Register here by 11 April 2023
STIAS Fellows Kopano Ratele,
professor of psychology at the University of Stellenbosch and head of
the African Centre for Critical and Creative Thought and Glenn Adams, professor
of psychology at the University of Kansas and Interim Director of the
Kansas African Studies Center will give public lecture titled: Toward a Decolonial Africa-centering Psychology: Beyond the Whitestream Gaze on Racism and Well-being
From
#RhodesMustFall to #BlackLivesMatter, an important component of
intersectional anti-racist protest movements has been concerns about
epistemic injustice and the corresponding need to decolonize and
depatriarchalize knowledge institutions. Typical accounts of epistemic
injustice focus on underrepresentation in knowledge production processes
(epistemic exclusion) or imposition of Eurocentric models without regard to cultural-historical context (intellectual imperialism).
In this presentation, we draw upon an Africa-centering standpoint and
perspectives of decolonial theory to illuminate another manifestation of
epistemic injustice that is particularly important in psychology and
related disciplines: the coloniality of the modern individualist
lifeways that increasingly inform both descriptive and prescriptive
standards for everyday life in the modern global order.
In
the first half of the presentation, we locate this understanding of an
Africa-centering standpoint among various approaches to the project of
African psychology. Rather than turn a whitestream theoretical lens to
the study of an African object, an Africa-centering psychology considers
what the world looks like from here, takes African experience as a
foundation for re-thinking whitestream theory-in-general. We then
consider one the most important insights of an Africa-centering
psychology: an appreciation for the coloniality of modernity. Decolonial
perspectives emphasize that Eurocentric modernity and its associated
individualist lifeways are not the leading edge of progress on a march
to liberation and justice, but instead are both a product and source of
racial violence in service of White futurity.
In
the second half of the presentation, we consider implications for
understandings of racism and the study of well-being. Typical
understandings tend to psychologize racism, approaching it as prejudice
or other manifestations of individual bias. A decolonial
Africa-centering psychology instead illuminates the materialization of
racist ideology via the coloniality of knowledge and (well)being. The
view from African standpoints suggests that dominant models of
well-being are not the just-natural expression of human nature, but
instead may depend on levels of affluence sustained through colonial
plunder. Although the self-expansive personal growth associated with
these lifeways can promote optimal individual experience for a
well-situated few, they may do so at the expense of a viable existence
sustainable at the level of humanity in general. An Africa(n)-centering
approach holds potential to illuminate sustainability-oriented models of
(well)being as a more solid prescription for viable collective
existence in our shared-planet reality of global interdependence.
Author Bios
Professor of psychology at the University of Stellenbosch and head of the African Centre for Critical and Creative Thought, Kopano Ratele teaches on African psychology and decolonial/critical social psychology. His recent books include Why Men Hurt Women & Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity (2022) and The World Looks Like This From Here: Thoughts on African Psychology (2019). He has a regular fatherhood feature on Wednesday night on SAFM’s The Meeting Point with Koketso Sachane. Glenn Adams is Professor of psychology at the University of Kansas and Interim Director of the Kansas African Studies Center. Together and separately they are part
of decolonial, cultural, anti-racist, or Africa(n)-centring psychology
collectives located in different parts of the world. Among these are the READSURA
Collective, with whom they recently co-edited three special issues and
authored four feature articles that apply decolonial approaches to the
production of knowledge in psychology. While at STIAS, Adams and Ratele
are working on a joint monograph on decolonial psychology and
well-being.