Abstract
The aim of this special issue is to strengthen a growing body of work on decolonisation and psychology.
We framed the special issue as follows in the call for papers: ‘Building on long-standing criticisms of the psychology curricula, pedagogy, research, practice, and governance; the aim of this special issue is to enrich debates about decolonisation and psychology. Without overly celebrating “decolonisation”; the special issue builds on previous critical contributions in psychology and raises questions about the role and relevance of decolonisation in psychology’.
The starting point was our grappling with what decolonisation meant for scholarship, teaching, activism, and practice in South African psychology. Decolonisation has been enthusiastically embraced by some-driven, in part, by the ongoing dissatisfaction with a system that privileges some knowledge(s) over the others and by students and universities who demand, sometimes paradoxically, that we ‘decolonise’ scholarship and teaching. Decolonisation has also been resisted in equal measure by those seeking definitions who refuse to engage until they know what it is and by those who argue that the current focus has nothing new to contribute to a decades-old body of decolonisation scholarship. There are those who continue with teaching, research, and practice regardless.
It was clear to us that calls to decolonise psychology, however interpreted, was necessary and needed to be taken seriously. At the same time, there were risks in simplifying ‘psychology’ and ‘decolonisation’ that assumed that we agree on what decolonising psychology might mean. There was also a risk that we adopt a single narrative for what a decolonised psychology might look like and that we forget the rich and complex history of colonisation, decolonisation, psychology, and criticality (Bulhan, 2015). Moreover, there was also a risk of limiting decolonisation to scholarly discourse that ignored the lived experiences of marginalised people including academics from marginalised groups and that psychology once again failed to address the ‘structural’ such as poverty and income inequality that continue to have profound implications in society.
In our attempt to make sense of what decolonisation meant, we did not seek definitions, grand proclamations of how decolonisation will impact psychological scholarship and practice, or what a decolonised psychology would look like, for this is a too difficult (perhaps impossible) task for one collection of papers. What we sought, however, was to understand how decolonisation was being considered and written into South African psychology and what this might mean. The call for papers, therefore, was purposefully broad and not limited to one particular subfield of scholarship.
The resulting special issue represents a collection of papers that reflect the range and depth of scholarship on decolonisation and psychology. Some papers attempt to deepen the theoretical underpinnings of decolonisation and psychology. For example, Canham focuses on rage, the limits of psychological assumptions of rage, and argues that protests are a form of community rage at sedimented oppressions. Kessi and Boonzaier provide an insightful framework for centering decolonial feminist ways of doing psychological work in Africa. Ratele et al. provide useful insights in response to some basic questions about Africa(n)-centred psychology in the context of decolonisation. In a powerful piece, Maseti reflects on feelings of (un)belonging and exclusion as a black female student and later as an academic in a previously white university, while Kiguwa and Segalo provide rich insights into decolonisation and the curriculum in their comparison of residential and distance learning institutions. They focus on the explicit, hidden, and null curricula and discuss ways in which a decolonised curriculum might take shape.
The #feesmustfall and subsequent movements played a significant role shaping the current decolonisation debates. Ally and August analyse online interactions of the #sciencemustfall movement while Ebrahim interrogates media representations of students in the #feesmustfall movement and their implications.
Some of the papers drew on innovative and creative research methodologies such as autoethnography (Maseti) and collaborative writing (Ratele et al.). Two papers focus specifically on the issue of methodology and decolonisation. Macleod argues for the need to collate existing writings to strengthen decolonisation scholarship with a special focus on systematic reviews and textbooks. Barnes discusses the decolonising methodologies movement and argues that while decolonising methodologies hold potential, a number of limitations may impede how much ‘decolonising’ can decolonising methodologies achieve. Finally, Pillay tactfully points out the ethics and responsibility of psychologists in calling attention to problematic political leaders, thereby placing politics and public interest firmly on the decolonisation agenda.
A number of insights can be gleaned from the contributions. The papers demonstrate the range of ways decolonisation has been drawn on in psychological scholarship including theory, application, curriculum, and methodology. The contributions reveal the complexity of decolonisation that extend beyond the familiar trope that decolonisation means to replace one body of knowledge with another. The contributions also demonstrate how critical movements can be mobilised under decolonisation to strengthen their cause as well as the loosening of the language and boundaries of psychological scholarship that could potentially improve disciplinary relevance. Importantly, some papers demonstrate how what could be considered as mainstream concepts such as systematic reviews could be usefully applied to decolonisation while critical concepts such as decolonising methodologies may be limiting.
There are, however, noticeable gaps in the special issue. No contributions covered the issue of language and decolonisation. We also did not receive contributions on psychology and pan African thought. Importantly, we did not receive papers on the topic of decolonisation and governance in relation to, for example, statutory bodies. The call for papers was broad. There is a need to focus on decolonisation within fields in the hope of more focused analyses as has already begun (see, for example, Adams, Dobles, Gómez, Kurtiş, & Molina, 2015; Seedat & Suffla, 2017). We trust that this special issue will stimulate further thinking about decolonisation and psychology.