Academics in the Global South, This Is Your Sign to Decolonize Psychology – Mad In America – Mad in America

In a new article (posted before peer review on preprint website PsyArXiv), psychologist Mvikeli Ncube of the University of Arden in the United Kingdom calls for the decolonization of psychological knowledge to address the epistemic violence done unto indigenous and local communities in the Global South. Ncube writes that the field of psychology must be decolonized and resituated in local contexts to ensure that meaning-making occurs within ones own lived experience rather than that of the situatedness and power of the Global North, suggesting that indigenous researchers and ways of knowing offer an important alternative to the colonizing status quo.

The Global North has exported its concept of psychology and psychiatry across the world, under the assumption that findings of how people behave in WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) samples, such as US college students, are universally true. This includes specific psychiatric disorders, medication, language, and ways of knowing. Ncube, in his essay, encourages indigenous and local researchers, academics, and thinkers in the Global South to recognize the epistemic violence innate to Western ways of knowing and conduct their own research to counteract its many harms.

Ncube articulates this argument via a brief philosophical and historical analysis of psychology. He premises his paper on the social constructionist epistemological position (meaning that his underlying assumption is that knowledge is created, rather than inherent and objective). Through this premise Ncube argues that the decolonization of psychology is best done through Fanonian epistemic decolonization.

He understands that the knowledge that is created in psychology is a kind of knowledge created and propagated by white researchers in the Global North. And this specific way of knowing and meaning-making will never be able to fully encapsulate or understand the true experience of indigenous people and locals in the Global South because it is designed to doubt and question other ways of knowing not founded in the scientific method. Ncube puts it simply: the Global Norths current psychology was created, not only without the appreciation for texts and methodologies grounded in the Global South, but with the specific intention to undermine them.

However, the psychology of the Global North can be challenged by the academics the Global South, advancing the cause of liberation. Ncube asks that academics embrace their situated ways of knowing and conduct research that exposes and counteracts what much of the world considers to be both natural and neutral concepts to highlight the failures of a discipline created with intentional neglect for other ways of knowing and meaning-making.

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Ncube, M. (2022). Epistemic violence in psychological science. Issues of knowledge, meaning making and power: A critical historical and philosophical perspective. Accessed September 21, 2022. https://psyarxiv.com/a5nxs/

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Academics in the Global South, This Is Your Sign to Decolonize Psychology - Mad In America - Mad in America