Social Issues from Student Perspectives

Decolonial Perspectives in Psychology Essay Contest

Isabelle Clough, University of Texas at El Paso
Stephanie Miodus, Temple University

The SPSSI GSC invited graduate and undergraduate students to participate in the essay competition on ‘Decolonial Perspectives in Psychology’. This essay writing competition was organized to inspire students to explore psychology’s colonial legacies. Scholarly efforts have increasingly begun to interrogate how the prevailing knowledge and practice of psychology reflect and promote the interests of a privileged minority of people in Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic settings (Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan, 2010; Adams, Dobles, Go?mez, Kurtis, & Molina, 2015). We encouraged student perspectives that examine how dominant psychology theories are interwoven with Euromerican assumptions of thinking, feeling and being, and shape everyday realities of people in the Global South. The following are essays from our winners and honorable mentions from the competition.

• Decolonial Research Practices in Mental Health: An Australian based perspective towards diversity inclusive research
• On Decolonizing the Structures of Gender and Sexuality in the Philippines
• Black Woman Activism: Intersectionality, Radical Hope, and The Case for Post-Resilience Frameworks in Psychology
• Hijras, Colonialism, Psychology, and Western Notions of LGBTQ+

Read Students in Social Perspectives, the January 2022 Newsletter here.

back to menu