The Future of Psychology 269Epistemic Justice
Considering postcolonial thought for psychology highlights the
important questions relating to location, representation, and practice in
psychological research (Macleod, Bhatia & Kessi 2017). Postcolonial
studies have critiqued the epistemic violence and privilege of academia and
intellectual traditions, how this often translates into forms of ‘othering’ in
the representation of colonial peoples sustained by assumptions of
objectivity and neutrality in research. This positivism in mainstream
psychological research is reflected through the emphasis on quantitative
and in particular experimental methods which prompted psychologists to
develop normative standards and to define normal and abnormal behaviour
(Burman 2008). This naturally leads to interpretations of alternative
cultures (those of the Global South) through a language of deficits and
inferiority as they deviate from established norms (Bhatia 2018). An
orientation that promotes epistemic justice in research would
fundamentally change some of the underlying assumptions of western
knowledge about being human (Mungwini 2018) through the consideration
of alternative rationalities and who the subject of the research is.
Indigenous psychologies critique the universalism of Euro-American
research and promote psychologies based on local philosophies,
epistemologies, and axiologies (Ciofalo 2019) with the potential to
redefine the meaning of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behaviour in local
contexts without attempting to extrapolate these into universal truths about
the human mind.
Praxis
Indigenous psychologies, liberation psychology, and black and anti-
colonial feminisms have explicitly promoted an understanding of
knowledge production as praxis. The idea of de-ideologisation (Jiménez-
Domínguez 2009) speaks to the need to uncover the less visible forms of
power that conceal and justify exploitation and naturalise the superiority of