Notification

The escalation of violence in Gaza and Israel is leaving people in Gaza in urgent need of humanitarian support. Please donate now.

Available documents

No available documents


Oxfam Policy & Practice provides free access to Gender & Development and Development in Practice journal articles.

Download from publisher

Overview

This article explores what a decolonial approach to emotional well-being and mental health looks like in development and humanitarian response, using the example of African feminist praxis around the emotional wellbeing and mental health of African women impacted by injustice, and the practitioners that work in solidarity with them. It draws on the experiences of the work of the African Institute for Integrated Responses to Violence Against Women and HIVAIDS (AIR), and analysis of the African feminist practitioners involved in its creation. It questions the presumption that orthodox Western psychology offers the most appropriate frameworks for understanding and designing mental health interventions targeted at African women and the practitioners engaging them, and looks instead to the thinking and practices developed by African feminist practitioners. Acknowledging that decolonising knowledge is central to the project of decolonising development, it argues for a decolonial feminist approach that takes seriously the healing knowledges produced by communities of African women affected by collective distress, and pays attention to the structural roots of trauma in African women’s lives. In doing so it calls for an approach to emotional well-being interventions that questions inequality and builds political and economic agency as part of emotional resilience. It also explores the practitioner–community relationship, arguing for the need to embrace the concept of vicarious resilience alongside that of vicarious trauma.

Additional details

Author(s)

Publisher(s)

Editor(s)

DOI

10.1080/13552074.2020.1717177

How to cite this resource

Citation styles vary so we recommend you check what is appropriate for your context.  You may choose to cite Oxfam resources as follows:

Author(s)/Editor(s). (Year of publication). Title and sub-title. Place of publication: name of publisher. DOI (where available). URL

Our FAQs page has some examples of this approach.

Related resources

Here are similar items you might be interested in.

Browse all resources