Supervision as decolonial love: Toward a transformative training process for Palestinian community health workers

Settler colonialism dehumanizes and alienates Palestinians in everyday life, including in our Whitestream mental health research, practice, teaching, and supervision practices. In this article, we focus on sharing insights into our supervision praxis in Palestine. We, the coauthors of this article, are four Palestinian psychologists and therapists, living and working in the Diaspora (Devin and Hana), in the Palestinian territories occupied by the state of Israel (Nihaya), and in the nation-state of Israel itself (Caesar). In this article, through conversation, we seek to articulate decolonial practices and epistemologies within our implementation process of a training workbook for community health workers in a refugee camp in the West Bank, Palestine. Our training process was based on a workbook entitled CURCUM's Trees: A Decolonial Healing Guide for Palestinian Community Health Workers (available for free download in English at https://mayflybooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/CURCUMs-Trees_A-Decolonial-Healing-Guide_ENGLISH-VERSION.pdf and in Arabic at https://mayflybooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/CURCUMs-Trees-Arabic-Version.pdf). We, as the four coauthors of this article, decided to write this article in storytelling prose. We invite readers to bear witness to our intimate conversation, which was audio recorded one evening in Palestine, in June 2023. We share excerpts from this transcribed conversation, where we strive to describe our decolonial praxis in the face of indescribable colonial violence. We shed light on the pathways and complexities of creating transformative training processes for community workers in conditions marked by settler colonialism. We wrestle with our own positionalities, epistemologies, and relationships through enactments of decolonial love. In doing so, conceptualize our supervision praxis as holding and seeing each other deeply and decolonially toward reenvisioning possibilities for liberation unbound by settler colonialism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).