Commentary: Lobbying for Endorsement of Community Psychology in Australia and the Invisibility of Community Psychology in the United States

The challenges faced by our Australian colleagues raise a range of questions about the future of Community Psychology (CP) in contexts that have become increasingly focused on the legitimizing of academic programs and professions by bureaucratic governmental entities whose understanding of the disciplines and professions they seek to legitimize may be limited at best. More importantly, their struggle points to challenges within academic psychology, as CP continues to struggle for a place at the table of organized psychology. Perhaps the greatest lesson in the narrative of this struggle was how some of the tools of the discipline were used to resolve what was perceived to be a crisis threatening the very survival of CP in Australia.