Abstract
For centuries Andean women from rural areas of Peru have lived in ongoing conditions of gender and racial marginalisation. Seeking to address these conditions and promote their wellbeing and development, professionals have been working with Andean women through social and economic projects. However, often these professionals privilege ideas and practices informed by their disciplinary training, which is largely rooted in western knowledge. This chapter explores how, through a feminist participatory action research (PAR) project, a group of Andean women engaged and contested ideas they perceive as being introduced in to their community from outside by professionals, particularly ideas regarding organising-as-women, development, and violence against women. It analyses how women decide to incorporate some ideas transforming and adapting them to their local context, and how they choose to reject others given that they are not in line with their ways of being in the world as Andean women. Furthermore, this chapter explores feminist PAR’s potential as a method for decolonizing feminist community psychology. It illustrates how this feminist PAR project served as a space for a group of Andean women to actively reflect and discuss about their processes of knowledge construction, processes that occur in relation to their local knowledge and in constant confrontation with dominant discourses that enter their communities from further afield. The chapter concludes with reflections and recommendations for community psychologists who work with indigenous women and who are interested in developing a feminist decolonial praxis.
This chapter is an adaptation of part of the author’s dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of her doctoral degree in Applied Developmental psychology.
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Notes
- 1.
I previously reflected about the complex power dynamics present in the relationship between the extractive industry company and this group of Andean women (see Távara 2018). However, it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss in detail these complexities.
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Távara, G. (2019). Engaging and Contesting Hegemonic Discourses Through Feminist Participatory Action Research in Peru: Towards a Feminist Decolonial Praxis. In: Boonzaier, F., van Niekerk, T. (eds) Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology. Community Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20001-5_3
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