Vers une psychologie décoloniale

Towards a decolonial psychology. Recentering and reclaiming global marginalized knowledges


Call for papers


Submission deadlines
Letter of intent deadline: October 15, 2023
Invitation to submit will be sent out: by November 15, 2023
Manuscript submission deadline: March 15, 2024


Editors
Sunil Bhatia, PhD
Ronelle Carolissen, PhD
Nuria Ciofalo, PhD
Alexandra Rutherford, PhD


Background and context

Decolonizing is an ethical commitment that involves dismantling the colonial structure of EuroAmerican psychology by asking questions about what counts as knowledge, whose knowledge is valid, who controls the production of knowledge, who is deemed an expert, and whom are we accountable to in our psychological research and for what purposes (Smith, 2012). This special issue will highlight the rich and compelling accounts of decolonial psychological knowledge that have emerged from different histories of colonization. AP readers will learn how decolonial psychology is disrupting and at times displacing Eurocentric psychological knowledge with ideas, theories, and concepts that are more relevant to the experiences and lifeways of communities around the world.


Special issue aims

This issue specifically invites contributors from different countries, cultural contexts, and social locations to provide readers with a useful mapping of the diverse, co-existing bodies of decolonial research that have proliferated in psychology, especially over the past ten years. These trends are exciting because they signal the potential for the discipline of psychology to draw on multiple ecologies of knowledge rather than a singular dominant form of knowledge. The issue will highlight contributions that center underacknowledged and silenced knowledge/s and practices. It will retrieve and center the histories of psychology that are emerging from a multitude of interconnected communities, geographies, and localities. Importantly too, it connects the struggle for making visible and understanding marginalized knowledge in the Global North and South. We are interested in contributions from scholars who develop and provide alternative knowledge frameworks to Eurocentric psychology and integrate in their analysis histories of racism, empire, colonialism and coloniality.

Our call for this special issue is guided by three goals: 1) to highlight a body of emerging knowledge–concepts, ideas, and theories that are distinct from, and stand as alternatives to, those offered by Eurocentric psychology; 2) to make visible and foreground the historical, cultural, and contextual factors that support and attend the development of these decolonial knowledges; and 3) to break power asymmetries and facilitate the bi-directional flow of intellectual exchange between decolonial scholars in the majority world and scholars in the minority world, and among diverse decolonial scholars themselves.

We welcome submissions on interdisciplinary themes and topics including: 

• history, theory of decolonial turn in psychology;
• decolonial histories of psychology;
• decolonial concepts, theories and ideas as alternatives to Eurocentric psychology;
• rethinking culture, agency, and resistance in decolonial psychology;
• decolonial psychology and social justice, liberation, neoliberalism, globalization;
• colonization, empire and racism and constructions of being, relationality, selfhood and community;
• decolonial examples of cultural retrieval, remembering and Indigenous life-making;
• recentering of voices from below and expansion of marginalized voices;
• arts, activism, and community centered approaches to decolonizing self;
• decolonization, social inequality and UN sustainable development goals;
• rethinking indigeneity and Indigenous psychology from a decolonial perspective;
• decolonization of self, subjectivity, and identity;
• dismantling coloniality of psychological knowledge; and
• application of decolonial psychological frameworks to local practices.

Submission details

Interested contributors should submit a letter of interest (LOI) consisting of 500-word abstract and 150-word author biographies that integrate information about life experiences, positionality, and social identities that inform their decolonial scholarship in psychology and allied disciplines. LOIs and author biographies/positionality statements should be emailed to Sunil Bhatia, Ronelle Carolissen, Nuria Ciofalo, and Alexandra Rutherford by October 15, 2023. The LOI should provide specific examples of how their decolonial psychological research is shaped by specific histories of colonization and rooted in geographic, familial, and local cultural knowledge. The editors will provide authors with decisions by November 15, 2023. Invited contributors will have four months to develop and submit their manuscript by March 15, 2024. Invitations to contribute do not guarantee acceptance of manuscripts, and all invited manuscripts will be subject to the customary journal review process.