Accompaniment
A way of working alongside people and communities in struggle without treating them as objects of rescue, charity, or study. In these interviews, accompaniment means building relationships of solidarity, listening, mutual responsibility, and accountability.
Voice: Dutta

Arpillera
A Latin American textile art form used by oppressed communities to tell stories through fabric, image, collage, and weaving. In Comas-Díaz’s interview, arpillera becomes a metaphor for healing, subversive truth-telling, and psychological practice.
Voice: Comas-Diaz

Collectivism
A social structure in which the needs of a group are prioritized over individual needs. This term is often contrasted with individualism.
Voice: Comas-Diaz

Colonial feminism
Sometimes referred to as imperial feminism, colonial feminism describes the use of women’s rights to justify or legitimize colonialism and imperialism.
Voice: Dutta

Coloniality of being
A term Segalo draws from Walter Mignolo to describe how colonialism dehumanizes people and shapes lived experience, especially for Black women who are pushed into what Frantz Fanon called the “zone of non-being.”
Voice: Segalo

Coloniality of Consciousness
A term Deanne Bell uses to describe how coloniality can block people from fully naming or connecting their lived suffering to larger structures of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and dehumanization.
Voice: Bell

Counternarratives
Stories that challenge dominant or official accounts by offering alternative perspectives that highlight the complexity and agency of marginalized groups. Counter-narratives are central to decolonial feminist work because they make lived realities visible through visual, oral, written, and community-based forms.
Voice: Segalo

Counterstorytelling
A storytelling practice that disrupts dominant narratives about a group of people, especially narratives used to dehumanize them.
Voice: Dutta

Critical Consciousness
An understanding of how systemic oppression shapes people’s lives, paired with a motivation to act against oppressive systems.
Voice: Comas-Diaz

Decolonial feminism
A framework and praxis that challenges the ongoing legacies of colonialism in knowledge production, social structures, and gender relations. Decolonial feminism centers voices, histories, and ways of knowing marginalized by colonial and patriarchal systems, while asking how gender, race, class, nation, empire, history and place shape lived experience.
Voices: Segalo / Dutta / Kessi / Boonzaier

Epicolonial
The continuation of colonial relations of power through subtle, often unnoticeable ways that cannot always be directly traced back to colonization, but nevertheless reproduce its effects. For example, university policies that privilege western knowledge traditions can exclude racialized students without naming race explicitly, reproducing racial hierarchies.
Voice: Kessi

Epistemic violence
Harm caused when dominant groups define their knowledge as universal, erasing other ways of knowing. For example, psychometric testing has historically framed western norms and culture as the standard (e.g., intelligence testing), dismissing non-western knowledge systems as inferior.
Voice: Kessi

Heart Work
Work rooted in deep personal, political, and ethical commitment. In Boonzaier’s interview, heart work names the meaningful, full-self labor of doing scholarship connected to healing, joy, decolonial love, and transformation.
Voice: Boonzaier

Indivisibility of Justice
The idea that issues such as gendered violence, incarceration, poverty, state violence, reproductive justice, and workplace harm cannot be separated into neat categories when they are lived together. Dutta insists on not forcing people to “truncate” parts of themselves in order to fit institutional categories.
Voice: Dutta

Praxis
Action guided by reflection, and reflection tested through action. Our interviewees' work is repeatedly described not in terms of abstract theory alone, but as practiced through research, teaching, activism, community work, listening, mentorship, and institution-building.

Relationality
A way of understanding people, power, identity, and belonging through relationships rather than fixed categories alone. In Savaş’s interview, relationality is where feminist and decolonial work meet: it helps psychology attend to how people are shaped through families, institutions, migration, translation, community, displacement, and exclusion.
Voice: Savaş