Tuesday 26 July 2022

"Troubled" derby subjectivities: Wellbeing and feminist new materialist movements in sport


Moving into derby

Putting on skates for the first time. Standing up, feeling wobbly. Practice, practice, practice. Getting stronger, more stable, faster. Buying gear: bags, pads, patches, helmets, stickers, merch. There is an expansion of possibility. I am becoming-derby as my skates, my pads, my team, the rules and regulations of derby, and the various spaces of training and skating become entangled with my everyday life.

Moving on

Yeah. I’ve kind of moved on now. It was like a really awesome part of my life. I even have tattoos about it. It was a hugely important part of my life. But it’s not a part of my life anymore. It was a hugely distinct chapter. Like I think, I used to do motorcycle riding. When I was 21 I got rid of a car and got a motorbike, and then I did roller derby, and I still had my motorbike. And I only recently sold my motorbike because I realised I’m just holding on to memories. Because my life isn’t like that anymore. My motorbike doesn’t mean I get to stay up to two o’clock in the morning drinking coffee with a really good group of mates anymore, because they’ve all also had babies. Like, so sometimes you just have to let shit go.

As a writer-scholar-skater-woman (and more!) who ended up doing a feminist ethnography about roller derby, I experienced the joys and thrill of the sport, as well as the tensions, risks and stresses of being part of a ‘new’, full contact sport that was organized completely by volunteers. So many people (mostly women, including trans women, and non-binary people, but also some men) have been attracted to roller derby (including myself) – it’s cool, it’s edgy, it looks fun and retro. We all bought skates and threw ourselves into training and the derby community. For many it was a place of belonging, transformation, ‘soul saving’. It helped women get through grief, break-ups, and domestic violence. It was transformative. This tough, rough and dangerous sporting space was troubling how we think about femininity, care, mental health, and recovery.

But not always. And not for everyone. For some people, even though it might have started out as a place of excitement and community, internal politics, conflict and frustration left them feeling dejected, annoyed, or even enraged and depressed.

How could something so good have turned out so bad?

As a high-risk activity (roller skating while trying to push another person down) roller derby embraces the tensions between multiple, and constant movements. Some of these movements are productive (getting fitter, bodies changing, making friends, feeling a sense of belonging), some destructive (injuries, pressures, bullying, organisational politics). I wanted to know more about these movements and to explore the antithetical (irrational?) relation between care, competitiveness and aggression, that seemed to emerge for women in roller derby. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic I put out a call for participants on Facebook and Twitter, with the only criteria being that they used to play roller derby. The tweet gained traction and was shared around the world. Over 15 women and one non-binary person volunteered to participate. Those who came forward wanted their story heard.

The stories told to me were diverse and powerful. I heard of the ways derby provided a space unlike any other to these women. A space of proximity to other women, of risk and danger and fun and expression. A space to embrace parts of themselves that did not always have room for expression in other sports or other part of their lives. Yet for these particular women who had left roller derby, their time in the sport had ended. Whether they felt bullied or excluded, bored or just felt like their time was done, their experiences of movement – into, through, out of and away from – can tell us something about transformation and wellbeing in women’s lives.

Aggression, violence and competition together describe some of the worst aspects of social life. Yet their power, or force, is sometimes required to break through or free us from certain entanglements or situations. One does not simply ‘leave’ a domestic violent relationship; instead, a person must muster every ounce of their courage and tenacity and summon all their resources to make that ‘break’. For women in particular, being ‘nice’ has been hugely important, yet being nice is not simply being kind or compassionate, but being self-sacrificing, allowing people to treat one (us? them?) as secondary citizens, loading us with labour (physical, cultural, social and emotional labour) and wondering why we are not smiling more.

In the most general sense, the relation between care, competitiveness and aggression is antithetical. Yet what my current work has to a degree demonstrated is that the gendered aspects of competitiveness and aggression in relation to care for the self – and, by extension, others – have useful and productive affects on which the skaters drew for their own subjectivities.

About the author:

Dr Adele Pavlidis is author of Sport, Gender and Power: The Rise of Roller Derby (with Simone Fullagar, Routldge, 2014) and Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery (with Simone Fullagar and Wendy O'Brien, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She is currently working on her third book and works as a senior lecturer at Griffith University in Australia where she teaches sociology. She is interested in social, cultural and personal transformation and engages in poststructuralist, new materialist and feminist theories of affect to think and write about bodies, movement and change.

Find an article related to this blog on the F&P website at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09593535221104878 

 

 

Tuesday 19 July 2022

Fighting for abortion rights: Strategies aimed at managing stigma in a group of Italian Pro-Choice Activists

Written by: Ilaria Giovannelli1, Terri Mannarini2, Federica Spaccatini3, Maria Giuseppina Pacilli1

1Department of Political Science, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Perugia, Italy

2Department of History Society and Human Sciences, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

3Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy



Pro-choice advocates' voices have echoed around the world in recent decades, both in liberal and legally restrictive abortion contexts. Even at the cost of their own stigmatization, pro-choice activists’ battles have impacted public opinion and achieved crucial political outcomes, such as the legalization of elective abortion and/or the busting of abortion stigma (Staggenborg, 1991). Even though, in Italy, elective abortion was legalized over 40 years ago, several right-wing political parties and anti-choice movements still regard it as an immoral practice, and they frequently dispute the law that protects it (Caruso, 2020). Pro-choice activists are constantly monitoring and countering these threats to abortion rights, and as a result, they are subjected to unfavorable views and denigrator attacks, particularly in public contexts, as they have been in the past (e.g., Macor, 2021).

Given this, in the Italian setting, we investigated abortion stigma toward pro-choice activists in order to shed light on this issue and add to what has previously been documented about stigma toward people who decide to abort and abortion providers (e.g., Kumar et al., 2009; O’Donnell et al., 2011; Pacilli et al., 2018). We conducted a qualitative study to investigate pro-choice activists’ experienced, perceived, and internalized stigma and how they managed it. Our participants consisted of thirty-four Italian cisgender women who are pro-choice activists and are actively and publicly engaged in movements, organizations, or unions that defend people’s reproductive freedom and support abortion rights. We conducted semi-structured interviews which were audio-recorded, and then transcribed and analyzed (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005).

Our study revealed that pro-choice activists faced both blatant and subtle stigma. They reported being the direct victims (or witnesses) of verbal and physical attacks, particularly by members of no-choice or right-wing groups, as well as violent attacks. Participants stated that stigma directed against them also manifested itself in more subtle ways, such as social disapproval or social distancing. Furthermore, our findings revealed that both pro-choice activists who had directly experienced (or witnessed) stigma, and those who had not, had a clear understanding of how others view them.

Even though they were aware that some people regard them as a positive model to follow in the battle against abortion stigma and, more broadly, for reproductive rights, they felt a negative focus on their positionalities and advocacy role surrounding elective abortion in most situations. It’s worth noting, that despite the fact that the majority of participants said they had been stigmatized and felt a devaluing gaze on themselves, they opposed this devaluing view.

Indeed, according to the interview data, pro-choice advocates did not internalize this stigma and asserted their personal, political, and social worth. To counter stigmatization, pro-choice activists who were involved in the study stated that they employed various abortion stigma management strategies, such as speaking openly about their involvement. Speaking openly about their abortion position is a beneficial tactic on a personal level to contrast internalization of stigma, but it is also a useful strategy on a socio-political level because it allows them to combat stigma against elective abortion. The article dives into the argumentative strategies used to combat abortion stigma (e.g., sharing real narratives, critically reflecting on the humanness of the fetus), as well as highlighting, in some cases, pro-choice activists’ opposing viewpoints. Finally, our findings showed examples of strategies that could be useful to all actors involved in abortion activism and revealed several implications and directions for future research.

References

Caruso, E. (2020). Abortion in Italy: forty years on. Feminist Legal Studies, 28(1), 87-96. https://0-doi.org.wam.seals.ac.za/10.1007/s10691-019-09419-w

Hsieh, H. F., & Shannon, S. E. (2005). Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 15(9), 1277-1288. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732305276687

Kumar, A., Hessini, L., & Mitchell, E. M. (2009). Conceptualising abortion stigma. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 11(6), 625-639. https://doi.org./10.1080/13691050902842741

Macor, M. (2021, March 10). Alice, 26 anni: Mi insultano perchè sono la testimonial dell'aborto farmacologico: ma io vado avanti. La Repubblica, Genova.

O’Donnell, J., Weitz, T. A., & Freedman, L. R. (2011). Resistance and vulnerability to stigmatization in abortion work. Social science & medicine, 73(9), 1357-1364. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.08.019

Pacilli, M. G., Giovannelli, I., Spaccatini, F., Vaes, J., & Barbaranelli, C. (2018). Elective abortion predicts the dehumanization of women and men through the mediation of moral outrage. Social Psychology, 49, 287-302. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000351

Staggenborg, S. (1991). The pro-choice movement: Organization and activism in the abortion conflict. Oxford University Press.

 

 Find an article based on this study on the F&P website at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09593535221106653 

Thursday 12 November 2020

“I don’t have an address”: Housing instability and domestic violence in help-seeking calls to a support service

Many helpline services are available to women with experiences of violence. But what actually happens when these women call for help? Are there small things that could be changed to improve interpersonal communication between service providers and clients? Our research shows that an ordinary question about address could pose difficulties for women experiencing housing instability. Although routinely used by the institution to identify callers, the question sometimes led to personal disclosures of violence which can be retraumatising for women.


The negative impacts of gendered violence, the barriers that prevent women from help-seeking, and the difficulties women face being believed and getting help are well established. However, little is known about what happens in the ‘here and now’ of interactions between support service providers and clients. Our research analyses naturally occurring calls for help which were audio recorded with ethical permission from callers and call-takers. The setting is a victim support helpline in New Zealand. We used conversation analysis to examine in detail the sequential unfolding of talk turn by turn. For women who had experienced violence at home, answering a routine institutional question about address could be difficult. Housing instability is a well-known problem associated with domestic violence and our findings originally highlight how it also creates trouble at the micro level of social interaction with institutions whose role is to help.

A seemingly innocuous question

At face value, the question “what’s your address?” seems innocuous. It’s the kind of question that routinely gets asked in a variety of institutional interactions. On the victim support helpline we studied, call-takers asked the question to confirm callers’ details against their casefiles. Yet our analyses reveal that the question can be difficult to answer. Questions convey presuppositions and communicate values, assumptions, and beliefs about the world. These assumptions are particularly problematic for women experiencing domestic violence and housing instability.

Recurrently, women who had experienced violence were unable to answer the address question straightforwardly. The case below demonstrates how this interactional trouble is visible in the details of the talk. The transcript represents both what was said and how, including features like silences (timed in tenths of a second) and non-lexical sounds like “um”. Capturing this level of detail makes visible what is happening at the micro level of social interaction. For example, the first indication that the question is not straightforward for the caller is the 1.8 seconds of silence that follows (line 12). Usually straightforward answers to questions come without delay. The second indication of trouble is the “um” at the beginning of the caller’s turn (line 13).


The caller responds to the question by describing her living situation. Housing instability is indicated by the reference to time “at the moment” and the description of where she is “staying” (line 13) – which is not a place of permanent residence. In her next turn (line 17), the caller elaborates with an explanation. Accounts like this reveal how people understand and construct their worlds. In this case, the caller treats her living arrangements as non-normative and in need of explanation. The reason that she does not have an address is because, like many women escaping violence, she does not reside where she used to. The term “ex-partner” (line 17) makes it inferentially available that the caller left her home because of violence, which is confirmed later in the call. Thus, a routine institutional question about address is difficult to answer for this caller and occasions an unnecessary – albeit implicit – disclosure of violence.

Unintentional consequences of ordinary actions

Asking for an address is a very ordinary question that does small but important things such as confirming a caller’s identity for institutional purposes. Our research suggests that institutions should carefully consider how routine practices such as asking for address might pose unintended problems for service users in vulnerable circumstances. Analyses of what actually happens in service encounter interactions is important for empirically grounded recommendations for the delivery of socially sensitive support.

In sum, this study shows how a global problem of domestic violence and housing instability also becomes a trouble at the micro level of social interaction.

About the authors

Ann Weatherall is a professor in psychology at Victoria University of Wellington whose work is shaped by conversation analysis, feminism and social psychology. Her current research examines how empowerment self-defence classes teach vocal and embodied strategies to deescalate and deflect violence.
Ann Weatherall is a professor in psychology at Victoria University of Wellington whose work is shaped by conversation analysis, feminism and social psychology. Her current research examines how empowerment self-defence classes teach vocal and embodied strategies to deescalate and deflect violence.



Emma Tennent is a lecturer in psychology with research interests in interpersonal communication, gender and language, and social psychology. Her research examines identity and social relations in both institutional and everyday interactions.




Friday 21 August 2020

When Psychology Speaks for You, Without You: Sunil Bhatia on Decolonizing Psychology

By Ayurdhi Dhar, PhD

Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Sunil Bhatia about decolonizing psychology, confronting the field’s racist past, colonial foundations, and neoliberal present.



Sunil Bhatia (pictured above) is a professor and chair of the Department of Human Development at Connecticut College. He is the author of two books and over 50 articles and book chapters. He has received numerous awards for his work in the field of decolonizing psychology, cultural psychology, and qualitative methods and for studies of migrant and racial identities. Most recently, his second book, Decolonizing Psychology: Globalization, Social Justice, and Indian Youth Identities, received the 2018 William James book award from the American Psychological Association (APA).

The movement to decolonize psychology is led by interdisciplinary scholars demanding a move away from the biomedical model of mental health and its colonial roots, especially in the Global South. Bhatia has been writing about these issues for over two decades and has often encountered resistance for speaking against mainstream voices. He is now one of the foremost experts in the field of decolonial studies. His work asks vital questions: Who decides what psychology should study? How do economic and social systems influence psychology? Is it possible to address economic inequality and social issues in psychotherapy? Does psychology speak of people, about people, or does it try to speak for them?

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Ayurdhi Dhar: A lot of your work has been on decolonization and psychology. Can you explain what decolonizing psychology means?

Sunil Bhatia: Decolonizing psychology draws on three frameworks: indigenous psychology or native studies, the colonial theory that comes out of Latin America, and lastly, postcolonial theory. It speaks to me personally, as well.

When I think about decolonizing psychology, I think about asking questions about who is telling the story of psychology, who has the power to construct and disseminate knowledge about psychology, whose voices are being included in that story?

I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Pune in India, and my curriculum was in psychology and philosophy. My syllabus was largely frozen, unchanged since colonial times, and the psychology we studied was all by British and American authors. It occurred to me that there was a disconnect between what I was reading in textbooks and what I was experiencing in India.

I could see the disconnect in rituals, at bus stops, while I was driving around on my moped—different cultural spaces. There were multiple layers of cultural meanings and practices around me, from the modern to the feudal, the postcolonial, and the neoliberal. But it was forbidden to ask questions about these cultural meanings in the classroom. It was not considered scientific to ask how religious meaning was critical to an understanding of Indian psychology, for instance.

This led me to seek a way of thinking about psychology that rooted in an understanding of culture—that saw culture as more than just another object to study. I felt very alienated from the way psychology was being done until I came to Clark University, where culture and narrative identity were more prominent.

In psychology, the stories of people from the Global South were depicted as a deficient form of humanity, and stories of people of color were relegated to the margins. I saw 356 million Indian youth, a gigantic part of our humanity, missing from the canon of the discipline. Their voice, their realities were erased, and I wanted to start addressing this gap. This motivated me to come up with a decolonizing framework to speak to these absences, to speak to the realities of the people who are the majority of humanity, but largely missing from the field.

Dhar: You mention the disconnect you saw between what you were studying in psychology and life in India. Can you illustrate this with an example?

Bhatia: Take the concept of internalized oppression and colonialism. I personally felt this during my master’s. I was studying how the founders of psychology had portrayed Indians in their work, and the representations were highly racist. From Darwin to Stanley Hall, they spoke of colonized people as “primitive savages.” Churchill had called us a beastly people.

In my seven years of studying psychology, I was always told that British and American culture was superior and more advanced. When I challenged my professors and asked why we continue to study this knowledge, which is colonialized, racist, and treats us as slaves, I was dismissed as being rebellious.

When I met graduate students from sociology, they taught me about caste hierarchies. I was able to bring in centuries-old oppressive structures that psychology was not studying. Psychology was only about the identity of middle-class people and was based on studies done in the United States. In India, class is deeply tied to caste hierarchies, but in my Master’s in psychology, I was told to ignore caste in my analysis because that would complicate things, and we wanted to keep explanations easy and scientific.

Dhar: Few people understand how internalized colonization works, and how speaking in English instead of your mother tongue becomes a marker of high class, caste, education, morality, and intellect. As an undergraduate studying psychology in India, I used to joke that if I spoke English well enough, I could land a job as a computer engineer. Can you talk about how Indian academics and psychologists internalize these colonial ideas?

Bhatia: First, they didn’t challenge the representations given in the books, the canon that was being exported from the West to the so-called third-world departments. They tried to indigenize it, give it an Indian flavor, but the core thinking, the empirical structures, and the positivist ideas, were never disturbed.

Second, there is the politics of location. Everyone was located in different socioeconomic conditions, from the middle and upper class to those from Dalit backgrounds, which is the lowest social group in the Indian caste hierarchy. But Indian academics and psychologists were not allowed to speak to that. Their existential experiences of living in India in these caste hierarchies, their socio-cultural identity, were important topics to them, but they could not bring that into the knowledge production process.

The third is the politics of practice. As a culture, we spent thousands of years thinking about the ‘self,’ the meaning of the self, nirvana, liberation, etc. at the metaphysical, philosophical, and psychological level. But all of this accumulated cultural wisdom was pushed to philosophy and seen as unscientific. There was no room for indigenous healing frameworks for understanding mental life because it was relegated to religion and philosophy. These are the three areas where colonial internalization played out.

Dhar: Have you received any pushback for doing this work on decolonizing psychology? If yes, from where?

Bhatia: There was pushback throughout my career, especially when I was beginning to develop ideas in opposition to the mainstream in psychology. When I wrote my 2002 paper on historical representations and rethinking of psychology, there was considerable pushback by the reviewers and a denial of the problem.

In that paper, I did a hundred-year portrait of how psychology has been complicit in advancing the colonial agenda directly and indirectly. I named all the key founders and stated that Orientalism, the practice of representing the East in ways that aided in colonialism, would not have been unleashed as a political project by the West without the explicit complicity of the social sciences.

The most common pushback was the rejection of my papers by journals, simply because it offended some reviewers who thought I was too severe. They would insist that this is all in the past and that psychology is progressive now. There was also resistance from colleagues who warned me that there is a risk in picking on the establishment. To articulate a framework of psychology from an anti-colonial and anti-racist position 20 years ago was tough, and there was a lot of emotional labor involved.

Dhar: How did the social sciences and psychology support the colonial project?

Bhatia: Take the example of G. Stanley Hall, founder of APA, who we are told is a hero and pioneer of psychology. He was also an advocate for colonialism and called for so-called “primitive” people to be domesticated and controlled, or else our world would be run by inferior people. He advised that the field should collaborate with politicians and soldiers to find out how to domesticate or wipe out these populations. So, there was a hint, maybe not an explicit agenda, of genocide. But all of this went unacknowledged by the field of psychology. It is the same story with Darwin, who also espoused racist opinions. Those are two examples I could give.

Additionally, there is the fact that modern psychology is predominantly the study of white, Anglo-Saxon, upper-class, elite, and mostly American subjects. All this knowledge about human psychology emanates from research on this one type of subject, and then it gets exported to the rest of the world.

Dhar: Indian culture and philosophy have a long history of knowledge about the ‘self,’ but the self in psychology is different from the Indian concept of self. You have written about how psychology promotes a “neoliberal self.” What does this mean?

Bhatia: We have spent over a millennium speaking, inquiring, and analyzing the term ‘self.’ Kenneth Burke, the literary critic, called it a God term. In the Indian context, the self is always thought about as embedded within the family, the community, and the neighborhood. The distinctions between self and other are slippery; this is a kind of slippery subjectivity. It cannot be encased within the individual.

Psychology’s understanding of self is based on the individual as self-contained, as atomic—a self which fashions itself as separate from the other. That concept did not exist in the Indian context, which focuses on the connection of self to the world, a relational concept. Philosophically, the transcendence of self was important.

In postcolonial times, after the British left but colonialism remained in India, new and powerful ideas about the self came about. In the ’70s, with the unleashing of modern globalization and privatization, and with the decline in social safety nets and access to public goods, came neoliberalism. Within neoliberalism, the idea emerges that social structures are not going to guarantee the maintenance of self. You have to rely on your biography, your strength, your family, your education, your credibility, your degree. You become an entrepreneur—managing your ‘self’ and making it presentable becomes critical, as Gauri Pathak says.

Being presentable involves acquiring new skills, whether it is meditation, new degrees, or other ways to look attractive and market yourself. This how you get Silicon Valley-type language in cross-cultural psychology, which promotes these new ways of thinking about the self. These psychological ways of thinking tie well-being to your productivity. This is the neoliberal shift, and it reflects the neoliberal economy and culture.

Dhar: Psychology reinforces this ‘neoliberal self’ by promoting theories of self-management and emotional regulation. What did you find in your research about this ‘self’ in India?

Bhatia: Neoliberal globalization affects each community in specific ways. Youth who have access to cultural capital, elite education, and wealth have developed a transnational identity where the understanding of Indianness is tied to being highly mobile. This can mean education at Oxford, travel across the world, acceptance by their German and Swiss friends, etc. Neoliberal language gave them an Indianness that could be exported around the globe—cosmopolitan but also culture-oriented, not backward anymore.

For example, in my book, Nina calls herself the ultimate Indian because they are the ones who set the standards of Indianness, and others usually follow it through fashion or consumption. This is a very consumer-oriented model, and behind it is the transnational capitalist class that supports this neoliberal self.

The middle-class is different; they are educated with limited income, and they work for large corporations, often as call center workers. They are the neo-colonial subjects. They have to go to accent reduction workshops—part of management practices where corporate cross-culture psychology is used to regulate them. They have to attend workshops to understand Indianness and Americanness! They laughed at it—this was their resistance. They would ask, “I am Indian. Why do I need to study what Indianness means?”

The workshops used traditional cross-cultural psychological concepts, and Indians were portrayed as always late, unable to adapt, argumentative, too flexible, authoritative, and hierarchy-oriented. In contrast, Americans were portrayed as punctual, reliable, and self-sufficient. All these diversity and management programs are invented in the US and executed there.

The Indian youth do not passively accept these ideas, but they could not resist it within the organizational culture. Privately, they make fun of it and call it gora psychology (white psychology), but the corporate stranglehold is too firm. Administrators had mandates from corporations to use personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to evaluate performance.

If one cannot talk like Americans or the British, it is a problem. There is a strong colonial hold on how to be yourself and what happens if people speak in a vernacular accent. They teach you to remove MTI (mother tongue influence). These are the ways coloniality has now taken a neoliberal turn and persists in India.

Lastly, there is the fact that social justice issues are not considered in psychology. We rarely ask about what impact poverty and chronic hunger have on self and identity in India. The lives of urban workers are not given any attention. It is as if they don’t exist as subjects. Their lives took a turn for the worse with liberalization. Globalization was supposed to help them. Their income increased a little, but the life around them became much more expensive and unaffordable, and their aspirations changed.

Dhar: These workers don’t feature in our research and our experiments. Subjects of most psychological research in India tend to be city-dwelling, upper-caste, educated elite. You have written about how Euro-American psychology tends to speak for others and silence them. Can you talk about a time you noticed that happening?

Bhatia: The entire enterprise of psychology over the last 50 years has spoken on behalf of the rest of humanity, even though psychology itself is a local and provincial discipline emerging out of a particular historical period in Europe and America. The Euro-American modern subjects then speak on behalf of Asians, Africans, etc.

Western psychology decides what good emotional and social development looks like, and then sets the standards for what constitutes a good education, life, health, and mental health. It decides all our psychiatric diagnoses. These are embedded in specific local cultural practices and then exported to the rest of the world.

Another way of speaking for someone is through research. In the book. Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, she writes that research was a very dirty word in the Maori community in New Zealand. This is because almost all of the research done on them and their way of life was by Europeans who wanted to exploit, contain, and destroy them. This particular community and their sense of self was largely represented by American psychological frameworks.

Dhar: Psychology was born in the Global North and is deeply entrenched in specific cultural values such as individualism, meritocracy, etc. Do you think psychology can ever truly be decolonized? What would that look like?

Bhatia: I think yes, it could be decolonized, but only under certain conditions. It has to be a political project akin to the abolishment of slavery, which means that to abolish it, you needed to change its entire structure.

It is not just driven by the state. It is about the very idea of what it means to be a human being. It is political, economic, cultural, personal, psychological, familial, and sexual. The roots of slavery had to be attacked, but the effects still exist. Right now, more African-Americans are dying in the pandemic because of health disparities.

Native American theorists have insisted that the decolonization model is not simply about taking a social justice perspective. It is about reclaiming land, territory, water—reclaiming language. Decolonization means restoring what was lost.

American undergraduates are 4,000 times more likely to be represented in psychological experiments. Then our studies claim that these findings can be applied to a person living in the Global South. The project of decolonization is viable, but it has to be complete decolonization in the way Frantz Fanon talked about it—new humanity. You have to dismantle the current methods of thinking about and doing psychology.

You cannot compromise because the colonial structure has tentacles at all levels: knowledge production, editors, writers, and the power of the American academy, etc. These tentacles, like the neoliberal order, regulate all psychological knowledge production across the world—deciding what forms of knowledge are considered elite, who gets published, who gets tenure, what makes a journal prestigious, and so on. First, you have to map, identify, and analyze this architecture. We are not even there yet. We have just opened up the conversation about what decolonizing means.

We have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to do psychology? There needs to be a revival of indigenous concepts that were for 500 years, not given any credibility. They do not exist in a pure form without being impacted by colonialism or modernism, but they are viable frameworks.

Take, for example, the Buddhist contemplative practices like Vipassana practiced and handed down for thousands of years. Silicon Valley understood the power of these practices, diluted them, turned them into mindfulness, co-opted them, and then sold them back to India. A lot about the mindfulness movement is powerful, amazing, transformative, but at the same time, there is the commercial interest of the rich. There are potential practices in many indigenous philosophies, religions, and community psychologies that we haven’t explored without evoking the language of Eurocentric knowledge.

Colonization is deeply rooted in capitalism. This current crisis has starkly exposed the difference between the haves and have nots—people who have care and those who don’t, those who can stay at home, and those who cannot. Psychology is rooted in the individual project of colonization, which serves to keep the idea of the individual intact. The intellectual project of decolonization will only be fulfilled when many of us come together in solidarity to rethink the entire structure.

About the author:


Ayurdhi Dhar, PhD 
Ayurdhi Dhar is assistant professor of psychology at Mount Mary University. She is the author of Madness and Subjectivity: A Cross-Cultural Examination of Psychosis in the West and India (to be released in September 2019). Her research interests include the relation between schizophrenia and immigration, discursive practices sustaining the concept of mental illness, and critiques of acontextual and ahistorical forms of knowledge.




Acknowledgements:

This article has been reposted from the Mad In America website with the author and publisher's permission, you can find the original article here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/05/sunil-bhatia-on-decolonizing-psychology/.


For more, see our latest Special Issue of Feminism & Psychology, entitled: 

Feminisms and decolonising psychology: Possibilities and challenges (Volume 30 Issue 3, August 2020) edited by Catriona Ida Macleod, Sunil Bhatia and Wen Liu, and features articles authored by: Aruydhi Dhar, Kamille Gentles- Peart, Angeline Stephens and Floretta Boonzaier, Sobia Ali-Faisal, Noorjehan Joosub and Sumayya Ebrahim, and Lindsay Lee Miller and Michael Miller. 





Thursday 21 May 2020

Silencing of the self in endometriosis


Figure 1https://pixabay.com/photos/secret-lips-woman-female-girl-2725302/


When we talk about the effects of long-term conditions, we often focus on the physical effects of such conditions. Though there is awareness that these physical effects have social and personal consequences, these consequences are often comparatively neglected on research agendas. In our qualitative research on endometriosis we wanted to explore these social and personal consequences, looking specifically at identity and relationships.

What is endometriosis?
Endometriosis describes a condition which predominantly affects women where cells similar to that of the endometrium (lining of the womb) are found elsewhere in the body. These cells can then respond to changes in hormones just like the lining of the womb does and can cause pain and other symptoms, such as diarrhoea and sexual difficulties, as well as debilitating and painful periods.
Despite a lack of awareness of the condition, there has now been a lot of research on its effects on women’s everyday functioning. Chronic pelvic pain in particular is a common symptom and this type of pain can have a profound negative effect on the mental health of women with endometriosis. There are now many qualitative and quantitative studies on endometriosis, which demonstrate the potentially negative impacts of condition on quality of life and on interpersonal relationships.

How do women with endometriosis negotiate the effects on their relationships?
Our own research explored how experiences of endometriosis affected how women talked about their identity and relationships with others. We conducted an online survey which asked for answers to open ended questions about various specific everyday contexts (friendships, romantic relationships, working life etc) and how endometriosis symptoms may affect women’s lives in these contexts.
We learned that some women had difficulty managing their physical symptoms alongside fulfilling what they felt was expected of them in their personal relationships. We saw evidence of something called ‘self-silencing’, which was proposed by Dana Jack in 1991 as an explanation for the particularly severe effects of depression on women. Jack argued that Western women are socialised to hide their own distress in order to avoid conflicts in relationships, but that this leads to a divided sense of self that can be associated with mental health problems (this coping strategy has been linked to poor outcomes in HIV, heart disease and cancer).
Through the answers our participants gave us, we were able to see some of the disruptions to their identity, and therefore their relationships, that endometriosis might contribute to. Our participants talked about feeling “not like themselves” anymore and about the frustration that this caused. They also talked about how they felt treated by others; their struggles with endometriosis were minimised and not believed. Some women expressed feeling as though they were “going mad” because of feedback from others that they were making a fuss over nothing, or that their physical struggles were “all in their head”.  The women often coped with these struggles by putting the needs and feelings of others in their relationships before their own, and, ultimately, hid discomfort and distress to avoid worrying other people or because they feared their reactions.

What does this mean for our understanding of endometriosis?
The study that we conducted represents one collection of stories from women who were predominately White and heterosexual, so many of the experiences we learned about may be specific to this group. However, our data does show the importance of considering the social context of women’s experiences of long term conditions, and how this may affect their coping strategies.
If women with endometriosis do have a tendency to silence their distress, health professionals treating these women should be aware of this. This awareness can then inform attempts to provide a safe space where women are able to talk about the potential psychological distress associated with endometriosis openly. 

About the authors
Jenny Cole is a senior lecturer in psychology with particular expertise in social psychology. Her research focuses on women’s health, body image and digital technologies.
Sarah Grogan is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She researches body image and links between body image, gender, and health-related behaviours.
Emma Turley is a senior lecturer in criminology at CQ University and a critical psychologist with specialist areas of interest including gender, social justice and inequalities, LGBTQI+ issues, feminism, subculture, sexualities, and the digital world.

Tuesday 21 April 2020

Responding to a pandemic: What can we learn from African feminists?


By Tracy Morison, May 2020

What can African feminists teach us about our response to the COVID-19 pandemic? African perspectives point to the need to think about public health responses holistically and through a social justice lens.

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

African countries' responses to the COVID19 pandemic are complicated by an array of economic and health challenges, introduced and entrenched by neo/colonialism and neoliberal economics. Yet, at the same time, the histories and present realities of these settings mean that African feminists have a different perspective on how to respond to the pandemic than those in more privileged settings. In this piece, I reflect on two important lessons that can be learned from African responses.

We are in this together
An NGO staff member poses for a portrait, as the NGO installs 
hand washing stations at the Kibera slum in Nairobi. 
(Photo by Yasuyoshi CHIBA / AFP)
Given previous experience with infectious disease and many of the social and environmental factors implicated in these, African health scholars are attuned to the importance of considering the wider context of health issues. African feminist research points to the importance of preventing social disruption and building social solidarity--in opposition to many of the individualistic measures in Western public health responses. As Nigerian feminist writer OluTimehin Adegbeye asserts, "Social distancing ... is a solution that doesn’t grasp a reality that is extremely widespread across Africa: people survive difficulty by coming together as communities of care, not pulling apart in a retreat into individualism".

This is a lesson for us all: public health measures focused on individual behaviour change alone will have limited impact. Instead, calls are made for holistic approaches to healthcare. In this vein, horizontal interventions are needed, which focus more broadly on both prevention and care. Such interventions also consider general community well-being in order to make it more difficult for rapid disease transmission. Such holistic approaches, importantly, treat public health as connected with other aspects of daily life.

For instance, in imagining how self-isolation might occur in settings where homelessness, low resources, and over-crowding are common, South African public health researcher Manya van Ryneveld states that "this virus will be defeated not so much by hospitals, but by communities acting creatively and responsibly to enable its isolation", for instance through community-run food kitchens and care centres.


Who is 'we'?
The sentiment that "we are all in this together" has been widely expressed in response to COVID19. Feminists in Africa have questioned who is being referred to when we say this. Who exactly is 'we'? They urge us to consider who is overlooked in public health responses, arguing that we need to see the pandemic through the lens of social justice, as an issue of equality and fairness. This means not only eschewing mainstream gender neutral approaches, but also adopting an intersectional view of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and response.

This view is exemplified in the #InclusiveLockdown Twitter campaign. Another example is Nigerien feminist Fati N’zi-Hassane's #SafeHandsChallenge, which highlights the importance of linguistic access and building social solidarity by inviting Africans to record videos in their local languages and share them on WhatsApp family groups. Similar measures for other African countries have been showcased by Medical and Health Humanities Africa network.

Acknowledgements:

This piece originally appeared as part of a series of short thought pieces related to COVID-19, Daily Life in Extraordinary Times, written by members of Massey University's Health Psychology team. (Click here for more information on Health Psychology at Massey.)



About the author:
Tracy Morison teaches health psychology and social psychology in the School of Psychology at Massey University, New Zealand. She is an honorary research associate of the Critical Studies in Sexualities and Reproduction research programme at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is currently working on a transnational project funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand on Long-Acting Contraceptives. Recent books include: Men's pathways to parenthood: Silence and heterosexual gendered norms (Morison & Macleod, 2015) and Queer Kinship: South African Perspectives on the Sexual Politics of Family-Making and Belonging (Morison, Lynch, & Reddy, 2019).