Notes on decolonizing psychology: from one Special Issue to another

Abstract

In this article, we describe a special thematic section on the topic of “Decolonizing Psychological Science” that we have edited for the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. Three approaches to decolonization were evident in contributions to the ongoing project. In the indigenous resistance approach, researchers draw upon local knowledge to modify “standard” practice and produce psychologies that are more responsive to local realities. In the accompaniment approach, “global expert” researchers from hegemonic centers travel to marginalized communities to work alongside local inhabitants in struggles for social justice. In the denaturalization approach, researchers draw upon local knowledge and experience of marginalized communities as an epistemic resource to resist the coloniality of knowledge and being in hegemonic psychology. The task of decolonization requires more than the production of local psychologies attuned to the conditions of particular communities. In addition, it requires decolonial versions of global psychology that are conducive to the wellness of all humanity beyond a dominant Eurocentric subset.

Keywords

Accompaniment coloniality of being coloniality of knowledge decolonizing psychology denaturalization indigenous resistance

As observers from a distance, it is clear to us that South African psychologists have engaged the task of psychological decolonization (and decolonization of psychology) with considerable urgency (e.g., Kessi & Kiguwa, 2015; Pillay, 2017; Segalo, 2016; Sonn, Stevens, & Duncan, 2013). Among other manifestations, this urgency is evident in both the program for the 6th International Conference on Community Psychology in Durban and this Special Issue of the South African Journal of Psychology (SAJP). In our contribution to the Special Issue, we share observations from our experience of organizing a similar project. Over the past 5 years, we have collaboratively edited a special thematic section (STS) on the topic of “decolonizing psychological science” for the Journal of Social and Political Psychology (JSPP).¹ We published the inaugural set of contributions to the STS in 2015. In this article, we discuss the conceptual background that informed the project. We then discuss approaches to decolonization that were evident in contributions to the STS.

Theoretical foundations: coloniality in psychological science

Our idea for the STS arose from a series of collaborative seminars between psychologists from the Cultural Psychology Research Group (University of Kansas and University of West Georgia, USA) and critical community psychologists in the Costa Rican Liberation Psychology Collective (Universidad de Costa Rica and Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica). A common thread that underlies the work of these groups is the idea that the epistemic perspectives of people in oppressed communities provide a privileged standpoint for understanding (the psychology of) the human condition (Barrero, 2012; Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012; Martín-Baró, 1986).

One source of inspiration for the STS was the work of revolutionary psychologist Frantz Fanon (1963). Throughout his work, Fanon emphasized that the task of liberation from colonial oppression required not only decolonization of land and material resources, but also decolonization of the mind (Bulhan, 2015). This emphasis on psychological manifestations of (de)colonization was not merely metaphorical (Tuck & Yang, 2012); instead, Fanon and others (e.g., wa Thiong’o, 1986) writing in African settings emphasized that freedom from colonial domination requires that one confront the knowledge formations that provide the foundation for postcolonial societies. For these revolutionary intellectuals, the project of decolonization includes the facilitation of critical consciousness that would serve as catalyst for liberation and revolutionary change.

Another source of inspiration for the STS was Latin American perspectives of decolonial theory (de Sousa Santos, 2014; Escobar, 2007; Grosfoguel, 2002; Isasi-Díaz & Mendieta, 2012; Lander, 2000; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2011). In contrast to the idea of colonialism as a discrete historical period with a finite conclusion, decolonial perspectives emphasize the extent to which coloniality—ways of thinking and being associated with Eurocentric global domination—has persisted long after the end of formal colonial rule (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). As other contributors to this special issue discuss with greater authority, perspectives of decolonial theory have provided an important conceptual basis for re-thinking the optimality of Eurocentric global modernity and modern individualist ways of being. Whereas hegemonic understandings portray the Eurocentric modern order as the leading edge of human cultural progress, the view from the Global South illuminates coloniality as the typically obscured, inseparable dark side of modernity (see Mignolo, 2011).

One way in which coloniality is evident in psychological science is the coloniality of knowledge (e.g., Lander, 2000). Hegemonic psychology has extensively documented individualist habits of mind—including an orientation toward opportunities for personal growth and self-actualization, exploration and expression of authentic desires, and pursuit of defining aspirations—that are prominent in the cultural ecologies associated with Eurocentric global modernity. Rather than understand these forms as a particular historical development associated with colonial violence, hegemonic psychology interprets these patterns as optimal expressions of unfettered human nature and elevates these patterns to level of universal standard. The adoption of this standard requires that one forget the violence that produced modern/colonial individualist ways of being, and it obscures the extent to which hegemonic ways of being and knowing reproduce the colonial present of narrow accumulation and violent dispossession.

A related way in which coloniality is evident in psychological science is the coloniality of being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; see also Adams, Estrada-Villalta, & Gomez, 2017; Bulhan, 2015). Although hegemonic understandings of human development portray modern individualist mentalities as an optimal expression of human nature and a key to personal happiness, a focus on the coloniality of being helps to illuminate how these mentalities both reflect and reproduce the racialized violence of colonial domination. Regarding the former, decolonial perspectives illuminate how modern individualist mentalities are not the politically innocent product of cultural developments, but instead have their foundation in centuries of colonial plunder that produced the material affluence that enables their characteristic sense of freedom from constraint. Regarding the latter, decolonial perspectives illuminate how the promotion-oriented pursuit of growth associated with modern individualist mentalities reproduces violence through its consequences for ecological degradation and inequitable distribution of resources (Adams et al., 2017). Simply put, decolonial perspectives illuminate the possibility that modern individualist selfways are a source, rather than solution, of global inequality and suffering.

An important implication is that coloniality is not just a concern for psychologists who want to avoid neocolonial imposition in their work with communities in the Global South. More generally, coloniality–and the corresponding imperative to decolonize psychology—is a concern for researchers and practitioners in any setting who wrestle with questions about optimal ways of being. This includes psychologists who work from WEIRD centers of power in the modern/colonial order.²

Producing the STS: editorial procedures

Informed by this theoretical background, we proposed and received approval to produce a STS around the organizing theme of decolonizing psychology. Our goal for the STS was both to provoke consideration of the topic and to get some initial sense for how people understood it. Our call for proposals (CFP) invited contributors to consider psychological consequences of colonial domination, the extent to which the discipline of psychology is itself a colonial form, and the place (if any) of psychology in the broader set of fields that consider decolonization. This range of questions reflected our desire to solicit a broad set of perspectives.

We launched the CFP in January, 2013 and accepted proposals through February, 2013. Besides networks attached to the JSPP, we publicized the CFP primarily through standard disciplinary channels of hegemonic psychology. These included electronic fora of such organizations as the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the Society for Community Research and Action, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity, and Race (Divisions 8, 9, 27, and 45 of the American Psychological Association). We also publicized the CFP in more specialized fora associated with cultural and liberation psychology. We encouraged recipients of the CFP to forward it through their own networks to relevant intellectual communities, but we did not directly publicize the CFP through national and regional psychology associations (e.g., the Psychological Society of South Africa).³ Similarly, we did not attempt to publicize the CFP through networks associated with area or regional studies (e.g., African Studies or Latin American Studies). In retrospect, this failure to publicize the CFP through diverse regional associations resulted in a restricted range of proposals that constitutes an important limitation of the inaugural set of articles for the STS—a limitation that we hope to overcome in ongoing submissions to the virtual online collection.

In response to the CFP, we received 39 proposals that engaged a diversity of intellectual perspectives and geographic locations (including 25 distinct national or regional settings). After independently rating each proposal, the 5-person multi-national editorial team met (virtually) and arrived at a consensus decision to invite authors of 16 proposals to submit papers for further consideration. After soliciting external reviews we met again as a team to make unanimous collective decisions about publication. Our primary criteria for evaluation were engagement with the theme of decolonization, conceptual coherence, and quality of written expression. We granted special consideration to work from marginalized epistemic locations and to proposals that added conceptual or geographic diversity. One noteworthy challenge we faced is that authors who had difficulty expressing themselves in English were at a disadvantage in the review process, despite measures we took to facilitate their participation. This Anglocentric bias is an important limitation of the STS and constitutes an enduring manifestation of coloniality in hegemonic psychology.

Results of the STS: overview of submissions

The editorial review process resulted in selection of eight articles for inclusion in the initial publication of the STS. These eight articles included contributions from experts in community psychology, critical psychology, cultural psychology, experimental social psychology, feminist studies, history of psychology, liberation psychology, participatory action research, and queer studies. They described place-sensitive research connected to a variety of national, regional, or cultural settings, including Australia, Brazil, Central America, Cuba, Israel, Palestine, Somaliland, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and people of African descent in the United States.

In our reading, roughly one quarter of the submissions proposed to illuminate elements of coloniality in hegemonic psychology without necessarily engaging the discussion of decolonization. Of the remaining submissions that did appear to propose a strategy for decolonization, we discerned three approaches. Although we present these approaches separately for analytic purposes, most contributions included combinations of each approach.

Decolonization as indigenous resistance

The most prominent approach to decolonization in submissions to the STS was what we call indigenous resistance. In this approach, locally grounded researchers and practitioners re-claim place-based wisdom to produce forms of knowledge that resonate with local realities and better serve local communities (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). This approach was evident in roughly half of the submissions to our CFP, from settings as varied as Aotearoa//New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Cuba, Greece, Guam, Hawaii, India, Indonesia, Latinxs in the United States, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, and the Philippines.⁴

Most submissions in this category proposed to decolonize psychology through relatively superficial forms of indigenization: merely populating the discipline with local or Indigenous researchers or directing closer research attention to racially oppressed or colonized communities of the Majority World. Although these steps are certainly necessary, they are not sufficient. As Fanon (1963) emphasized (and decades of postcolonial rule have confirmed), the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples or racially marginalized personnel in hegemonic institutions provides no guarantee of transformation in the oppressive epistemic structures—including the coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being—that reflect and promote ongoing colonial domination. Moreover, as Said’s (1978) analysis of Orientalism suggests, an increase in research attention to Other settings will typically re-affirm, rather than disrupt, the coloniality of knowledge unless accompanied by a shift in epistemic standpoint that turns the analytic lens (and the colonial gaze) from colonized Other to re-think knowledge and practices of the colonial research apparatus.

One exception to this trend of superficial indigenization among submissions to the STS was an article by Pat Dudgeon and Roz Walker (2015), who applied Indigenous Australian understandings to re-think conceptions of well-being in hegemonic psychology. Hegemonic psychology focuses on the growth and happiness of individuals abstracted from social context. Dudgeon and Walker (2015) argued that this focus is problematic when applied to Indigenous Australian settings, where everyday understandings of well-being emphasize connections to family, kin, community, culture, land, spirit, and ancestors. They proposed the Indigenous Australian concept of socio-emotional well-being (SEWB) as a foundation for an alternative psychology that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous practitioners can use in work with Indigenous communities.

The particular strength of indigenous resistance approaches is the valorization of local understanding as a legitimate source of knowledge to counteract tendencies of internalized oppression or colonial mentality (David & Okazaki, 2006). A common strategy of resistance for people in oppressed communities is to recover and revalue aspects of local meaning systems that colonial violence suppressed or denigrated. These recovered meaning systems not only can bolster individual pride or self-esteem, but also (and more important) provide a ready foundation for collective identification around which to organize and motivate action and resistance. In this way, local understandings are reservoirs of meaning or epistemic resources upon which people in marginalized or colonized communities can draw to counteract the violence of colonialism.

Beyond colonial mentality, the relevance of indigenous resistance approaches as resources for mental decolonization extends to the coloniality of knowledge more generally, particularly the epistemic violence associated with the imposition of hegemonic knowledge in marginalized communities of the Majority World. Research in Majority World communities helps to reveal how standard scientific knowledge and methods assume particular everyday realities that differ profoundly from most human societies across time and space. Because researchers and practitioners in hegemonic psychology often work at a distance from lived realities in marginalized communities, they are generally unaware of the mismatch between lived realities and hegemonic imagination. The unwitting application of hegemonic knowledge and prescriptions, despite the poor fit to local circumstances and ways of being, can do considerable harm. Indigenous understandings provide a potential antidote to this epistemic violence by illuminating forms of intervention and ways of being that are better suited to local history and ecological conditions.

Despite these important strengths, approaches to decolonization as indigenous resistance are not without corresponding limitations. One set of limitations that we observed frequently in submissions to the STS concerned issues of essentialism, reification, and folklorization: processes whereby researchers or practitioners take the fluid, flexible, ecologically responsive patterns that they observe in a community and propose them as fixed, timeless essences of rigidly bounded cultural entities. One problem with this tendency is a view of innovation and adaptation as rejection of cultural identity and inauthentic assimilation rather than a normal feature of human cultural life. A related problem is a tendency to romanticize local ways of being, act as apologist for potentially problematic practices, and avoid subjecting local understandings to critical scrutiny.

Another set of limitations is the flipside of the emphasis on local understanding. Because the goal of indigenous resistance approaches is often to serve particular marginalized communities, there is often little interest in exploring the more general implications of resulting local knowledge beyond those particular communities, either for application in other marginalized communities or in hegemonic psychology as a whole. For example, one might wonder whether practices based on the Indigenous Australian concept of SEWB (Dudgeon & Walker, 2015) are appropriate for application in South African settings or even the WEIRD settings that disproportionately constitute hegemonic science. Such questions are not a priority for many researchers and practitioners who apply an indigenous resistance approach to decolonization, as they often face more pressing struggles for community survival against violence and epistemicide (de Sousa Santos, 2014).

Decolonization as accompaniment

The typical instance of the approach to decolonization as indigenous resistance is the case of a local insider who works in marginalized communities of the Majority World, notes how hegemonic psychology participates in the racialized colonial violence that these communities suffer, and articulates alternatives better suited to local circumstances. This is a difficult enough task when the psychologist has insider experience in a community. What happens if, as is frequently the case, psychologists find themselves working in communities in which they are not local insiders? Can they contribute to the project of psychological decolonization in contexts where they are outsiders? More generally, does the project of decolonization have any relevance for psychologists who benefit from colonial power and who work in privileged enclaves of the modern global order? Does their ignorance somehow absolve them from responsibility to engage the task of decolonization, or does their position of colonial privilege magnify this responsibility? If the latter, then how can they best contribute to the project?

One answer to that question is the second approach that we observed in submissions to the STS: decolonization as accompaniment (Watkins, 2015). This approach was evident in six submissions to the STS, primarily associated with the theoretical perspective of community psychology. In this approach, researchers and practitioners from mainstream academic settings leave the gated-community enclaves of Eurocentric global modernity and travel to colonized or racially subordinated settings to work among marginalized communities in struggles for social justice. In the best exemplars of this approach, the process is not one of an expert vanguard illuminating the path to liberation for oppressed Others, but rather joint efforts by oppressed communities and their allies to transform unjust systems and restore collective well-being. Whereas practitioners of hegemonic psychology typically assume the role of experts who dictate solutions for their clients, the practice of accompaniment requires that practitioners exchange the attitude of detached authority for one of engaged humility as they walk and learn alongside people in the oppressed communities where they work (Watkins, 2015).

Among contributions to the STS, an example of the accompaniment approach to decolonization was a multi-authored article describing projects of participatory action research (Segalo, Manoff, & Fine, 2015). In her contribution to the article, Puleng Segalo described a project in which she collaborated with women in a South African embroidery collective “to carve an alternative narrative (through making of personal embroideries) that highlights Black South African women’s experiences of growing up during apartheid and theorize how they define their citizenship within a newly democratized country” (Segalo et al., 2015, p. 345). In the same article, Einat Manoff described a project of counter-mapping—the re-presentation of alternative constructions of existing spatial realities—in which Israeli and Palestinian peace activists re-imagined society through plans for the return of displaced Palestinians to spaces now occupied by Israeli settlers.

As Michelle Fine noted in her concluding comments for the article, these projects perform decolonization in several important ways. They decolonize dominant conceptions of methodological rigor (especially the emphasis on sanitized observations abstracted from context; Denzin & Lincoln, 2012) through the participation of locally grounded researchers who draw upon personal knowledge gained from long-term engagement with particularities of place (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). These projects decolonize knowledge production by directing attention from the concerns that dominate hegemonic psychology to the concerns of people in marginalized communities of the Majority World. They decolonize knowledge forms by considering a broader range of products (e.g., maps and embroideries) by which people in marginalized spaces give tangible expression to alternative imaginations of reality that both denaturalize the unjust status quo and provide a sense of direction to a more just future. Finally, these projects decolonize knowledge by illuminating or provoking consideration about worlds of possibility, rather than documenting (and legitimizing via naturalization) worlds as they appear from a particular hegemonic standpoint.

As this exemplary contribution to the STS suggests, the strength of accompaniment approaches to decolonization is the emphasis on action and social change rather than “basic” research or “pure” knowledge abstracted from social and historical context. Whereas prevailing ideologies of positivism and scientism (Denzin & Lincoln, 2012) mandate cool detachment from societal struggles as the preferred mode of intellectual inquiry, the accompaniment approach to decolonization suggests that one comes closest to truth when one participates alongside marginalized communities in the context of everyday struggles.

Potential limitations of these approaches are inherent in the position of the accompanying researcher or practitioner as an outside expert. The expert’s position of relative power and privilege can enable a range of colonial practices (see Smith, 1999). Chief among these is a form of epistemic extractivism (Grosfoguel, 2016) whereby researchers and practitioners stay briefly in marginalized communities and appropriate local voices for their own professional agenda before returning to the insulated comfort of university centers. A related issue is what Cole (2012) referred to as “The White-Savior Industrial Complex”: a belief that problems of global injustice require the benevolent intervention of altruistic outsiders who will heroically step forward to lead oppressed Others to liberation. Besides the paternalistic overtones, this way of constructing issues of oppression is problematic to the extent that the focus on saving Others obscures the experts’ everyday participation in more diffuse, enduring forms of colonial privilege and systemic domination from which they benefit.

Another limitation that accompaniment approaches share with indigenous resistance approaches is an understanding of decolonization as something that one does in colonized or marginalized settings of the Majority World outside the affluent spaces that most psychologists inhabit. Even in exemplary applications, accompaniment approaches can fail to turn the analytic lens and consider how hegemonic psychology reflects and reproduces violence in its everyday application in centers of Eurocentric global modernity. Accordingly, even relatively progressive practices of accompaniment can easily reproduce and extend the coloniality of knowledge, especially when engagement with oppressed communities occurs on the epistemic terms of the accompanying practitioner.

Decolonization as denaturalization

The exclusive focus on colonized settings in the indigenous resistance and accompaniment approaches to decolonization contrasts with a third, denaturalization approach. This approach emphasizes that efforts at decolonization must also interrogate and disrupt elements of coloniality in both the standard regimes of hegemonic science (i.e., the coloniality of knowledge) and the psychological habits of the people in the typically WEIRD settings that inform scientific imagination (i.e., the coloniality of being). Perhaps because people do not typically consider dominant centers of the Eurocentric modern global order as sites ripe for psychological decolonization, the denaturalization approach to decolonization was evident in relatively few contributions to the STS, mainly associated with perspectives of critical and cultural psychology.

Our example of the denaturalization approach comes from the contribution to the STS by Tuğçe Kurtiş and Glenn Adams (2015). This contribution applied a decolonial analysis to the growth-oriented model of relationality that constitutes the normative standard in hegemonic psychology. Features of this model include concentration of care resources in a nuclear model of family centered on the conjugal relationship, a construction of care as emotional support, a construction of love as self-expansive merging with a chosen partner, and a promotion orientation toward relationality as a domain for self-expression and personal fulfillment. Judged against this normative standard, hegemonic perspectives of psychology are inclined to look with concern at patterns in many Majority World settings, including the Turkish and West African settings where Kurtiş and Adams (2015) have worked. These patterns include distribution of care resources across a lineage model of family centered on kinship, a construction of care as material or practical support, a construction of love as dutiful attention to obligation, and a prevention orientation toward relationality as a source of security. Viewed from a WEIRD epistemic perspective, one might consider these patterns problematic to the extent that they lead people—but especially women—to sacrifice personal growth and intimacy in order to maintain harmony.

In response to this pathologizing characterization, Kurtiş and Adams (2015) draw upon epistemic perspectives of women in marginalized settings as a privileged standpoint for a decolonial analysis (e.g., Mohanty, 2003). This standpoint provides a conceptual foundation to normalize tendencies that hegemonic perspectives portray as abnormal. Rather than deficient expressions of growth-oriented relationality, this approach suggests that one can regard the Turkish and West African patterns that Kurtiş and Adams (2015) observed as forms of care-oriented relationality attuned to everyday life in many settings of the Majority World. Rather than something harmful or worthy of contempt, these forms or relationality are worthy of respect and emulation for clues about sustainability and ecological interdependence to address the environmental and social crises of the modern/colonial order.

Equally important, this standpoint provides a conceptual foundation to denaturalize and deconstruct the patterns of growth-oriented relationality that inform standards of hegemonic psychology. Rather than optimal expressions of human nature, concentration of resources within the nuclear conjugal household, the pursuit of self-expansive fulfillment via romantic love, and other patterns of growth-oriented relationality require and reproduce the neoliberal individualist sense of abstraction from context and freedom from constraint associated with modern/colonial ways of being. Although these modern/colonial ways of being may afford personal growth and satisfaction for a privileged few, their benefits come at the cost of broader social injustice and ecological degradation for the majority of humanity (Adams et al., 2017).

The primary strength of denaturalization approaches is to confront the coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being in standard patterns of hegemonic psychology. When psychologists prescribe growth-oriented relationality and other manifestations of individualist selfways, they reproduce and propagate ways of being that reflect and reproduce colonial domination. The primary goal of denaturalization approaches is to counteract these forms of epistemic violence and to illuminate alternative ways of being, oriented toward sustainable relationality versus the pursuit of unlimited growth, that better resonate with the experience and aspirations of all humanity. The radical goal of this approach is not (only) local liberation, but (also) to promote decolonial versions of knowledge and practice that promote broader liberation. They do not (necessarily) address colonial violence by working directly with communities that have suffered from it; instead, they confront the epistemic violence that emanates from and operates in centers of power in the modern/colonial order.

The primary strength of denaturalization approaches is also their primary limitation. The audience is hegemonic psychology rather than people living in situations of colonial and racial oppression. Similarly, the proximal target of decolonization is forms of knowledge, not communities of people. For psychologists who approach decolonization as indigenous resistance, this focus on epistemic violence raises questions about the use of decolonization as metaphor that neutralizes the concept and misdirects struggles away from the primary task of reparative justice (Tuck & Yang, 2012). For researchers and practitioners who are accompanying people from marginalized communities in their struggles against material violence, this focus on epistemic violence from the insulated security of ivory-tower institutions risks becoming a sanitized, intellectual exercise. In either case, the concern is that this approach becomes precisely the sort of hegemonic psychology that requires decolonization in the first place.

Conclusion

Although we have presented these approaches to decolonization as separate categories for the analytic moment, we again emphasize that these distinctions are somewhat overdrawn. Rather than mutually exclusive categories, successful efforts at practice of mental decolonization are likely to incorporate elements of each approach. Although accompaniment or indigenous resistance approaches to decolonization properly emphasize local understanding in the context of material struggles for reparation and social justice, they are most effective when they draw upon this epistemic resource to turn the analytic lens and counteract the coloniality of knowledge in hegemonic psychology. Similarly, denaturalization approaches to decolonization are typically most effective when they take inspiration from indigenous knowledge or a history of engagement with everyday life in marginalized settings.

Rather than these analytic categories, perhaps the more important distinction that emerged from contributions to the STS was between two senses of the project of decolonizing psychology. The first sense refers to a process that one applies to standard knowledge and practice of science (i.e., decolonization of psychology). In this sense, the task of decolonization requires that researchers reveal and counteract the colonial standpoint of standard scientific forms that typically masquerade as positionless or politically innocent reflections on objective reality. Although certainly a necessary step, successful submissions to the STS also engaged the project of decolonizing psychology in a second sense: production of knowledge practices suitable for the task of decolonization (i.e., psychology of decolonization). In this sense, the task of decolonization requires the development of alternative concepts and tools that provide a broader foundation for human liberation. We offer our analysis to the current Special Issue as a contribution toward that objective.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This work benefitted from the critical engagement and epistemic community of the Costa Rican Liberation Psychology Collective and the Cultural Psychology Research Group at the University of Kansas. Glenn Adams appreciatively acknowledges the hospitality and consideration of South African colleagues, especially Norman Duncan, Kevin Durrheim, Peace Kiguwa, Puleng Segalo, and Garth Stevens.

Funding

The author(s) declared receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Glenn Adams received funding from the American Psychological Association MOU Conference Program to support his attendance at the 2016 meeting of the Psychological Society of South Africa, where he delivered the address that forms the basis for this article. The broader work is a product of support from the Vicerrectoría de la Investigación at the Universidad de Costa Rica and the Office of International Programs at the University of Kansas in the form of a UCR-KU Collaboration Grant to Ignacio Dobles, Glenn Adams, and Ludwin E. Molina.

Notes

References

Adams

Dobles

Gómez

Kurtiş

Molina

L. E.

(2015). Decolonizing psychological science: Introduction to the special thematic session. Journal of Social and Political Psychology: Special Thematic Section on Decolonizing Psychological Science, 3, 213–238.

Adams

Estrada-Villalta

Gómez Ordóñez

L. H.

(2017). The modernity/coloniality of being: Hegemonic psychology as intercultural relations. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. Epub ahead of print 11 July 2017. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2017.06.006

Barrero

(2012). Del discurso encantador a la práxis liberadora: Psicología de la liberación. Aportes para la construcción de una psicología desde el Sur [From enchanting speech to liberatory praxis: Liberation psychology: Contributions toward the construction of a psychology from the South]. Bogotá, Colombia: Ediciones Catedra Libre.

Bulhan

H. A.

(2015). Stages of colonialism in Africa: From occupation of land to occupation of being. Journal of Social and Political Psychology: Special Thematic Section on Decolonizing Psychological Science, 3, 239–256.

Cole

(2012, March 21). The white-savior industrial complex. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/

Comaroff

J. L.

(2012). Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa. Anthropological Forum: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology, 22, 113–131.

David

E. J. R.

Okazaki

(2006). Colonial mentality: A review and recommendation for Filipino American psychology. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 12, 1–16.

Denzin

N. K.

Lincoln

Y. S.

(2012). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In Denzin

N. K.

Lincoln

Y. S.

(Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 1–19). New York, NY: SAGE.

de Sousa Santos

. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

10.

Dudgeon

Walker

(2015). Decolonizing Australian psychology: Discourses, strategies, and practice. Journal of Social and Political Psychology: Special Thematic Section on Decolonizing Psychological Science, 3, 276–297.

11.

Escobar

(2007). Worlds and knowledges otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality research program. Cultural Studies, 21, 179–210.

12.

Fanon

(1963). The wretched of the earth. New York, NY: Grove Press.

13.

Grosfoguel

(2002). Colonial difference, geopolitics of knowledge, and global coloniality in the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 25, 203–224.

14.

Grosfoguel

(2016). From “economic extractivism” to “epistemical extractivism” and “ontological extractivism”: A destructive way to know, be and behave in the world. Tabula Rasa, 24, 123–143.

15.

Henrich

Heine

S. J.

Norenzayan

(2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavior and Brain Sciences, 33, 61–83.

16.

Isasi-Díaz

A. M.

Mendieta

(2012). Decolonizing epistemologies: Latina/o theology and philosophy. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

17.

Kessi

Kiguwa

(2015). Social psychology and social change: Beyond Western perspectives. Papers on Social Representations, 24, 11–111.

18.

Kurtiş

Adams

(2015). Decolonizing liberation: Toward a transnational feminist psychology. Journal of Social and Political Psychology: Special Thematic Section on Decolonizing Psychological Science, 3, 388–413.

19.

Lander

(Ed.). (2000). La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas [The coloniality of knowledge: Eurocentrism and social sciences. Latin American perspectives]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales.

20.

Lau

Seedat

(2015). The community story, relationality and process: Bridging tools for researching local knowledge in a peri-urban township. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 25, 369–383.

21.

Long

(2016). On the Africanisation of psychology. South African Journal of Psychology, 46, 429–431.

22.

Maldonado-Torres

(2007). On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21, 240–270.

23.

Martín-Baró

(1986). Hacia una psicología de la liberación [Toward a liberation psychology]. Boletín de Psicología de El Salvador, 22, 219–231.

24.

Mignolo

W. D.

(2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

25.

Mohanty

C. T.

(2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

26.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni

S. J.

(2013). Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: Myths of decolonization. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA.

27.

Nwoye

(2015). What is African Psychology the psychology of? Theory & Psychology, 25, 96–116.

28.

Pillay

S. R.

(2017). Cracking the fortress: Can we really decolonize psychology? South African Journal of Psychology, 47, 135–140.

29.

Ratele

(2017). Four (African) psychologies. Theory & Psychology, 27, 313–327.

30.

Said

E. W.

(1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage.

31.

Segalo

(2016). Decolonizing social psychology in Africa. In Ndlovu-Gatsheni

S. J.

Zondi

(Eds.), Decolonizing the university, knowledge systems, and disciplines in Africa (pp. 165–180). Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

32.

Segalo

Manoff

Fine

(2015). Working with embroideries and counter-maps: Engaging memory and imagination within decolonizing frameworks. Journal of Social and Political Psychology: Special Thematic Section on Decolonizing Psychological Science, 3, 342–364.

33.

Smith

L. T.

(1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London, England: Zed Books.

34.

Sonn

C. C.

Stevens

Duncan

(2013). Decolonisation, critical methodologies and why stories matter. In Stevens

Duncan

Hook

(Eds.), Race, memory and the Apartheid Archive: Towards a transformative psychosocial praxis (pp. 295–314). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

35.

Tuck

McKenzie

(2014). Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. New York, NY: Routledge.

36.

Tuck

Yang

K. W.

(2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1, 1–40.

37.

wa Thiong’o

. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Nairobi, Kenya: East African Educational Publishers.

38.

Watkins

(2015). Psychosocial accompaniment. Journal of Social and Political Psychology: Special Thematic Section on Decolonizing Psychological Science, 3, 324–341.