Decolonial Psychology

This edited volume in the Community Psychology Book Series emphasizes applications of community psychology for disrupting dominant and hegemonic power relations. The book explores domains of work that are located within critical community psychology, as well as work that is conventionally not self-defined as community psychology but which draws on and contributes to the foundations and enactments of critical and liberatory community psychology. Specifically, the book advances conceptions and praxes for community psychology grounded within a decolonial framework. The volume heeds the call for a generation of approaches to community psychology that link local struggles to broader questions of power, identity, and knowledge production, bringing together examples of praxes from different contexts as a political project of highlighting indigenous struggles toward self-determination. Collectively, the chapters in this book embody a decolonial agenda for community psychology that foregrounds social justice; the lives and knowledges of the marginalized and oppressed; epistemic disobedience and transdisciplinarity; and decolonial aesthetics. The book is divided into two parts - Part I: Conceptions of Engagement for Community Psychology delves into the conceptual framework for a decolonial community psychology, and Part II: Modes of Enactments and Praxes for Community Psychology builds on these theoretical advancements through examples of praxis in different contexts. The audience for the book includes scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists, and students located within community psychology specifically, as well as disciplines within the health and social sciences, and arts and humanities more broadly.

This edited volume seeks to critically engage with the diversity of feminist and post-colonial theory to counter hegemonic Western knowledge in mainstream community psychology. In doing so, it situates paradigms of thought and representation that capture the lived experiences of those in the global South. Specifically, the book takes an intersectional approach towards its reshaping of community psychology, centering African, black, postcolonial, and decolonial feminist critiques in its 1) critique of existing hegemonic Euro-American community psychology concepts, theories, and practice, 2) proposal of new feminist, indigenous, and decolonial methodological approaches, and 3) real-life examples of engagement, research, dialogue, and reflexive qualitative psychology practice. The book concludes with an agenda for theorization and research for future practice in postcolonial contexts. The volume is relevant to researchers, practitioners, and students in psychology, anthropology, sociology, public health, development studies, social work, urban studies, and women’s and gender studies across global contexts.

In this provocative and necessary book, Robert K. Beshara uses psychoanalytic discursive analysis to explore the possibility of a genuinely anti-colonial critical psychology. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial approaches to Islamophobia, this book enhances understandings of Critical Border Thinking and Lacanian Discourse Analysis, alongside other theoretico-methodological approaches. Using a critical decolonial psychology approach to conceptualize everyday Islamophobia, the author examines theoretical resources situated within the discursive turn, such as decoloniality/transmodernity, and carries out an archeology of (counter)terrorism, a genealogy of the conceptual Muslim, and a Žižekian ideology critique. Conceiving of Decolonial Psychoanalysis as one theoretical resource for Critical Islamophobia Studies (CIS), the author also applies Lacanian Discourse Analysis to extracts from interviews conducted with US Muslims to theorize their ethico-political subjectivity and considers a politics of resistance, adversarial aesthetics, and ethics of liberation. Essential to any attempt to come to terms with the legacy of racism in psychology, and the only critical psychological study on Islamophobia in the United States, this is a fascinating read for anyone interested in a critical approach to Islamophobia.

This book compiles the most recent literature on decolonial psychology by scholars and practitioners engaged in this groundbreaking work, offering readers a comprehensive look at its historical foundations, research practices, education and training, and psychological practice, among other topics. From its inception, psychological science and practice in the United States has been framed predominantly by Eurocentric epistemologies. As a result, oppressed people have internalized the belief that their culture and values are inferior to those of dominant groups. Infusing a decolonial lens into psychology is one way for the field to become more inclusive and relevant to the numerical majority worldwide. Decolonial psychology creates space and methods for oppressed and impoverished communities to radically imagine their existence outside of the superimposed borders of coloniality, neoliberalism, racism, and other systems of oppression. It emphasizes how people's subjectivity and connections to diverse social groups are influenced by history, context, and oppression; how these populations actively resist and survive attacks on their humanity; and how knowledge production is shaped not only by how data is interpreted but also by the questions asked. The chapters in this book provides an opportunity for readers to deepen their understanding of how colonization and coloniality impacted knowledge creation in society and the field of psychology. The book also underscores how coloniality continues to reverberate in many aspects of psychology today. Collectively, the authors invite readers to resist engaging in psycolonization by generating ideas and pathways to help reclaim, honor, and celebrate Indigenous ways of knowing and being. It is time to confront the limitations of mainstream psychology. This book will help psychologists at all levels anchor their research, teaching, and practice in decolonial methods and practices.

This book examines the ways in which decolonial theory has gained traction and influenced knowledge production, praxis and epistemic justice in various contemporary iterations of community psychology across the globe. With a notable Southern focus (although not exclusively so), the volume critically interrogates the biases in Western modernist thought in relation to community psychology, and to illuminate and consolidate current epistemic alternatives that contribute to the possibilities of emancipatory futures within community psychology. To this end, the volume includes contributions from community psychology theory and praxis across the globe that speak to standpoint approaches (e.g. critical race studies, queer theory, indigenous epistemologies) in which the experiences of the majority of the global population are more accurately reflected, address key social issues such as the on-going racialization of the globe, gender, class, poverty, xenophobia, sexuality, violence, diasporas, migrancy, environmental degradation, and transnationalism/globalisation, and embrace forms of knowledge production that involve the co-construction of new knowledges across the traditional binary of knowledge producers and consumers. This book is an engaging resource for scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists and advanced postgraduate students who are currently working within community psychology and cognate sub-disciplines within psychology more broadly. A secondary readership is those working in development studies, political science, community development and broader cognate disciplines within the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Through innovative and critical research, this anthology inquires and challenges issues of race and positionality, empirical sciences, colonial education models, and indigenous knowledges. Chapter authors from diverse backgrounds present empirical explorations that examine how decolonial work and Indigenous knowledges disrupt, problematize, challenge, and transform ongoing colonial oppression and colonial paradigm. This book utilizes provocative and critical research that takes up issues of race, the shortfalls of empirical sciences, colonial education models, and the need for a resurgence in Indigenous knowledges to usher in a new public sphere. This book is a testament of hope that places decolonization at the heart of our human community.

In this provocative and necessary book, Robert K. Beshara uses psychoanalytic discursive analysis to explore the possibility of a genuinely anti-colonial critical psychology. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial approaches to Islamophobia, this book enhances understandings of Critical Border Thinking and Lacanian Discourse Analysis, alongside other theoretico-methodological approaches. Using a critical decolonial psychology approach to conceptualize everyday Islamophobia, the author examines theoretical resources situated within the discursive turn, such as decoloniality/transmodernity, and carries out an archeology of (counter)terrorism, a genealogy of the conceptual Muslim, and a Žižekian ideology critique. Conceiving of Decolonial Psychoanalysis as one theoretical resource for Critical Islamophobia Studies (CIS), the author also applies Lacanian Discourse Analysis to extracts from interviews conducted with US Muslims to theorize their ethico-political subjectivity and considers a politics of resistance, adversarial aesthetics, and ethics of liberation. Essential to any attempt to come to terms with the legacy of racism in psychology, and the only critical psychological study on Islamophobia in the United States, this is a fascinating read for anyone interested in a critical approach to Islamophobia.

In Decolonizing Psychology: Globalization, Social Justice, and Indian Youth Identities, Sunil Bhatia explores how the cultural dynamics of neo-liberal globalization shape urban Indian youth identities and, in particular, he articulates how Euro-American psychological science continues to prevent narratives of self and identity in non-Western nations from entering the broader conversation.