The interviewees featured in this exhibit challenge the idea that mainstream psychology can stand outside history, culture, or power. Their reflections ask us to consider how psychological theories, methods, and institutions have often carried Western and Eurocentric assumptions about the individual, the mind, family, gender, race, and wellbeing.

For many of them, these limitations were not abstract. They were encountered through absences in the classroom, in curricula organized around theories that did not speak to their communities, and in professional models that located suffering inside the individual while overlooking the structural conditions that produce harm.

A decolonial feminist approach does not simply make room for marginalized people within existing frameworks. It asks psychology to turn its gaze upon itself: its histories, categories, methods, silences, and entanglements with colonial and patriarchal systems. It also asks what psychology might become if it began elsewhere—from lived experience, relationality, community knowledge, and the pursuit of liberation.

Ultimately, Psychology, itself, becomes an object of decolonial feminist transformation.

"We have to learn how to separate categories, how to separate the institutions that we are in from, I think, the human. So, you know, you have to be able to pry race apart from the human. You have to be able to pry this modern life that we are apart from the human. If we can’t do that kind of prying, then we can’t actually see what this stuff is doing to human beings."

– Deanne Bell

"I did my undergrad in Turkey… I knew that I wanted to be in psychology. And then there's the disenchantment after getting in and realizing that this is super individualistic and, you know, it is sort of like a facade for spreading individualism… We’re sitting in this classroom, most of us are first generation, coming from, of course, Turkish-speaking households. Our teachers are teaching in English… Teaching us in English these published articles in English that are based on data coming, like pretty much you know, 95% of it is coming from students, from people who look like my current students [in the US]...I was not finding myself in that curriculum.”

– Özge Savaș

"I think psychology has a lot to offer. But we have to grapple with the history of psychology and the legacies of psychology...Unless we can deal with some of the harmful effects or the epistemic violence of our discipline, we're not going to be producing the types of psychologists that can have any impact on society...decolonial psychology would be a psychology that critiques the colonial relations of power that continue to exist in the discipline.”

– Shose Kessi

The interviewees all touched on the notion of research as inseparable from social justice.

The voices featured here describe research as a practice of accountability: to communities, to histories, and to ongoing struggles for justice. Some turn to participatory and arts-based methods, including photovoice, embroidery, counter-storytelling, poetry, film, and oral history. Others work through clinical practice, curriculum transformation, community organizing, and feminist archival work.

Across these varying approaches, knowledge is not extracted from communities and translated into academic language. It is created with communities, returned to communities, and used to open conversations that might otherwise remain silenced. This commitment lies at the heart of decolonial feminist psychology. Research is not only a way of studying harm, oppression, or identity. It is also a way of making space for voice, recognition, imagination, healing, and collective action.

"Coming to the United States and actually being on the ground in a place where these kinds of experiments or theorizing took place was like an 'aha' moment, but also a moment of sadness to say: so, this is what it looks like or it feels like to actually theorize from the ground, theorize from where you are, observe your surrounding and the lived realities and then from that make meaning of it and then write about it in terms of how we understand psychological processes. We are denied that opportunity, because we’re only prescribed textbooks that come all the way from America."

“So that's how all of that, I think, started within the communities and remains in the community. So, I tried to create this space between academia and the community - academia with its expectations: you need to publish. Yes, fine. You need to publish. Who's going to read? Can I take this article and take it to the community? No. So what are some of the ways in which we can also create work or knowledge that is accessible to the communities themselves?”

– Puleng Segalo

"Psychology was very much implicated in how we legitimize colonization, slavery, et cetera. People call that epistemic violence of research... But at the same time, I think psychology is very necessary. My approach is to kind of figure out, well, how can we use psychology in a way that can actually be productive, be joyful, be rejuvenating, be healing? Hence, my interest in participatory action research, which is very much about understanding participants in your research as equals, as the researchers themselves, actually."

– Shose Kessi

“sometimes the question is not, what can we do? but it is, how can we accompany people who are in struggle, people who are in contexts of unspeakable suffering? And that fundamentally can change your relationship to how you come to it.”

– Urmitapa Dutta

Across our conversations, our interviewees emphasized decolonial feminist psychology as imbricated in history, place, and geography.

History matters because colonialism is not only a past event. Its effects continue to surface in modern institutions, public discourse, family relations, migration, and education, among others.

Likewise, place and geography matter, first because psychology does not travel evenly. Theories developed in one context should not be imposed elsewhere as universal, while local ways of knowing are treated as secondary, informal, or outside the bounds of legitimate knowledge. Place carries colonial history, intellectual inheritance, political struggle, language, migration, and ways of theorizing.

Our interviewees insist that decolonial feminist psychology must remain attentive to specificities of histories and geographies. Their work further reminds us that there is no single feminism, no single decolonial psychology, and no universal account of psychological life. There are, instead, situated practices of critique, care, resistance, and imagination, rooted in the places from which people think, struggle, remember, and heal.

“I feel like the idea of intersectionality is embedded in decolonial feminism. The other key thing
is history. History is really important. So, it's a recognition of the ways in which colonization
and, you know, slavery and apartheid and all that, being foundational to the creation of particular kinds of identification. As related to race, related to gender, sexuality. So, it’s not only thinking about that history, right, but thinking about how that history resurfaces in the present..”

– Floretta Boonzaier

“A lot of my formative years obviously are in Puerto Rico — schooling, undergraduate, worldview, and again I feel like that experience was crucial to me because it’s not only being a woman of intersections, Chicago, Puerto Rico, but also Puerto Rico is by itself an intersection, being North American, being South American, being American, being Latin American, being Caribbean, and also in the racial composition, in the ethnic composition. So intersections, now that I’m describing this to you, [intersections] are the key element in my life.”

– Lillian Comas-Díaz

"I think perhaps in the second year of my graduate school that, that it suddenly struck me that I had begun to identify myself as a woman of colour in a very visceral, in a very real way, that it wasn't just an identity category or a label, but that's how I felt And I think that was such a powerful moment of recognizing the racialization that had happened, a very different racialization from the way that I had been racialized when I was in India."

– Urmitapa Dutta