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This chapter focuses on the mental health system of Guatemala through interviews with the directors that run this system. In Guatemala, the majority of the public mental health system is composed of one psychiatric hospital—the National Mental Health Hospital Carlos Federico Mora, known as Federico Mora. Based on liberation psychology (Martin-Baro, 1989), I situate mental health within the relational, and in a historical perspective. Eight directors give insight into how the mental health system operates in the country. Findings reveal a high demand for mental health services that is unattended. An effort to avoid the services at the Federico Mora by organizations requiring psychiatric referrals. Finally, a history that ties the creation of the Federico Mora to the internal armed conflict. I argue that in a country where psychological violence was used against the civilian population by the state, mental health is a political issue. In addition, an unresponsive mental health system that uses violence in their care practices is a political strategy that through action and inaction normalizes state terror. In other words, the Federico Mora oppresses Guatemalans receiving services through violence (action) and those requiring services and not able to access them (inaction). This pattern is consistent with that of feminicide. Feminicide implicates the state in the killing of women by men as an act of gendered violence, and as such is a political term (Sanford, 2008; Carney & Torres, 2010; Menjivar, 2011). Because of this context, I propose teaching toward decoloniality as a paradigm centering the mental health needs of Guatemalans.

This essay lays out a networked conception of violence and justice work. Locating a prime example of networked culpability for twenty-first-century torture in the financial and professional ties that bind the Association of American Psychologists (APA) to the US Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, the essay points back to the long twentieth-century collaboration between national security and behavioral science that fueled network science. I argue that network thinking confounds the liberal humanist sense of agency or sovereignty, and it provokes a promising rethinking of human rights efforts as networked challenges to networked violence. The essay looks at tools for prosecuting violence networks and toward models for disrupting and rerouting them drawn from sociology, quantum physics, indigenous feminisms, and liberation psychology.

This chapter applies the culture theory of cultural-historical psychology and Liberation Psychology to conceptualize social emancipation. We take Vygotsky’s use of historical materialism to explain the need to transform the political-economic base of society. This provides maximal emancipation from the status quo. Particular cultural factors must follow this lead. A hierarchy of different kinds of social change is enumerated, with political change the most complete. We show how civil rights are far less emancipatory because they welcome people into the status quo without changing their fundamental social relations. Identity politics is also shown to be less emancipatory in this hierarchy.

This chapter explains what social-psychological emancipation means. It also explains how a psychological theory can contribute insights to emancipation. Martin-Baro’s Liberation Psychology and Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology are introduced as exemplary psychological theories that can contribute to emancipation. The chapter presents culture as the key link of emancipation and psychological science. Psychology must be cultural to comprehend the cultural features of social-psychological emancipation. Cultural psychology can utilize its scientific culture theory to evaluate the degree to which emancipatory social movements draw upon an adequate culture theory. Their political errors can be traced to inadequate theories of cultural organization and change. Cultural-historical psychology can improve strategies for political change.

This chapter explains that historical-materialist emancipation is especially important to carry out at this time because mainstream societies are wracked with intensifying problems that are more destructive. Fascism is becoming increasingly active as a false solution to deep problems. In fact, fascism is favored by the upper classes as a means to protect their wealth and power amidst the crises that their system is causing. Consequently, disposing of these problems, their causes, and their oppressive solutions is particularly urgent. Populist emancipation is incapable of challenging the scope and causes of these problems. Only the emancipation that is guided by cultural-historical psychology and Liberation Psychology is capable of genuine emancipation.

In their definition of liberation psychology, Montero and Sonn (2009) stressed the need for psychologists to transform both people and environments by rupturing social processes buoyed by social identities. Adding further to the peace implications of Montero and Sonn’s work, Mayengo et al. (2018) stated that “practices of liberation yield to peace-building with the understanding that violence in all forms diminishes the capacity for people to live together harmoniously” and therefore, attention to peace is essential to strivings for liberation. Mayengo and his colleagues are a research team that consists primarily of faculty from different ethnic groups in Uganda.

In this chapter, we examine community arts and cultural development (CACD) as a method for working with Aboriginal communities to begin to respond to issues that stem from social suffering produced by conditions of oppression. We outline the theoretical underpinnings of CACD, locating its roots in the liberation paradigm. We emphasise the importance of disrupting singular stories and seek to expand ways to foster community-engaged action to promote liberation. An example of CACD practice with Aboriginal people in Western Australia, the Narrogin Stories project, is used to illustrate the practice. The example describes the various processes of consultation and negotiation, and the collection and re-articulation of individual and group stories through creative output. The case study also includes a description of the production and staging of a soundscape that was important to the longer term process of transforming a community narrative of loss, pain, and feuding, to foster hope. The chapter concludes with a listing of key principles taken from this project for community engagement and knowledge production.

The lives of women and men living in the Central American countries of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama are diverse with respect to gender roles, attitudes, and ideologies. However, there is evidence that gender plays out in the domains of development, work and home lives, health, violence, and sexuality. Disparities in men’s and women’s conditions are bolstered by the ideologies of machismo, an exaggerated masculinity associated with hypersexuality and violence, and marianismo, the notion that women should be pure, spiritual, subordinate, and self-effacing. In this chapter we describe the evidence for gender disparities in many domains of life and present a Central American derived process for social change, liberation psychology.

This chapter introduces the philosophical bases of methods of participation. These philosophical ideas and the methods that flow from them were developed in Latin America and have been influential in liberation psychology. The idea of analectics, introduced by the philosopher Dussel, involves introducing that which is different from and other to oneself in a dialectic process. Rather than being pushed away that, which is other, is welcomed into the totality, enriching, and enlarging the self. The roots of Freire’s methods of social pedagogy are to be found in these analectic and consciousness methods. Methods for consciousness and liberation including problematization–conscientization as the core processes, with complementary processes such as habituation, denaturalization, de-ideologization, de-alienation, and dehumanization are described and explained.

This chapter explores the transformative potential of creative resources and embodied practices in psychosocial and feminist accompaniment processes within two distinct multi-year projects with Mayan women survivors of gross violations of human rights committed during the 36-year Guatemalan armed conflict. One project engaged Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women in the rural town of Chajul and its surrounding villages who also suffered gross violations of human rights and sexual violence during the war. The second project worked with Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Mam, and Chuj women from three different regions of Guatemala, who self-identified as survivors of sexual violence. In the wake of war and in contexts of ongoing violence, the tension and stress from living in situations of “normal abnormality” (Martin-Baro, Writings for a liberation psychology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996) are carried in one’s body. The chapter explores how performances of these lived experiences offer possibilities for personal transformation through individual and small group experiences, and hold the potential for rethreading community towards social transformation. Thus dramatisation, art, massage, storytelling, theatre, photography, and Mayan cosmovision and traditions facilitated women’s self-expressions and recognition of each other’s stories of survival and protagonism. The chapter analyses drawings and dramatisations produced during creative workshops facilitated by the authors, mapping points of connection and disconnection between the two projects, and exploring whether—and, if so, how—participants experienced creative methodologies as transformative. Included is an analysis of the role of local and transnational intermediaries in these processes, and discussion of how the dialogical relationship between survivor and intermediary shapes and informs Mayan women’s protagonism. The chapter concludes by arguing that the elucidation of the significance of Mayan women’s engagement with creative methodologies in contexts of ongoing violence, impoverishment, and impunity, contributes to trauma work in post-conflict or transitional contexts.