Understanding community violence: A critical realist framework for community psychology

Abstract

Critical realism can unsettle a number of orthodoxies that surround the study of community violence within community psychology. This is to say, because critical realism is embraced so rarely by community psychologists, it can institute a parallax shift within the discipline, whereby we are granted alternative ways of perceiving violence within community contexts. Drawing on transdisciplinary thought, we offer in this article a retroductive framework for studying community violence. This framework, we argue, can facilitate an understanding of structurally violent causal mechanisms through interrogating how direct—or observable—violence intersects with epistemic violence (i.e., harmful and inaccurate representation). Demonstrating the efficacy of this framework, we provide an example from our work, where participants from a low-income South African community produced and screened a documentary film on community violence and collective resistance. Reflecting on the ways by which this film engaged xenophobic violence in particular, we examine how community members used the film to trouble perceptions of community violence and advance a multifaceted antiviolence agenda. By way of conclusion, we consider how our framework can be used to inform a critical realist community psychology, wherein violent social structures are analyzed against the agentic community-driven initiatives which oppose these structures.