The Future of Psychology 267(McIntosh 2009). In societies that reward individual achievement and
performance, privileged individuals will have better chances of success
given their privileged access to resources from the outset. These groups are
then highly motivated to maintain these myths and consequently their
privileged status.
Privilege is the ability to maintain access to resources through
relationships of dominance towards less powerful groups through violence,
political exclusions, economic and sexual exploitation, cultural alienation,
as well as the psychological denial of privilege. Psychological power “is
also the hegemonic mind, the white, or masculinist, or heterosexist, or
national chauvinist mind that constitutes and is constituted by coloniality”
(Martinot 2011).
The challenge for psychology and its future is to produce the kinds of
research and practices that critique these forms of power and how they
manifest in everyday contexts (Howarth & Andreouli 2017).
Furthermore, if this challenge is to have any impact on addressing
power relations, it must emerge from the experiences and knowledges of
those who endure the consequence of oppression and dominance.
Alternative ways of doing psychological work have emerged from the
Global South and its diaspora, drawing on alternative philosophies, such as
liberation theory, black studies, postcolonial studies, black & anti-colonial
feminisms, and calls for indigenous and decolonial orientations to
knowledge production.
These philosophies of knowledge provide a critique of power and its
influence on social, political, and economic formations and relations in
ways that centre the oppressed.
Foregrounding these perspectives in the research and teaching of
psychology, would demand that we draw on multiple epistemologies to
understand human life.
It would challenge what counts as psychology, how and where it is
practiced, and who has access to it. It would also represent a departure
from the methodological constraints of experimental doctrines to include
more effective tools for understanding everyday lives. In this final section,