C 2005) American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 35, Nos. 3/4, June 2005 ( DOI: 10.1007/s10464-005-3402-6
Community Psychology Is (Thank God) More Than Science1 Julian Rappaport2,3
Thinking about Community Psychology primarily as a science may make it harder, rather than easier, to embrace certain aspects of the field to which we are deeply committed, but usually fall outside the conventional meaning of “doing science.” While community psychologists use (and expand) the tools of science, this is different than saying that Community Psychology is only, or even primarily, a science. The field is just as much social criticism as it is science. In order to further conversation about these matters, seven thoughts about why (thank God) community psychology is more than a science are offered, the most basic of which is that today the greatest danger to freedom is not in the union of church and state, but in the union of science and state. KEY WORDS: science and state; social criticism; critical consciouness; philosophy of science; social justice; qualitative methodology.
On August 9, 2004, National Public Radio’s Snigdha Prakash (npr.org/archives) reported on “Morning Edition” that a recent investigation in response to critics worried about influence on the direction of academic research in a project funded by the agribusiness division of Novartis, at the University of California, Berkeley, found that in this case there was no undue influence. However, investigators suggested that there may have been a “subtle influence.” Administrators at Berkeley had apparently conducted an “auction,” offering sponsorship of research in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology to the highest bidder. Novartis gave them 25 million dollars over 5 years, reportedly to do whatever basic research they desired. According to the story, Andrew Gutierrez, a Professor of ecosystem science at Berkeley said, “When you start receiving large amounts of funding, it can’t help but influence people’s perception of who they are serving, and I don’t care how ethical the individual might be.” The investigation did find that in aligning itself so closely with Novartis the University “threatened its capac-
ity to serve the public as an independent source of knowledge,” and may have influenced a denial of tenure to a critic of the deal. There is no doubt that the modern university is increasingly dependent on corporate sponsorships. This is something that many people worry about, and the Berkeley case above is just one among many such arrangements. What is less likely to raise eyebrows is the influence of government on research agendas. Presumably, this is because priorities selected by government are thought to be, by definition, in the public interest. Perhaps so; but there is no reason to assume government sponsored research is a neutral force with respect to the products of that research. For example, funding for research on homelessness is currently channeled to NIMH, rather than HUD. What this means is that in order to obtain government funds to study homelessness researchers are encouraged to look for relationships to mental illness, as opposed to economic policy.4 Government policy decisions drive research agendas in ways that are not different from the ways that private corporate interests drive research agendas. In either case the
1 Based
on a paper presented at a Symposium, A. Wandersman (Chair), Science and Community Psychology, Held at the 9th Biennial Meeting of the Society for Community Research and Action, June, 2003, Las Vegas, New Mexico. 2 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.
3 To
whom correspondence should be addressed at Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, Illinois 61820. 4 My thanks to Beth Shinn for providing this example.
231 C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 0091-0562/05/0600-0231/0
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influence on research agendas is probably real. These influences are the subject of considerable concern. Implicit in such concerns are two assumptions: One, if researchers were somehow left to pursue their own ends, science itself would keep them free of undue influence; and two, the influence has more to do with content than with methodology. In this paper I want to take up the second assumption. Conventional scientific methods are no guarantee of research agendas free of social control because such methods are themselves representative of current consensual (status quo) ideas about methodology on the one hand, and exclusion of social critique on the other. This point is not one that is lost on our colleagues outside of psychology. A recent message submitted to the SCRA Listserv from Linda Green at the University of Toronto (September 21, 2004) posted notice of the First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. The call for papers included the following: We call on the international community of interpretive scholars . . . to address the implications of recent attempts by federal governments and their agencies to define what is good science, what is good scholarship. Around the globe governments are attempting to regulate interpretive inquiry by enforcing biomedical, evidence-based models of research . . . . In the United States . . . (this) threatens to deny advances in critical qualitative inquiry, including rigorous criticisms of positivist research . . . (and) marginalizes indigenous, border, feminist, race, queer and ethnic studies.
The argument for an expansion of what constitutes legitimate scientific inquiry has already been taken up in an earlier special section of this journal (Wandersman, 2003a). In that issue of the journal, several important matters are discussed, among them, Sarason’s (2003) plea for descriptions of community interventions to include (especially) “before the beginning” details, a topic on which he has written for at least thirty years (Sarason, 1972). Jim Kelly’s paper offered seven suggestions for ways to “reduce the constraints on the scientific discipline of community psychology” (Kelly, 2003, p. 244). Price and Behrens (2003) discussed transcending artificial “basic versus applied” research distinctions, and managing the tensions between scientific caution and community action. Finally, Wandersman (2003b) spoke of a “community science,” intending it to be a term of inclusion rather than exclusion. In one form or another, each of these scholars makes a plea for a different kind of science than the one that most of us learned about in our research
Table I. Thoughts About Why Community Psychology Is More Than Science Thought #1–Today the greatest danger to freedom is not in the union of church and state, but in the union of science and state. Thought #2–The methods of conventional science can be a limiting condition for the community psychologist’s pursuit of social justice. Thought #3–It is too easy to assume that the best way to know things is to do science. Thought #4–It is easy to assume that the only things worth doing are those that have been scientifically demonstrated; but science is not all it is cracked up to be. Thought #5–Many things worth doing have no scientific basis, but we often want to claim that they do. Thought #6–Community Psychology cannot make unique contributions under the thumb of conventional scientific constraints. Thought # 7–To the extent that we provide alternatives and analyses that are intellectually and morally compelling, the field will make unique contributions to scholarship, research and action.
methods courses. At various points and in various ways, however, I found myself wondering if thinking about community psychology primarily in terms of science does not make it harder, rather than easier, for us to embrace certain aspects of the field to which we are deeply committed, but which usually fall outside the conventional meaning of “doing science.” While I agree with almost everything I read in those four papers, I am not convinced that it is useful to think of community psychology as only (or even primarily) a conventional science. Here I intend to offer some elaboration on that idea, intended to provoke further conversation about science and Community Psychology. Most of my elaborations on the idea that Community Psychology is more than a science remain in the form of thought statements. These statements are summarized in Table I. Of course, it is usual to expect a journal article to make a logical argument; but my intention in this paper is more to provoke than convince. These statements are thoughts I might express aloud to people who do not expect any advice or answers but who may worry about these things themselves. Somehow, I expect to find such people at SCRA meetings, and reading this journal. The thoughts that follow are not necessarily in logical sequence, nor are they mutually exclusive categories; rather, they are intertwined aspects of a point of view. It is not a popular point of view in academic psychology, although as noted from the conference notice quoted above, it is a point well understood in some disciplines.
Community Psychology is (Thank God) More Than Science Before I begin I want to emphasize that although community psychologists can and do use science, I do not think Community Psychology is only a science: thus, my title. In my view, Community psychology is a unique blend of science and social criticism. It is a field of practice with explicit goals that might be thought of in Freire’s (1996, 1998) terms as critical consciousness. Combining the goals of fostering critical consciousness with the methods of science makes for an unusual combination, especially in psychology. For those among you who are fundamentalists in the faith tradition of conventional science (and I use this term to mean precisely what is meant when someone says “religious fundamentalist”), I confess that these thoughts are impure and perhaps heretical.
Today, it is easy to forget (because we take it as a given) that the Institute of Medicine (IOM)6 and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) are essentially agents of the state. George Albee, referring to IOM/ NIMH (that is, state) strategies for prevention science wrote: Primary prevention efforts to reduce the rate of mental disorders are supported largely by money derived from taxes. People do not pay directly for most prevention programs. Decisions about strategies for prevention efforts are based on the models explaining the causes of mental disorders. These decisions are made largely by powerful bureaucrats who control tax-generated research and training funds. The top bureaucrats, in turn, are appointed by politicians who sometimes have definite ideas about causation and who exert direction and control. At other times politicians are preoccupied with larger issues and leave things to the experts. When all is said and done, it is the powerful bureaucracy that endures and controls. (Albee, 1996, p. 1130)
THOUGHT #1 Today the Greatest Danger to Freedom Is Not in the Union of Church and State, but in the Union of Science and State This thought is a paraphrase from the philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend (1979). There is a lot of talk in the United States about separation of church and State. There is very little talk about separation of science and state. Community Psychology might have something to say about that. Although the framers of the U.S. constitution did not have to worry about science and its influence on the state in 1789, this worry is not a new thought. Nor is it unique to philosophy, or politics, or unknown in literature and popular culture.5 Religion versus science become salient in the United States in the period between the Civil War and World War I (Menand, 2001), but no one imagined a relationship between science and state in anything like its current form. In this regard, one might ask if the notorious Tuskegee experiments, designed in collaboration between university researchers and government officials (not private corporations), could have been anticipated?
5 This
is not the place to trace a history of the relationship between science and state, or its expression in popular culture, but I should at least note that there has been a visible intellectual skepticism and critique in literature and film for many years. By mid-20th century Orwell’s “1984” appeared, and later the film, “A clockwork Orange.” A more contemporary example might be, “The Matrix.” Community Psychology might have something to say about this topic as well.
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Today, science has the status of a religious belief system– and the state bureaucracy to enforce its dogma. If the founders of our constitution were doing it today they might have added something about the separation of science and state to the Bill of Rights.7 We worship the “free market.” We attribute to this construct the power historically attributed to God when we assume, as we do, that the free market “knows best”and is the ultimate arbiter of what has value. If getting money is justification enough for the work most people do, it is often taken as justification enough for scientists as well. Thus, the obtaining of grants, often from the state, becomes an important index of one’s worth as a scientist. For people with academic careers, questions such as, “does she get money?” are usually asked at the time of consideration for promotion and tenure. The faith in science tradition does more than control and allocate resources; it defines reality. It selects the worthwhile, the true and the meaningful. It serves the purposes of the state by sanctifying what the state does, and
6 The
IOM is not formally a government agency, but it does serve as a primary policy agent of government. 7 That we can do something in the context of science need not mean we should do it. Many policy makers and scientists tend to think technical possibility itself justifies actual use. I do not here discuss the more obvious forms of science and state collaboration motivated by the politics of empire, fear and fascism ranging from traditional development of weapons to more recent ideas incorporated in the so-called, Patriot Act, as for example, the use of computerized library records to monitor what you are reading. This paper worries about more subtle forms of collaboration.
234 vice versa. This is a very convenient relationship for certain elites. There is plenty of evidence that what we believe in: science, voodoo, Christianity, Islam— both explains and controls. There is also considerable evidence that state funding agencies (even if, or perhaps because, evaluation panels are composed of respected scientists) define the limits of acceptable methodology, and little reason to expect these agents of the state to fund conceptual or methodological approaches that are critical of the powers that be. I do not suggest that there is some sort of conspiracy to reject new ideas or ways of doing research, only that certain methods, models and ways of thinking become sanctified in the culture of science exactly as they would in any other culture. Nor do I think it impossible for creative researchers to work around such conservative traditions, only that the sanctification of these conventions by the state makes it harder, rather than easier to do so.
THOUGHT #2 The Methods of Conventional Science Can Be a Limiting Condition for the Community Psychologist’s Pursuit of Social Justice In sociological terms science’s function with respect to the state is quite like the functions historically served by religion. One might argue that professors are like theologians (after all, the seminary is the origin of our model for a university) and practitioners of psychology and social science are priests, those who help ordinary people to understand the meaning of things, including our relationship to one another, to the material world, to the universe; and to adjust to things as they are. As psychologists, emphasizing that our work is mainstream science has practical advantages: It increases our access to power, money and legitimacy. But knowledge, morality, and ethical practices do not necessarily follow from power, money and legitimacy. Nor does social justice. We should not confuse these things. Community Psychology as social criticism is as much a part of our traditions as is science. So why don’t we say, “Community Psychology is social criticism”? I suspect those who think Community Psychology is science would prefer to say “we can use social criticism, but it does not define the field.” This is exactly what I contend we should say about science. Feyerabend (1975) is the author of a book called “Against Method.” He was an iconoclast who argued that we can learn more if we follow anarchy rather
Rappaport than orthodoxy in methodology. What he meant was, science tends to sanctify certain methods as correct, and thus confine us to certain paradigmatic views of knowing that become so much background that they form a culture. When I served as Editor of the American Journal of Community Psychology I noticed this. I marveled at how many reviewers (often people I thought were very bright and creative) demonstrated that they remember the rules they learned in their graduate research design class. Editors and editorial boards select for those who have had some success doing things the way they are supposed to be done. We come to like it that way and it is not surprising that we would be conservative about breaking out. This is not all bad. Conservativism is an asset in making scientific judgments. It’s just not all good. Conservativism is a liability in locating the creative, the unusual, and dealing with what one art critic called, the “shock of the new.” It hampers social criticism. The culture of science becomes invisible; but when customs, or conventions are violated they both expose culture and are usually sanctimoniously rejected by powerful authority (perhaps community psychology has a role to play in exposing). I have discussed our role as exposers in my recent paper on “Tales of Terror and Joy,” where I suggest that for those of us interested in social change, reading the narratives of our own time differently, so that they reveal and expose rather than hide the terror of oppressed people, is a worthwhile activity for community psychologists (Rappaport, 2000). Some of this work will have little to do with conventional science. This view is not anti-science; it simply suggests that conventional science is not enough, something more is required, i.e., a critical consciousness.
THOUGHT #3 It Is Too Easy to Assume that the Best Way to Know Things Is To Do Science This is false. Knowledge can be obtained in many ways. Now I am fairly sure the scientific fundamentalists will immediately say, “Of course there are other ways to ‘know’ things,” but such ways are not, by definition, going to add to our psychological knowledge base. Despite 40 years of doing psychology I have never been able to grasp this point. If I want to understand something, why not use all the means available? If I grasp it from a novel or a journalist, or a table of numbers, or a story, the question remains, “Did I learn something
Community Psychology is (Thank God) More Than Science and is it useful in describing, explaining or understanding some phenomenon of interest?” Who cares if the method has been sanctified as scientific? My answer to that question is, “only the fundamentalist priests and theologians who care more about protecting their institutions than about understanding.” This does not mean that we have no standards by which to judge our work. Here is an example: Murray Levine (1980) once wrote an American Psychologist article about investigative reporting as method for inquiry. I have been surprised that this did not gain more currency as a legitimate method in our field. I suspect it is because of some version of Thought #1, i.e., “Who is going to fund that?” Perhaps today there is a chance for more anarchy of method, and for other ways of knowing, to borrow Belenkey’s phrase, to emerge (Belenky, et al., 1986). The turn toward qualitative research (it is still important to call it by scientific names in order to mask the fact that it comes from the “non-scientific” disciplines, even granting that some of them also want to claim science, because, of course, they also want power, money and legitimacy) may be an effort to find a way to break out of the classical traditions of our field’s methodological limitations — like the impressionists did in art 100 years ago. Perhaps we need new ways of seeing light.
THOUGHT #4 It Is Easy to Assume that the Only Things Worth Doing Are Those That Have Been Scientifically Demonstrated; But Science Is Not All It Is Cracked Up To Be Science has many limits–Seymour Sarason, of course, has a lot to say about that. Here are some examples of what can be said: In the scientific tradition, knowledge is cumulative: You either add a new brick to the edifice of knowledge so that it looks different or, better yet, you destroy the edifice and present your colleagues with a foundation for a new and better structure. One part of this tradition says that knowledge is cumulative; the other part says that your contribution is proportionate to how much past knowledge you have rendered obsolete. You use history, so to speak, with the hope of destroying its usefulness. This kind of attitude or hope is subtly but potently absorbed by young people entering scientific fields, it has been particularly strong in psychology, less because of psychology’s youth as a scientific endeavor and more
235 because of its self-conscious desire to identify with that endeavor. (Sarason, 1986, p. 13).
It is easy to assume, if we insist that community psychology is primarily a science, that the only things worth doing are those that have been scientifically demonstrated. But we only have to play by those rules if we ourselves insist that we be judged only by those rules. Do we always want those rules to be the ultimate test of the value of our work? Again I turn to Sarason: As for the scientists who enter the arena of social action, they would do well to be guided by the values they attach to the facts of living . . . This will present scientists with a type of problem (and transform their concepts of solution) for which their scientific models are inappropriate and may even be interfering. They will find themselves dealing in persuasion, not only facts; the problems will change before and within them; they will not be concerned with replicability because that will be impossible; there will be no final solutions, only a constantly upsetting imbalance between values and action; the internal conflict will be not in the form of ‘Do I have the right answer?’ but rather ‘Am I being consistent with what I believe?’; satisfaction will come not from colleagues’ consensus that their procedures, facts, and conclusions are independent of their feelings and values, but from their own convictions that they tried to be true to their values; they will fight to win not in order to establish the superiority of their procedures or the validity of their scientific facts, concepts, and theories, but because they want to live with themselves and others in certain ways. (Sarason 1986, pp. 25–26)
Are we (community psychologists) such people? Do we enter the world of social action? If so, then we may want to constantly ask ourselves, “Are we being consistent with what we believe?” “Can we live with ourselves in certain ways?” Recognizing the limits of science, and asking questions such as these, albeit informed by a knowledge of science and its methods, are hardly defined by it. This is closely related to Thought #5.
THOUGHT #5 Many Things Worth Doing Have No Scientific Basis, But We Often Want To Claim that They Do Mainstream academic psychologists tend to evaluate the worth of activities according to how well they fit their ideal of the scientific method. Many psychologists have aspirations to be seen as scientists. Sometimes we seem desperate to force our work into scientific models. The advantages of being seen
236 as a scientist: money, power, official legitimacy, have nothing to do with knowledge, useful activities or intellectual merit, let alone moral and ethical justification, or the likelihood that social criticism will gain you much with the people who benefit from things they way they are. Donald Hebb, the brilliant scientist and former APA president when people were elected to that office because they were esteemed scientists, once said, “It is to the literary world, not to psychological science, that you go to learn how to live with people, how to make love, how not to make enemies; to find out what grief does to people . . . ” (Hebb, 1974, p. 74) Don’t go to psychology, go to literature? Do we agree? Psychological science, prevention science, community psychology as science, to what shall we speak if not to what Hebb, a very good scientist, wants to exclude from psychological science? Of course, we are now adept at framing what we do as science; but do we really believe that conventional scientific methods define the limits of our inquiry and are always the best way to judge its value? This church called science has very strict rules for membership. Do we really want those same rules to define the limits of psychology, let alone community psychology? We will have to play by the rules– unless we don’t want to. I hope we don’t want to. If we define ourselves by the religious beliefs and rituals of conventional science what do we exclude? What do we exclude if we limit ourselves to the study of those topics deemed to be amenable to the scientific method, as classically understood? As George Albee points out–evidence for the power of decent social and economic resources, for political action to achieve equal rights, and reduce the stresses of discrimination and exploitation, does not require the prevention science strategy preferred by the state as reflected by the IOM or NIMH to be convincing. I suggest that social critique and qualitative, interpretative research is an equally legitimate strategy of inquiry and demonstration. Perhaps community psychology has something to say about that.
THOUGHT #6 Community Psychology Cannot Make Unique Contributions Under the Thumb of Conventional Scientific Constraints Community Psychology must be concerned with social justice and raising critical consciousness. Such
Rappaport concerns transcend the limits of conventional science. Again, I want to make clear that these concerns do not exclude science, but rather they broaden its conventional concerns. Let’s do a quick mind experiment: Make a list of the various subfields of psychology. List what content they each pay attention to, what makes them a subfield of psychology. Somewhere on the list they will all claim to be governed by (dare I say worship?) scientific methods. In this equation the constant–conventional scientific method–adds no variance. What makes each subfield unique is what is different about them. The contents of their concerns–their phenomena of interest– distinguish subfields somewhat more, although there is still substantial overlap. What does community psychology bring to the table that these other subfields do not? It is definitely not conventional science, and increasingly (look at the APA divisions) it is not necessarily the content of our domains of interest. Look in the Community Psychologist for listings of SCRA interest groups: Children and Youth, Community Action, Community Health, Disabilities, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/transgender (LGBT) issues, Prevention and Promotion, Rural, School Intervention, Self help and Mutual Support, Stress and Coping, Undergraduate Awareness. Each of these topics are studied by other subfields of psychology, and many of them are studied by other disciplines. Most of them also claim science. They willingly embrace its dogma, its culture, its way of doing things. This is not bad–this is good. But what is the unique contribution of community psychology? While we do science, it is not our unique contribution. Our contribution is a self conscious social and professional analysis and critique that is both added to and changes conventional science. This leads directly to Thought #7.
THOUGHT #7 To the Extent that We Provide Alternatives and Analyses that Are Intellectually and Morally Compelling, the Field Will Make Unique Contributions to Scholarship, Research and Action Let us reinvigorate our founding traditions, let us force attention to the values, ethics, and morality of social justice. Let us use whatever methods provide information. Science is not concerned with what ought to be. Community Psychology begins with a
Community Psychology is (Thank God) More Than Science vision of what ought to be. The vision is not a general one; it is quite specific to a set of core values. Among these core values are notions of the just society. This requires Community Psychology to be more than science. It does not stop it from using science; but it is not a field delimited or defined by science. Therefore, community psychologists learn from, use, and wish to contribute to the knowledge base of many disciplines and scholarly traditions, as well as to the practices of many different action traditions. Many of these traditions are not science based. That does not mean they don’t have a scholarly tradition or a narrated way of going about their practices. Bill Berkowitz (e.g., Berkowitz, 2000) has documented a lot of this in the domain of community and neighborhood organization, as has Abe Wandersman (e.g., Wandersman & Florin, 2000) in the context of citizen participation. There are many other examples, including the work of people such as Paulo Freire who asserts, at the end his book on “education for critical consciousness,” that the educators who aim at liberation must (whatever else is at their disposal) ask themselves if they really believe in the people, in ordinary people. He concludes his book by saying, if they do not believe in ordinary people, they will at best be “cold technicians . . . or even good reformers. But they will never be educators who will carry out radical transformations” (Freire, 1998, p. 164). In taking this position within the traditions of psychology, the question may arise as to what should be the standards for judging that which is intellectually and morally compelling? This is not a simple question to answer, and the details are far beyond the scope of this paper. They include philosophical, literary, and perhaps theological, as well as scientific considerations. There may even be contradictory answers. However, it is probably worth noting here that such standards ultimately are, like those of conventional science, a matter of debate and consensus. There is already developing, across many social science disciplines, a conversation about criteria for evaluating qualitative and interpretative work; see for example, Denzin and Lincoln’s (2000) Handbook of Qualitative Research, now it its second edition. Unfortunately, psychology as a discipline lags far behind other disciplines in this regard, such that we are unlikely to find satisfying answers if we confine ourselves only to reading other psychologists. As a field, psychologists are quite naive with respect to qualitative and interpretative research. At this point in our development much of our concerns may be described as analogous to figuring out what a t test is, while
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other fields are doing sophisticated multivariate research. My own thinking on this question of standards has been influenced by people such Lincoln and Guba (1985, 1986, 1990), and I have previously applied some of their ideas to the pursuit of an empowerment social agenda (Rappaport, 1990). They offer, in addition to philosophical and methodological analysis, the notion that in an evaluation all stake holders should have a voice. This is a good example of a standard that would not necessarily be derived from a conventional philosophy of science. Community psychology is like an open construct, not to be delimited by the confines of conventional science. We often concern ourselves with issues of social transformation (i.e., Maton, 2000). A prime contribution is that we are concerned with social critique, including a critique of practices within our own profession. This is a critique that goes beyond the usual scientific analysis of research quality. It includes a critique of the very purposes of our work and the work of others. It even questions science as the ultimate criterion. We can even ask, “Just because we can do it, does that mean we should?” This leads us to “oughts,” moral considerations, questions of ethics and the meaning of constructs such as social justice. Science can be used, but it does not define community psychology. This is related to Jim Kelly’s important early message to this field, concerned with the training of community psychologists, where he pointed out that the “antidote to arrogance” is in community work (Kelly, 1970). What if we were delimited by the rules of conventional science? What would be excluded? For example, does Rod Watts and his colleagues’ (Watts, Williams, & Jagers, 2003) recent critical analysis of prevention in historical context count? He worries that much of school based prevention, for example, is based in mainstream North American psychology, often founded on positivism, ahistoricism and individualism. It tends to neglect the sociopolitical forces that shape people’s lives. He offers student critiques and investigative journalism as shedding more light on the pervasiveness of (for example) illegal drugs in African American communities than prevention science. He raises questions about school violence prevention programs in the context of violence embedded in the social oppression of institutionalized practices, legally sanctioned violence and racist patterns of incarceration, while advocating for what he calls “an emancipatory model of education.” This will require much more than good conventional science. He cites Prilleltensky and Nelson’s call on community psychology to “re-claim” a social justice
238 agenda, as opposed to the “at risk,” or risk behavior models so popular today among the prevention scientists. Watts also cites Cornel West who says, we are at risk of becoming “a neo-hegemonic culture that postures as an oppositional force, but is in substance a manifestation of allegiance and loyalty to the status quo.” This kind of social critique is a part of community psychology we need to be sure does not disappear. It harkens back to the work of people like Bill Ryan (1971), and Caplan and Nelson (1973) and many of the passionate founders of our field who today are being brushed aside by the union of conventional science and state. It also opens a space for those who would see community psychology as aligned with liberation movements, as in the recent special section of AJCP edited by Watts and Irma Serrano-Garcia (2003). For my own part, I suggest both as method and as substance the use of storytelling, and the analysis of narratives, including the dominant cultural narratives of our time, from the point of view of the oppressed (e.g., Rappaport, 1998; 2000). For those who would claim the use of science in community psychology, we must, as the authors of the initial special section on science and community psychology referred to in my opening remarks have suggested (Wandersman, 2003a), broaden our view of what constitutes science. We will need to challenge scientific dogma in order to do it. I hope we continue to do so. But more is necessary. We should not make the mistake of calling (or selling) community psychology as only science, because (thank God), it is a lot more than science. ACKNOWLEDGMENT Thanks are extended to Beth Shinn for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. REFERENCES Albee, G. W. (1996). Revolutions and counterrevolutions in prevention. American Psychologist, 51, 1130–1133. Berkowitz, B. (2000). Community and neighborhood organization. In J. Rappaport & E. Seidman (Eds.), Handbook of Community Psychology: New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. McV., Goldenberger, N. R., & Tarule, J. M. (1986). Women’s ways of knowing. New York: Basic Books. Caplan, G., & Nelson, P. (1973). On being useful. American Psychologist, 28, 199–211. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (2000). Handbook of qualitative research, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Rev. edn.). New York: Continuum.
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