Drawing on scholarship in the fields of vocational and industrial/organizational (VIO) psychology, we propose a definition of social justice and assess progress and problems in achieving it. Using a ...critical psychology lens, we find that the historical focus on higher-income settings and workers with relatively privileged status reflects the neoliberal underpinning implicit in most of VIO psychology. We identify five marginalizing conditions that act at macro levels to perpetuate the status quo and restrict progress toward social justice: group bias, forced movement of people, poverty, unemployment, and lack of decent work. Our review of these conditions accentuates the necessity of social justice praxis at multiple ecological levels to effect significant progress. We propose a set of recommendations for the future that highlight the importance of articulating and deconstructing context, power, and perception implicit in extant VIO endeavors. Our recommendations challenge the field to: (1) extend the scope of the locations and range of ecological levels at which VIO research and practice are carried out, (2) highlight who is and is not served and benefitted by VIO research and practice, and (3) question the underlying values and ideological assumptions of existing VIO research and practice. We call for greater critical consciousness among VIO psychologists in order to ensure the relevance and benefit of our research and practice for all workers around the globe.
•Much VIO social justice scholarship focuses on individuals and microsystems.•A focus on structural sources of injustice and neoliberal influences is needed.•VIO social justice endeavors should address context, power, and perception.•Progress will require multilevel engagement that interrupts the status quo.
Critical psychology is a discipline that can be defined in a variety of ways, though common themes include critiquing mainstream psychology as well as critiquing society at large and engaging in ...social change to respond to those critiques. The neurodiversity movement is a political movement that emerged in response to the dehumanizing treatment of Autistic and other neurodivergent individuals by society in general and by mainstream psychology specifically. In this article, I describe five ways in which critical psychology and the neurodiversity movement can and have begun to benefit from each other: (a) by critical psychologists embracing neurodivergent epistemologies in the way they embrace other diverse epistemologies; (b) by resisting attempts within mainstream psychology to pathologize difference or "treat" these so-called psychopathologies by modifying behavior; (c) by practitioners developing cultural competency around neurodivergent culture within the psychotherapeutic practice; (d) by challenging the homogenization and whitewashing within the neurodiversity movement through leveraging lessons from within various critical psychologies; and (e) by researchers and practitioners recognizing and combatting instances of ableism embedded in other forms of oppression and within the field of critical psychology itself.
How might core values of psychology impede efforts to promote public psychology? We identify some of the ways the discipline's aspirations for publicly engaged science are undermined by its norms, ...particularly when engaging with communities affected by historically entrenched, structural inequalities. We interrogate what makes for "good" psychology, including methodological and ethical norms that are used to maintain scientific integrity and police the boundaries of the discipline. We suggest that some of the discipline's classical tenets and contemporary movements may produce structural, epistemic barriers to the production of science and practice that enhance the public good. Reflecting critically on the rise of implicit bias training in institutional diversity efforts as a case study, we consider how evidence-based efforts to intervene in social problems on behalf of the so-called public interest can inadvertently reproduce or exacerbate extant inequities. We turn to various social movements' reclamation of what counts as "bad" to imagine a psychology that refuses to adjust itself to racism and structural inequality. We argue that much of what psychologists might characterize as "bad" should not be viewed as antithetical to the very best kind of psychological practice, particularly trailblazing work that reimagines the relationship between psychologists and society.
Public Significance Statement
This article investigates how psychology's disciplinary norms may actually impede the development of public psychology and instead suggests the discipline become more accommodating of ideas, perspectives, and methods that appear disruptive of the status quo.
Mental health has traditionally been explained via medical knowledge, positioning biological pathology and pharmacological treatments as key in addressing psychiatric and psychological ailments. This ...article introduces the prospect of ecologics as a guide for communities committed to responding to mental health concerns in respectful and ethical ways. Significant features concerning ecologics are explained across three sections. The first proposes a revised take on ecological systems premised on constructivism arguing that student-centred approaches contribute to the continuation of predominantly individually focussed efforts within contemporary education settings. The second section draws from critical disability studies, critical psychology, and indigenous knowledges to engage with difference differently challenging the presence of ableism in contemporary society. The final section recaps five prospective conditions necessary for the application of ecologics: i) explicating orientation, ii) accepting not-knowing, iii) working transparadigmatically, iv) affirming relationality and v) respecting unfinalisability. Ecologics offer schools unorthodox means for going on together.
Despite the sustained flourishing—both in terms of quantity and quality—of qualitative research in psychology, psychology's establishment ‘gatekeepers’ seem to still be wedded to the dogma that only ...experimental research and quantitative data are sufficiently robust to be taken seriously. In this paper we make the case against this contempt and call for qualitative research and data to be recognized as valid and epistemologically sound in its own right. Given that its ontology is based upon constructionist assumptions about the nature of the social world, its power to provide nuanced insight into the complexity of humankind is not a problem, but its greatest strength. Our paper therefore starts with a brief review of the ontological and epistemological differences between the two approaches to demonstrate that they are complementary rather than competition. We then make our case, based on two key strategies: first by shedding light on the fact that many (perhaps even most) of psychology's classic experimental studies actually collected qualitative data (in the form of debriefing interviews and the like) and used it to understand what was going on; and then by recent studies that have expressly sought feedback about the hypothesis being purportedly tested. We then recognize the extent to which contemporary researchers are expressing their frustration at the way that they are being forced into a methodological straight jacket, by carrying out their research in ways they view as inauthentic. We end with a call to kerb the methodological dogma that has taken hold of psychology, and to move to a more inclusive approach.
It is emphasized that theoretical psychology is based on the practice of theorizing. After presenting and challenging some ideas about theories, three tasks for theoretical psychologists are ...discussed: theorizing as critique refers to describing psychology as a hyper-science that inflates its methodological and technical activities in order to conceal its lack of a natural–scientific foundation. Theorizing as reconstruction is an activity that seeks to make sense of history, culture, society, power, money, and politics in the development of the discipline and subjectivity. This task also traces the elements that have led to psychology’s difficulties. Theorizing as creation means developing theories that are able to make sense of psychological knowledge. It is suggested that a theory of subjectivity is needed that draws on not only the psychological sciences but also the psychological humanities. Finally, it is argued that theorizing remains a duty of psychological work.
Anti-Black police brutality in the United States is not a new problem, but at least a 400-year old one. Mainstream psychology has responded to this critical racial and social justice issue by ...conceptualizing it primarily as an outcome of police officers' social cognition (e.g., threat perceptions) or implicit racial biases. Such individualistic and cognitive perspectives, however, ignore the fundamental role of anti-Black structural racism in facilitating the ability of law enforcement to terrorize, brutalize, and kill Black people with impunity. As with the media and public attention, mainstream psychology has also tended to frame acts of anti-Black police brutality as outliers, or occasional lethal and spectacular events, rather than as a broad spectrum of routine acts that structure policing and police brutality as a world for Black people in the United States. Informed by critical psychology, and the critical theoretical frameworks of critical race theory, intersectionality, and Afro-Pessimism, the goal of this article is to critically engage with the topic of anti-Black police brutality. By critically engage, we mean expose and challenge the economic, social, and material power relations that disproportionately expose Black people to police brutality; and conceptualize police brutality not as a series of aberrant incidents, but as a structure that in essence constructs and reifies Blackness and Whiteness. We also introduce the Anti-Black Police Brutality Continuum, a conceptual framework of police brutality as a broad spectrum of routine manifestations of anti-Black structural racism, and criticize mainstream psychology's deferral of a critical and transformative response to anti-Black police brutality.
Public Significance Statement
Police brutality in U.S. Black communities is one of the most critical social justice issues of our time. Although mainstream psychology has long been in the vanguard of advancing empirical knowledge about the effects of racist stereotypes, implicit racial bias, and other individual-level factors on police brutality, it has largely ignored the role of structural racism. This article challenges mainstream psychology to critically engage with the topic of anti-Black police brutality. The article also introduces the Anti-Black Police Brutality Continuum, a conceptual framework developed to increase knowledge about the non-lethal and lethal spectrum of anti-Black police brutality, and its deleterious physical and mental health implications for U.S. Black communities.
Psychology as a discipline has historically served the interests of dominant groups in society. By contrast, contemporary trends in psychological work have emerged as a direct result of the impact of ...violent histories of slavery, genocide and colonisation. Hence, we propose that psychology, particularly in its social forms, as a discipline centred on the relationship between mind and society, is well placed to produce the critical knowledge and tools for imagining and promoting just and equitable social relationships and social structures. Starting with an overview of the historical assumptions of the discipline that served to legitimate systems of slavery, colonisation and apartheid, this article then introduces a framework for centring decolonial, feminist ways of doing psychological work with a focus on the particularities of the African context. We argue that a decolonial feminist approach to psychology curricula and psychological research is necessary for the discipline to remain relevant in contemporary African contexts.
Throughout its history, capitalism has undertaken its extractive, imperial, and expropriative operations under the sign of democracy. Psychology has played a part in the ideological consolidation of ...capitalist democracy, adapting people to this system while also legitimising it. However, what of radical democracy as an always-contested grassroots organisational form that stands in opposition to both capitalism and the capitalist co-optation of democracy? Radical democracy of this sort remains a psychologically fraught function of anticapitalist resistance, one that has the potential to produce fracturing among comrades building such democracy. In this article, I consider how critical psychologists can work with those undertaking the difficult work of building radical democracy into political and quotidian life. I consider what critical psychology praxis could mean for those practicing radical democracy and how critical psychology might reconstitute itself through radically democratic formations.
“Positive” psychology has gained a dominant voice within and outside the field of psychology. Although critiques of this perspective have been rendered, including by humanistic psychologists, ...psychology scholars have offered minimum space for critical reflections of this movement in contrast to its critiques existing inside and outside the academia in other fields. Therefore, this contribution seeks to explicate emerging systematic critiques of positive psychology by scholars and practitioners from within mental health fields as well as from philosophy, medicine, education, business, and cultural studies and to highlight sociocultural discussions of positive movement by the culture critics. Last, we offer reflections on positive psychology as immigrant professionals from non-Western backgrounds with an emphasis on existential and humanities-based perspectives. We also highlight that the tenets and experiments based on “positive” psychological practices may have especially detrimental effect on marginalized individuals and communities. This contribution seeks to invite a critical dialogue in the field regarding positive psychology within and outside humanistic psychology and psychology in general.
