This community psychology M.A./Ph.D. specialization is a bold initiative to forge transdisciplinary and transformative approaches to the critical personal, community, cultural, and ecological challenges of our time. Accomplishing this necessitates a radical engagement in re-conceiving psychology as a potentially liberatory and restorative force in society, one engaged in initiatives to promote social, economic, and environmental justice, peace-building, and ecological sustainability. The specialization is committed to rebuilding fragmented cultural and ecological connections, and to co-creating democratic, dialogical, joyful, sustainable, and nonviolent living. The curriculum places multicultural approaches to depth psychological theories and practices in dynamic dialogue with ecopsychology, indigenous psychologies, critical community psychology, and psychologies of liberation from diverse cultural settings. Students gain an understanding of the interdependence of individual, community, cultural, and ecological well-being. Coursework nurtures creative approaches to collaboration in organizations, non-profits, community groups, and educational settings. Through community and ecological fieldwork and research, students are supported in the pursuit of their distinctive areas of interest, and in strengthening their research and practice skills so that they are able to make their own significant contributions.
Learn about what financial assistance is available to returned Peace Corps Volunteers at Pacifica Graduate Institute through the Paul D. Coverdell Fellows program. All fellows complete internships in under-served communities in the United States, allowing them to bring home, and expand upon, the skills they learned as Volunteers.
Mary is chair of the Depth Psychology Program, Co-Chair of the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco- Psychologies Specialization (CLIE), and Coordinator of Community and Ecological Fieldwork and Research in CLIE. She was trained as a clinical and developmental psychologist and was an early member of the archetypal/imaginal psychology movement. She has worked in a wide variety of clinical settings and with groups on issues of peace, diversity, social justice, reconciliation, immigration, and the envisioning of community and cultural transformation. She is the author of Waking Dreams, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues, Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons, co-author of Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Talking with Young Children about Adoption, and Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border, and co-editor of Psychology and the Promotion of Peace. Please find Dr. Watkins’ publications available for download here.
