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A critical exploration of historical power structures and forces of oppression that shaped the field of psychology, and a compelling call to move towards the decolonisation of the discipline in today's university.
List of contents
1. Introduction: The Canon and Systems of Thought
2. The Eugenics Problem: The Rotten Ideals Underpinning Today's Statistical Tests
3. The Identification of the 'Feeble-Minded': How Psychological Testing and Segregation Go Hand-In-Hand
4. Mental Illness and Marginalisation: Psychiatric Diagnosis as an Untrustworthy Lever of Power
5. Phrenology, Neuroimaging, and the Technologies That Shape Our Understanding of the Mind
6. Hysteria, Happy Pills, and Hormones: Psychology's Woman Problem
7. I Don't See Colour: Psychology's Race Problem
8. De-WEIRDING Research: A Stepping Stone to a Better Psychology?
9. #NotAllUniversities: How Higher Education Perpetuates the Inequities it Claims to Eliminate
10. Conclusion
About the author
Akira O’Connor is a Senior Lecturer who received his undergraduate and postgraduate education at the University of Leeds (England). He spent two and a half years working at Washington University in St Louis (USA), before taking up a permanent lecturing position at the University of St Andrews (Scotland). Akira researches memory, memory decision-making, and memory phenomena such as déjà vu. His parents are Irish and Japanese, and he grew up in North-West London—not British, but a mixed-race Londoner. He is a trade union member and serves at the Race Equality Charter Chair at the university, coordinating an institutional bid for a Race Equality Charter award.Erin Robbins is a Lecturer from the South of the United States. She completed her undergraduate education at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama (USA) and her postgraduate training at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia (USA). In-between she worked in a number of different jobs, from technical writer to conservationist. Her primary interest is in the role of culture in cognition and development which led her to pursue field work, primarily in Samoa and Vanuatu. She is queer, a trade union member, and serves as the Director of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion for her department.
Summary
A critical exploration of historical power structures and forces of oppression that shaped the field of psychology, and a compelling call to move towards the decolonisation of the discipline in today’s university.
