Email this article Using critical reflexivity to decolonise community research: Listening to the voices of mothers navigating an early childhood support system in Chile
Abstract
Community psychology has advanced in questioning the colonial biases embedded in its practices—biases that continue to reproduce power inequalities between the Global North and the Global South and impose specific notions of identity and the self. However, further methodological guidance is still needed to operationalize research that challenges the hegemony of Western knowledge and colonial ways of thinking, while offering alternative approaches for the co-production of knowledge committed to social change in favor of oppressed and marginalized groups. This study contributes to this effort through a first-person account of the researcher’s embodied experience during a 15-month follow-up of a low-income mother classified as high psychosocial risk and a user of the Chile Grows with You (ChGY) system. A narrative autoethnographic strategy is employed to analyze how the reflexive strategies adopted shaped the research process and outcomes. The findings reveal that critical reflexivity enabled the researcher to recognize and overcome individualistic biases, integrate an ecological and situated understanding of motherhood in contexts of oppression, and transform their role toward ethical psychosocial accompaniment aligned with the principles of critical community psychology. The study underscores the importance of training reflexive researchers and promoting contextualized epistemologies that make visible power dynamics and oppression in work with marginalized communities.
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