketch of dynamics within a contemporary detention camp in Kearney New Jersey. In both cases, a mosaic of bodies, pain, power and expertise mingles; new knowledges, identities, solidarities, radical possibilities and new objects of terror form. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)