Roots and Routes Toward Decoloniality Within and Outside Psychology Praxis

Abstract

Recent psychology scholarship has engaged topics of decoloniality, from conferences to journal publications to edited volumes. These efforts are examples of the decolonial turn, a paradigm shift oriented to interrupting the colonial legacies of power, knowledge, and being. As critical community psychologists, we contend that decoloniality/decolonization is an epistemic and ontological process of continuously disrupting the coloniality of power that is the hegemonic Western Eurocentric approach to theory, research, and practice. To document and critically understand this process of colonial disruption—the roots and routes toward decoloniality within and outside of community psychology—we collected information at conference workshops and an open-ended online survey disseminated across international contexts. Through an analysis of two conference workshops (Chile; United States) and a survey, we describe four orientations that capture how participants engage with a decolonizing praxis. The four orientations include Generating knowledge With and from Within, Sociohistorical Intersectional Consciousness, Relationships of Mutual Accountability, and Unsettling Subjectivities of Power/Privilege. The coloniality of power, which characterizes the ethics and tensions within the discipline, is uprooted through these orientations, thereby enabling possibilities to trek a route away from colonial theory, research, and practice, and toward the decolonial turn in community psychology.