Decolonizing Psychology

Abstract

Decolonizing Psychology sheds light on the universalizing power and the colonizing dimensions of Euro-American psychology. The book integrates insights from postcolonial, narrative, and cultural psychology to ask how Euro-American scientific psychology becomes the standard-bearer of psychology throughout the world, whose stories get told, what knowledge is considered as legitimate, and whose lives are considered central to the future of psychology. Urban Indian youth represent one of the largest segments of the youth population across the world and yet remain so utterly invisible in the discipline of psychology. By using ethnographic and interview methods, this book draws a nuanced narrative portrait of how urban youth in Pune, India, who belong to the transnational elite, middle and working classes, reimagine their identities within the new structural and neoliberal cultural contexts of globalization and neoliberalization. The book examines how particular class identities shape youth narratives about globalization and “Indianness” generally, as well as specific stories about self and identity, social inequality, dignity, poverty, family, relationships, work, marriage, and practices of consumption. The book articulates an alternative vision of psychology in which questions of social justice and equality are seen as central to its mission, and it is argued that a psychology is needed that urgently and meaningfully speaks to the lives of the majority of the world’s population.