Increasing the visibility of psychology in non-Western traditions

Fighting Epistemic Justice

The PPLS EDI Committee has funded a series of events, motivated by the University’s commitment to redressing epistemic injustice, as identified in its 2025 Race Review.

Epistemic Injustice occurs when we do not take someone’s knowledge seriously not because of intellectual flaws but because of their social standing, e.g. race, nationality, culture, or when these features prevent them from contributing their knowledge to society.

Many psychologists in Africa are at institutions which cannot afford to fund their research, to pay the fees required to publish their work in international journals, or to disseminate their knowledge at overseas conferences.  These barriers are social, not intellectual, and the ongoing legacy of colonial extraction of wealth and resources from those countries.

Culture shapes the mind

Humans are cultural beings. The values of our community shape who we are, how we do things, and what we take to be important.  Philosophers of science have long recognised that we cannot leave our cultural identities at the door of laboratory, because our values inevitably shape the questions we are most interested in, and the methods we choose to get to the answers.

Once we recognise how our values can impact our scientific research, it becomes easier to see when one set of cultural values has dominated the research landscape.

For example, most of the work in psychology that we hear about —in scientific journals, popular press or as it is taught in colleges and universities — is produced by academics based at universities in North America and Western Europe.  These countries (and a few others, e.g. Australia, Israel and New Zealand) dominate the research landscape despite being Minority World countries, that is, countries which hold a minority of the World’s population.  Recently, scientists have been questioning the wisdom of a minority world stranglehold on the production and dissemination of psychological findings, arguing that it limits the sources of knowledge we have about human thought and behaviour.

Broadening perspectives

In response to these concerns, the School of PPLS invited Dr. Adeyemi Adetula, a psychologist affiliated with Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Nigeria and Université de Grenoble Alpes, France, to share his research.  Dr. Adetula has written several highly acclaimed commentaries about the importance of African psychological research, including ‘Psychology should generalise from – not just to – Africa’, and ‘Psychology needs more diversity at the level of Editor-in-Chief’.

During his visit he delivered a lecture open to all members of the School titled “Beyond Western epistemologies: Towards more inclusive research through African perspectives”, as well as speaking to a group of academics and graduate students at a workshop on ‘Scientific Pluralism and Majority World Psychology’. He also answered some questions posed by Dr. Suilin Lavelle in a short interview.

Over the course of his visit, Dr. Adetula sparked many exciting questions and ideas about how and why we do psychological research.  We discussed how the questions of interest to African researchers are often based around solving problems they witness in their community, e.g. condom use negotiation, prevention of teenage pregnancy, and how African and Western researchers differ in their evaluations about what the most important psychological phenomena to study are.  We learned how some African cultures view a person’s identity as necessarily and intrinsically bound with those around them, and how this affects they ways in which this shapes their research.  For example, Western psychologists have spent a lot of time and resource investigating how young children figure out what other people are thinking, a question that stems from the idea that we can only be certain of our own thoughts, and not other people’s.  Yet this founding assumption is far less intuitive in more community-based philosophies such as that promoted by Ubuntu or Omoluabi world views.  By only pursuing the Western point of view, we are assuming that it is the best way of studying the mind before we have evaluated and explored alternatives.

Want to learn more?

If you would like to find out more about these issues, these books and papers are a good place to start.

• Psychology should generalize from — not just to — Africa
• The World Looks Like This From Here: Thoughts on African Psychology