Reflections On McKnight & Kretzmann’s Mapping Community Capacity and Mathie & Cunningham’s From clients to citizens – Asset-based community development as a strategy for community-driven development

McKnight & Kretzmann’s Mapping Community Capacity address an issue that I have puzzled over for many years:  How can the government create an incentive to better one’s life circumstances without creating and perpetuating an environment of unhealthy need and dependence that engenders mere existence and probably hopelessness, to create producers rather than service clients?  Unfortunately,… Read More

Reflections On Transformational leadership Chapters 9 and 10, Lykes, Blanche, and Hamber’s Narrating survival and change in Guatemala and South Africa, and Hershbert and Lykes’ Redefining family-Transnational girls narrate experiences of parental migration, detention, and deportation

Hacker and Roberts open with what for me is a very prescient idea, the idea of victim-blaming in an organization, and indeed in most Western modern societies, rather than looking for solutions and rising to challenges that can teach one to be stronger.  Their John Stewart Mill quote speaks to current events in government that… Read More

Reflections On Johnson, Murungi, and Pugh’s Naming our reality, Fine and Torre’s Re-membering exclusions, Kidd and Kral’s Practicing participatory action research, and Lykes,, Mcdonald, and Box’ The post-deportation human rights project

(This is it folks.  I may have found the research method of choice to write thesis and dissertation in social psychology and media studies respectively.  It’s Participatory Action Research.  Everyone teaches and everyone learns, including the study participants.  Stay tuned.)   Participatory action and the research that it entails give me hope for the future. … Read More

Reflections On Hacker & Roberts’ Transformational leadership Chapters 7 and 8, Participatory Feminism, and Selected Writings on Feminism and Liberation Psychology

I know there are” ideal” companies to work for, not because I have worked for them (because I haven’t), but because very few friends have mentioned their work environments and their ideal supervisors and because I have read about them occasionally in the news pages.  But now that I have read Hacker and Robert’s analysis… Read More

Reflections On Diaz’ A psychological framework for social justice praxis, Teo et al’ Philosophical reflexivity in social justice work, and Hacker & Roberts’ Transformational leadership Chapters 5 and 6

I see the potential for perpetual personal evolution and perhaps personal revolution within Diaz’s summary, “. . . a relational/empathy based concept of social justice provides us with an interpretation of social justice as the perpetual process of creating and recreating relationships of awareness, empathy, and empowerment.” I see this either as the direction that… Read More

Reflections On Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Martin-Baro’s Role of the Psychologist, Prillitensky’s Value-based praxis in community psychology (And Personal Reflections On Things I Consider Important)

While much has been said and much has been written about scientific objectivity and, in the case of my experience in local television journalism, much has been said regarding journalistic objectivity, sometimes quite passionately to the detriment of the local issues being discussed.  Both have their place, but I have never really understood why there… Read More

Reflections on the Implicit Associations Tests Exercise

Harvard’s Implicit Associations Test is interesting, as loaded as an adjective as that is in this case.  The visual portion of the test makes certain assumptive social constructs that particular categories of individuals “look” a specific way (I took the gender- science test and the African American-European American test—twice) rather than another.  There was no… Read More

Reflections On Development of the Community Healthy Living Index and A Meta-Analytic Review of Obesity Prevention Programs for Children and Adolescents

If one conquers obesity and disease, one conquers bad eating and living habits.  This is a “comprehensive tool for communities to assess opportunities for active living and healthy eating and to mobilize all sectors of society to conquer obesity and chronic disease.” (Kim:  1).  While I agree that obesity is an epidemic that I see… Read More