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Recent psychology scholarship has engaged topics of decoloniality, from conferences to journal publications to edited volumes. These efforts are examples of the decolonial turn, a paradigm shift oriented to interrupting the colonial legacies of power, knowledge, and being. As critical community psychologists, we contend that decoloniality/decolonization is an epistemic and ontological process of continuously disrupting the coloniality of power that is the hegemonic Western Eurocentric approach to theory, research, and practice. To document and critically understand this process of colonial disruption—the roots and routes toward decoloniality within and outside of community psychology—we collected information at conference workshops and an open-ended online survey disseminated across international contexts. Through an analysis of two conference workshops (Chile; United States) and a survey, we describe four orientations that capture how participants engage with a decolonizing praxis. The four orientations include Generating knowledge With and from Within, Sociohistorical Intersectional Consciousness, Relationships of Mutual Accountability, and Unsettling Subjectivities of Power/Privilege. The coloniality of power, which characterizes the ethics and tensions within the discipline, is uprooted through these orientations, thereby enabling possibilities to trek a route away from colonial theory, research, and practice, and toward the decolonial turn in community psychology.

In the last 6 decades, large sections of the global population have been exposed to ongoing dangers in circumstances of pervasive conflict, violence and trauma. In this article, we revisit the concept of continuous traumatic stress, originally proposed by South African researcher-practitioners to characterize mental health conditions and challenges under apartheid, and explore its viability as an alternative and supplementary framework for understanding and addressing exposure to situations of ongoing threat. The article highlights the political and mental health limitations associated with the dominance of posttraumatic stress conceptualizations of these forms of human suffering and distress, and calls for more nuanced and complex understandings of such complicated psychosocial conditions and their effects. It concludes by foregrounding several critical debates related to continuous traumatic stress, namely, the importance of understanding contexts of ongoing exposure to danger as both political and psychological (psychopolitical) in nature; of developing socially relevant clinical and conceptual models that can meaningfully account for the varied impacts of, and responses to, these conditions of continuous threat; and the need to extend our intervention practices to include culturally and contextually appropriate intervention strategies that are both clinical and psychosocial in orientation.

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