In summer 2023, Leeds Beckett University’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion money, kindly funded Pearl Tshimbalanga, a former undergraduate psychology student with interests in decolonizing psychology, to work as a research assistant producing practical psychology teaching materials.

Alongside Glen Jankowski, Pearl highlighted work that applied Global Southern insights to popular subtopics taught in psychological curricula. This work exists – but is often neglected in the psychology taught in the UK and the Global North.

Examples included the application of the pan-African concept of Ubuntu to wellbeing and the self; see Nyengele, 2014) and the impact that languages apart from English can have on cognitive functions (see Blasi et al., 2022). These insights were contextualised by an outline of the discipline of psychology’s historical racism and more recent commitments to global diversity and anti-racism – particularly since the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

Pearl and Glen presented the project at the brilliant Global South Critical Psychology Conference in May 2023 and it has now been accepted for publication in the conference’s associated journal: The Arden Journal of Social Sciences (due November 2023). After successfully gaining a PhD candidacy in the psychology department at Leeds Beckett University, Pearl is planning to continue this work, to further support psychology educators to engage with decolonial resources. To contact Pearl email: p.tshimbalanga@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

An annotated presentation slide on the above (~30 mins) with audio clips for teaching is available below – and free to use, wholly or partially, with audio narration and notes or note.

A poster Glen created for POWES is also below.

Key references

• Blasi, Damián E., Joseph Henrich, Evangelia Adamou, David Kemmerer, and Asifa Majid. ‘Over-Reliance on English Hinders Cognitive Science’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 0, no. 0 (14 October 2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.015.
• Nyengele, M. Fulgence. ‘Cultivating Ubuntu: An African Postcolonial Pastoral Theological Engagement with Positive Psychology’. Journal of Pastoral Theology 24, no. 2 (December 2014): 4-1-4–35. https://doi.org/10.1179/jpt.2014.24.2.004.