Table Of ContentBecoming Ecological:
An Expedition Into
Community Psychology
James G. Kelly
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Becoming Ecological
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BECOMING ECOLOGICAL
An Expedition Into Community Psychology
James G. Kelly
1
2006
1
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Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kelly, James G.
Becoming ecological : an expedition into community psychology / by James G. Kelly.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13 978-0-19-517379-6
ISBN 0-19-517379-1
1. Community psychology. I. Title.
RA790.55.K455 2005
362.2'2—dc22 2005004297
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
on acid-free paper
For
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Foreword
REBECCA CAMPBELL
JULIAN RAPPAPORT
The volume you hold in your hand is a much-anticipated collection. Here, in a
single place, are some 40 years of major papers (along with considerable addi-
tional material and personal reflections) by James G. Kelly, one of the founders
and perhaps the foremost theoretician of community psychology. We, along
with just about anyone who teaches or practices community psychology, have
often introduced Kelly’s work as either required reading for students or recom-
mended reading for colleagues. We have often wished that he would put it all to-
gether in book form. Now that it is here, all in one place, it is a bit easier to see
why to “get it” (that is, to grasp what community psychology is about) one has
to read Kelly.
In these 40 years ofpapers, we can see the history ofcommunity psychology
unfold. History is everything to Kelly—one cannot possibly know where to go
next, what to do next without an understanding, a feel, for what came before.
The history of community psychology, as created by Kelly and throughout this
volume, told by Kelly, is one grounded in the history of many other disciplines.
For Kelly, history is also personal. Events and ideas are shaped by whom you
have lunch with, whose office is next door, and who happened to be in the same
space at the same time. This volume tells these stories, too: who and what influ-
enced Kelly, who then influenced the entire field of community psychology. This
volume reminds us to look around and see our own history in the works—
where we were when we read these papers first (and then again and again),
with whom we discussed them, and how we applied them to our own work.
These encounters weave the history of tomorrow.
Perhaps the overarching impact of reading Kelly is that attentive readers will
acquire a powerful way of looking at the world. The shorthand term for this
worldview is ecological,and Kelly is the one who made this term come alive well
before it became widely accepted. He has taken it very seriously, more than once
explicating the ecological principles of interdependence, succession, adapta-
tion, and cycling of resources. Once this viewpoint is adopted, nothing seems to
be the same; it becomes impossible to ignore what one now sees. Kelly’s world
(the social ecology) is complex, multilayered, and filled with interesting people,
organizations, communities, venues, values, and ideas that point us toward pro-
cess and interconnections. It is no coincidence that he taught us to look for ra-
diating effects in our interventions and research projects.
It can be difficult to communicate this ecological worldview to students in
their introduction to community psychology. Human behavior in real-world
settings is messy enough, but then Kelly demands that we examine that behav-
ior in the context of interconnected dynamic cycles that change over time. It is
a wonderful teaching moment when you sense that your students have started
thinking ecologically. They start a sentence, but then stop themselves with,
“well, wait, no, that is related to that, which would probably cause that...
hang on, this is bigger than I thought.” Every time those of us who teach com-
munity psychology bear witness to that intellectual transformation, we, too, are
transformed again by Kelly’s work. Every trip through these writings brings
something new. As a teacher, this process will be easier now: Hand students this
volume, and let Kelly do what he does best—take us on an intellectual journey
that challenges and inspires.
Often his theoretical writings on ecology and communities garner the most
attention, but this volume reintroduces us to Kelly the methodologist. As with
his theoretical writings, methodology is embedded in context and history. Kelly
taught us “Tain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” Kelly’s methods re-
flect a radical way of thinking about the methods of our scholarship. Method
defined by experimental field designs, questionnaires, and data files is too nar-
row, and community psychology methods must be broader, richer, and un-
doubtedly more complicated. If context matters, then race, ethnicity, gender,
social class, age, disability, sexual orientation, and other markers of our individ-
ual and collective identities will shape how we conduct our research. For Kelly,
these are resources for scholarship as they shape how we interact with the com-
munity. His own projects articulate a methodology of collaboration. Through
his research, Kelly showed us how we can create partnerships with our commu-
nity collaborators and how such work can stimulate new methodological ap-
proaches. The trees from Kelly’s Developing Communities Project are both
method and metaphor, fitting that both his theory and his methods return to
the natural world.
In this volume one will not find specific methodological techniques so much
as viewpoints. These viewpoints are simultaneously straightforward and philo-
sophically sophisticated. They provide a theoretical skeleton on which to hang
the empirical, ifsometimes amorphous body ofwork that makes up community
psychology. Partly from reading the previously published papers and partly
from reading Kelly’s current reflections on them, we are provided with a win-
viii FOREWORD
dow into his mind. But Jim Kelly is more than an intellectual. He is also a practi-
tioner of his craft, and his concern with practice is reflected here in his interest
in locating hidden community and human resources, training, mentoring and
nourishing students and colleagues, and fostering the continued development
of our knowledge base in a wide variety of forms.
In addition to telling us what he was thinking about at the time that he wrote
each of the chapters included here, Kelly gives us a narration of his own autobi-
ography. For anyone who (like us) sees him as a hero, there will be considerable
delight in his willingness to share his own life story. Kelly believes in interde-
pendence as more than an abstraction. He understands interdependence as a
concrete reality, and here the reader is treated to an example of that reality in
the author’s narration of his own life experiences. And that is not all this vol-
ume provides. In the last section Kelly brings us up to date on his current think-
ing on ecological topics as they are played out in theory, research, action, and
training. Throughout this remarkable collection of essays, Kelly maintains an
intellectually generous spirit. He continuously credits specific people and cir-
cumstances with stimulating his own thinking. It is ultimately Kelly’s generos-
ity toward ideas, methods, people, and practice that one comes away from this
volume understanding. That generosity has made Jim Kelly a beloved figure in
community psychology, but it is his ideas that have sustained the field for more
than four decades.
Kelly is the kind of scholar/social scientist who is rare today. He is old fash-
ioned in his breadth of interests and expertise and in the broad scope of his
ideas; but he is postmodern in his ability (to steal his own phrase) to cross
boundaries between fields, social statuses, and methodologies. Read this volume
to become educated in a way that will make you more curious, more apprecia-
tive of social environments, more open to research methods that are liberating,
and more responsive to others, including students and ordinary citizens.
FOREWORD ix
