Emotion and Affect in Social and Political Life: Community Psychology’s Contributions and Erasures

The post-apartheid South African context has galvanized a burst of critical scholarship in psychology, differentially addressing the age-old question of relevance in the discipline (See Wahbie Long’s (2016). A history of “relevance” in psychology for a detailed overview). Community psychology, in its interrogation of the discipline’s apolitical history and continued practice, has facilitated complex understandings of social and political life that affect communities. In its questions focused on the role of power and ideology in (re)producing and sustaining dynamics of power in communities, community psychology has spear-headed critical insights into the knowledge and practice of psychology more generally, and community wellbeing specifically. Thus, enjoying a status as perhaps one of the more politically sensitive of the sub-disciplines, it is possible that community psychology may inadvertently remain incognizant of its own blind spots and erasures that do not fully interrogate its own knowledge and practice. One of these blind spots is the inattention to the role of emotion and affect both in the knowledge and practice of community psychology itself (some notable exceptions include Canham (2017, 2018), Hayes (2017), Malherbe (2021), Ngwenya et al. (2022), Ratele (2005), Stevens (2019)), as well as in the formation and operation of power dynamics within communities. My starting contention is that critical explorations of power and ideology in the discipline have favored theoretical orientations that either highlight the material structural conditions of power or the discursive and symbolic dimensions of power. These contributions have been useful but often to the detriment of the role of emotion and affect as vibrant features of power dynamics and ideology. I am interested in how emotions and affect both fuel and interact with social and political life, as well as how social and political life become sedimented in interior lives and vice versa. The question of what this means for community psychology knowledge and practice is part of this chapter’s interrogation: namely, the emotional processes and affective mobilizations that interact with community processes, broader society at large and even between community psychologists and the communities they work in.