The 1996 Glasgow Community Psychology Conference—‘Community Psychology for a Change: Moving from Marginal Practice to Mainstream Effectiveness’
✍ Scribed by Peter Jones
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 63 KB
- Volume
- 8
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1052-9284
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Community and Clinical Psychology: Putting Ideas Into Practice', celebrated community psychology as an alternative approach within clinical psychology, the 1996 Glasgow conference demonstrated that community psychology holds an important role for all applied psychologies. The conference hosted a range of conference participants which included practitioners from clinical, educational, community and academic psychology, from non-psychologist posts in other community settings, and community activists. A workshop-based format for the two days promoted learning by listening to the real stories of practical experiences, openness to theoretical critique and illumination, and some shared development of understanding for the applications of a wide-ranging community psychology.
The conference started its ®rst half day with a workshop led by Cathy McCormack of the Greater Easterhouse Popular Education group. As a key member of a tenants' association in Easterhouse in Glasgow, she was able to give stark reality to the struggle for psychological survival in severely adverse social environments. The workshop engaged the conference participants in living-tableau exercises, tried to achieve a shared sense of the complexity of interacting in¯uences in social oppression, and detailed a successful piece of community activism in Easterhouse.
The second day was opened by Paddy O'Donnell, Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Glasgow. In setting the scene for the day, he called for psychologists to be aware of who was controlling their areas of work and development and to appraise clearly the reality of what is actually within their sphere of in¯uence. Other morning speakers explored the underlying principles for community psychology, the acceptability of those principles to other psychologies, and how to move from a marginal role to in¯uence mainstream practice.
Ali Chalmers, an educational psychologist, emphasized community development as a distinctive underpinning for community psychology. He called for a community psychology that engaged in political and social action to overcome dysfunction in service systems and society, and which targeted the empowerment of the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised. Gordon Phillips, Principal Educational Psychologist in Glasgow, felt that community psychology oered opportunities for addressing community problems, but that there was a need to overcome the restricted perceptions of possible funding agencies as to what psychologists can actually do.