Decolonizing Psychological Science

Decolonizing Psychological Science

• Mainstream psychology still reflects the interests of a privileged minority in affluent centers despite global access to information.
• Few critical voices reflect on the Euro-American colonial character of psychological science, unlike other social sciences.
• There is a relationship between psychology and ongoing domination processes that favor a minority but hurt the global majority's sustainability.
• Concerns exist about racialized violence, economic injustice, unsustainable development, and ecological damage.
• Liberation and cultural psychology perspectives inform the approach to decolonizing psychological science.
• Coloniality manifests in psychological science, with indigenization, accompaniment, and denaturalization as approaches to decolonization.
• A library of digitally linked articles on decolonizing psychological science is continually growing.

Franz Fanon's Challenge

• Revolutionary psychologist Franz Fanon challenged researchers to decolonize intellectual production for broader decolonization and global revolution.
• Prevailing understandings in mainstream academia reflect and promote interests of domination.
• Fanon urged scholars to articulate alternative understandings more conducive to human liberation.
• Mainstream psychology largely ignored Fanon’s challenge or discredited it as political activism.
• Mainstream psychology reflects the interests of a privileged minority from Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) countries.
• "Majority World" experience tends to be viewed through WEIRD-centric concepts, methods, and beliefs.
• There is little attention to how science works to express and reproduce domination.
• Psychologists have few opportunities to reflect on their participation in domination processes that undermine well-being for most of humanity.
• The special thematic section on Decolonizing Psychological Science addresses Fanon’s challenge due to oppression.
• The special section originated from intellectual exchanges between the Cultural Psychology Research Group at the University of Kansas, and the Costa Rican Liberation Psychology Collective.
• Exchanges were motivated by working in marginalized settings of the Majority World, outside of the WEIRD-centric norms.
• "Scientistic mimicry" is practiced to align with intellectual debates in Global North academic centers, distancing from the poverty realities in their societies.
• Psychologists use "unknowing" to study experience abstracted from context to proceed with academic business separate from colonial violence.
• Everyday life reminds researchers in majority-world spaces of the coloniality of the modern global order.
• Coloniality emphasizes the modern global order’s reliance on racialized power that continues violence.
• Knowledge production without reference to coloniality obscures more than it reveals about basic psychological tendencies.
• It is important to understand colonial violence and its relationship to mainstream psychology.

Conceptual Resources for Decolonizing Psychological Science

• There are bodies of work that provide conceptual resources for intellectual decolonization
• The theoretical perspectives of liberation psychology and cultural psychology inform the editorial team's approach to the topic.

Perspectives of Liberation Psychology

• Theoretical perspectives of liberation psychology are a set of conceptual resources that inform our approach to decolonizing psychological science.
• Articulations of liberation psychology have emerged over the last 50 years.
• Latin American character of liberation psychology emerges from local understandings and reflects colonial violence.
• The intersection of social-psychological methods and insights seeks to serve social justice.
• Privilege the epistemological position of oppressed or marginalized conditions.
• Emphasize praxis over sterilized theory
• There is a commitment to treat the perspectives and interests of oppressed and impoverished communities as a primary source of insight.
• Influenced by Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Fals-Borda's participatory action research.
• Martín-Baró identified three urgent tasks for liberation psychology.

De-Ideologizing Everyday Realities

• Conventional representations of everyday events and experience are neither the neutral reflection of reality nor a "natural" reality.
• They represent particular constructions of reality that reflect and serve the interests of the powerful.
• Researchers can advance the cause of liberation, by exposing and counteracting the ideological nature of supposedly neutral or natural concepts.
• Challenging hegemonic perspectives of psychological science.
• Science is a positioned form of knowledge reflecting the understandings and interests of dominant people.
• Understandings that emerge direct subsequent activity toward ends consistent with motivations for their original selection.
• Empirical research can be a tool for de-ideologizing conventional understandings of everyday realities.

Recovering Historical Memory

• Epistemic violence represses local representations of history/identity and replaces them with colonizer understandings.
• Recovery of repressed historical memory is a second urgent task for liberation psychology, drawing on the work of Orlando Fals-Borda.
• The prevailing discourse is apparently natural/ahistorical, preventing people from deriving lessons from experience/finding their identity roots.
• Recovery of historical memory reconstructs models of identification that open up horizons for liberation and fulfillment.
• Institutional denial/collective forgetting of violence can be counteracted by the recovery of historical memory.
• Promotes identity constructions that provide unity/purpose around alternative understandings of history/progress.

Privileging Marginalized Perspectives

• Understand reality from the perspective of the oppressed.
• Authoritative discourses marginalize or pathologize most of the world's people outside contexts that give discourses authority.
• The task provides a mindful corrective and enables analysis of events.
• Emphasizing humanity/dignity of marginalized Others and illuminating the racialized colonial standpoint of authoritative knowledge forms that practitioners/consumers typically regard as truth.
• Resonates with Fanon's call to "work out new concepts" is revolutionizing intellectuals.
• Recognizing the epistemological value of marginalized perspectives provides a firm conceptual basis for liberatory action.
• Liberation psychology shares with cultural psychology.

Cultural Psychology

• Cultural psychology provides another set of resources to decolonize psychological science.
• Cultural psychology considers the mutual constitution of culture and mind.
• The sociocultural constitution of psychological experience requires engagement with the affordances of different cultural ecologies.
• Everyday ecologies are products of human activity.
• Cultural psychology perspectives respond to Fanon's call to work out new concepts for a decolonial psychology.
• Conventional cultural psychology shies away from power/domination due to the impact of positivist epistemology.
• Perspectives of cultural psychology offer tools to combat prejudice.
• Reduction of prejudice/peaceful co-existence can affect interests.
• Concern exists with forms of epistemic violence maintains systems of exploitation/domination.
• intersection of cultural psychology with the epistemological standpoint of Global South communities offers a platform to reveal/resist violence.

Normalizing Other Experience

• Provide a normalizing account of patterns in Majority World or marginalized spaces that mainstream approaches portray as abnormal.
• Researchers/practitioners should view patterns from a context-sensitive perspective.
• Affirms the intellect and humanity.
• This strategy regards local understandings as a reservoir of time-tested wisdom.
• Takes the perspective of people in marginalized, majority-world spaces as knowledge base.
• Reconsider interventions and rethink mainstream theory and research.

Denaturalizing Conventional (Scientific) Wisdom

• Conventional scientific wisdom reflects and promotes the perspectives/interests of people in affluent WEIRD spaces.
• This strategy resonates with Martín-Baró's call to de-ideologize official accounts of reality.
• Provides a more adequate/ less paternalistic account of Other experience and people.
• Cultural psychology locating its foundations in independent selfways: constructions that promote understanding of the social world abstracted from historical context.
• Emphasis on ideational underpinnings and neglect of structural or material underpinnings.
• Obscures the unprecedented material affluence of North American settings, the historical origins of that affluence in violent colonial appropriation.
• Intellectual formations afford consideration of the historical forces that created/maintain the material affluence of Euro-American worlds.
• Perspectives note how this affluence developed/persists, enriched a privileged minority at the global majority's expense.
• Independent selfways have existed in a relationship with resource extraction and domination.
• United conceptual and material via neoliberal individualism
• Explicit the relationship between individualist understandings of self and society with the modern economic foundations evident in economic deregulation, labor exploitation, gutting of social welfare, constriction of public sphere, growing social inequality, and overconsumption.
• Important direction to consider the extent to which conventional and professional practices reflect/reproduce ideologies of individualism.

Coloniality and Psychological Science

• Psychological science bears relation to processes of colonization.

Coloniality of Being: Metacolonialism

• Intersection of colonialism and psychology
• Colonial violence extends to "occupation of being" and control over psychological, mental colonization.
• Hegemony of Euro-American understandings in defining modern global realities.
• Calling to turn focus from individual happiness to collective well being.
• Bulhan's reference provides understanding manifestions of coloniality that influences psychological experience.
• Colonial occupation of being focuses on how colonized people come to experience life using colonizer concepts/standards.
• Colonial mentality: internalized oppression characterized by rejection of colonized.

Coloniality of Knowledge: Orientalism

• Daily habits that reflect the process of colonization
• Hegemonic psychological science elevates these ways of being to the status of normative standard for all humanity.
• Dominance as a universal standard/ violence that masks problematic history.
• Unmarked dominance as the topic Bulhan considered.
• Well being as a life satisfaction/ personal happiness
• Not those that maximize promote-oriented accumulation and high-arousal happiness.
• Can lead to people focus on personal over focus on change/ transformation.
• Another framework understanding is Said’s discussion of Orientalism
• Set of European powers created sense of superiority and justified domination.

Decolonization as Indigenization

• Theviolence of colonialism is extensive to extend to epistemic forms associated with the occupation on being and the symbolic resources.
• Evident the approach is “decolonization by Indigenization”
• The reclaims local or indigenous wisdom to produce forms of knowledge.

Indigenizing Health: Social-Emotional Well-Being

• Approaches the concept of Socio-Emotional Well being a Australian
• Focuses on the growth and happiness of individual abstracted, problematic when applied in Australian
• Emphasize connections as they propose the concept.

Indigenizing the Revolution: From Psychology in Cuba to Cuban Psychology

• Social decolonization stimulated efforts on theoretical decolonization
• Build on psychology to suit the society rather than imported oriented
• Local realities resonating with discussion important part efforts
• Develop and create consciousness to mobilize people.

Decolonization as Accompaniment

• Community insider is a case of colonization
• Hegemonic can also participates as ineffective
• Work for and the like suited circumstances and local conditions.

Accompaniment in Healing

• Academic is used for a radical change
• Typically are academic authority and knowledge.

Accompaniment in Research

• The research of South Africa with the research and development.

Decolonization as Denaturalization

• Relied on outsiders' objective
• Focus is in the affluent side to the society and social.

Coping With Oppression: Conscious Transformation Versus Colorblind Adaptation

• Theories focused on science to advocate with racial injustice
• Can also affect or have impact
• The consciousness of racism.

Decolonizing Love: From Growth to Sustainability

• Two separate sections or articles that contribute and provide from certain perspectives.

An Invitation to the Reader

• The special thematic to provisionally consider topically science
• Continue to invite contributions and other submissions.