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v

CONTENTS

List of Contributors  vii

Acknowledgments  xii
Preface: Reporting on the 2019 International Critical Psychology
Praxis Congress  xiii
Robert K. Beshara

1 Ten Concepts for Critical Psychology Praxis  1

Robert K. Beshara

2 Understanding and Challenging Literary Gentrification in

New Mexico: A Concept in Parts  13
Patricia Marina Trujillo

3 Subversions of Subjectification  33
Hans Skott-​Myhre and Kathleen S.G. Skott-​Myhre

4 The End of Knowing as Critical Praxis (Practical-​Critical

Activity)  44
Lois Holzman

5 Looking (Out) for New Masters: Assessing the Bar between

Lacanianism and Critical Psychology  51
Michael J. Miller
vi

vi Contents

6 Psychology as Business and Domination: Challenging the

Colonial and the “Import–​Export” Model  66
Serdar M. Değirmencioğlu

7 Blessings from the Tewa Sunrisers of Santa Clara Pueblo  82

Rachel Begay

8 The Creation of the Viable Unheard of as a Revolutionary

Activity  85
Fernanda Liberali,Valdite Pereira Fuga, and
José Carlos Barbosa Lopes

9 Student Resistance as a Praxis Against Neoliberalism:

A Critical Analysis of Chilean Public Education from
1980 to 2020  100
Silvana S. Hernández-​Ortiz and
María-​Constanza Garrido Sierralta

10 Critical Deconstruction of “East meets West”: The Lesson

from Hong Kong  113
vi
Fu Wai

11 Decolonizing the Intersection: Black Male Studies as a

Critique of Intersectionality’s Indebtedness to Subculture
of Violence Theory  132
Tommy J. Curry

12 Between Critical (World) Psychology and Transdisciplinary

Praxis  155
Robert K. Beshara

Index  159
 vi

CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel Begay is Native American of Santa Clara Pueblo and Navajo decent. Her
mother is Pueblo and her father was Navajo; she was raised and resides in Santa
Clara Pueblo. She participates in Pueblo ceremonies year round and endures a lot
vi
of hard work, to preserve their way of life so that the next generation and all those
who follow will be born into a world that gives them value and meaning in their
lives as Pueblo people. Her career as an Administrative Assistant at Northern New
Mexico College (NNMC) began in 2007 working in the Registrar’s Office and in
2014 she moved to the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, Language, and
Letters. She has been employed at Northern for over 13 years and enjoy working
with a diverse faculty in these departments as well as the students. She is also one
of the sponsors for Northern’s American Indian Student Organization.

Robert K. Beshara is the author of Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical

Islamophobia Studies (Routledge, 2019) and Freud and Said: Contrapuntal
Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis (Palgrave, 2021), and the editor of A Critical
Introduction to Psychology (Nova, 2019). He works as an Assistant Professor of
Psychology and Humanities at Northern New Mexico College. He is the founder
of criticalpsychology.org, a free resource for scholars, activists, and practitioners.
He is also the director of the Critical Psychology certificate program at Global
Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS) College. For more information, please visit
www.robertbeshara.com

Tommy J. Curry is Personal Chair (Distinguished Professor) of Africana Philosophy

and Black Male Studies, Department of Philosophy, The University of Edinburgh,
School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences. He is a recipient of
the American Book Award Winner (2018) and he is a Diverse Emerging Scholar
vi

viii List of Contributors

(2018). He is the editor of Black Male Studies: A Series Exploring the Paradoxes of
Racially Subjugated Males (Temple University Press). He is the author of Another
White Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce Quest for a Philosophy of White Racial Empire
(2018); The Man-​Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017);
and The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African
Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization (2016).

Serdar M. Değirmencioğlu was Professor of Psychology in Istanbul when he

was fired in April 2016 for having signed a peace manifesto. In 2017, he was
banned from public service for life. Forced to go into exile, he has held visiting
positions in Cairo, Macerata, Brussels, and Frankfurt. He is now a visiting scholar
at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. He has produced groundbreaking
books on young people’s participation, martyrdom, and militarism, psychosocial
consequences of personal debt, and corruptive influences of private universities,
and an award-​winning documentary on the university entrance exam in Turkey.
As an outspoken advocate of children’s rights, he writes a Sunday column focused
on children’s rights and well-​being in a daily newspaper in Turkey.

Valdite Pereira Fuga gained a Ph.D. and Master’s in Applied Linguistics and
Language Studies at the Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-​SP), affiliated
to the Language in Activity in the School Context Research Group (LACE). vi
She graduated in Language Studies (Portuguese and English) at Mogi das Cruzes
University (UMC) and at the same institution, graduated in Mathematics.
Currently, she is a professor in Higher Education at Faculdade de Tecnologia de
Mogi das Cruzes, where she was one of the coordinators in the Languages without
Borders (LwB) program in partnership with the Brazilian Ministry of Education
(MEC). At the moment, she attends post-​doctoral studies at PUC-​SP. CV: http://​
lattes.cnpq.br/​1602876529143912

Silvana S. Hernández-​Ortiz graduated as a psychologist from the Universidad

del Desarrollo, Concepción, Chile. She is currently a Doctoral candidate in
Psychology at the Universidad Católica del Maule, Talca, Chile. Her lines of work
correspond to educational psychology from the perspective of critical psychology.
Her main research interest is how students from highly vulnerable and segregated
educational contexts construct their subjectivities from a Foucauldian perspec-
tive and through critical discourse analysis. She has presented her work at the
2019 International Critical Psychology Praxis Congress, New Mexico, USA, and
the 2020 Critical Psychology Conference in East Asia, Tokyo, Japan. She can be
contacted here: [email protected]

Lois Holzman is the co-​founder and director of the East Side Institute for Group
and Short Term Psychotherapy and the founder and chair of the bi-​ annual
Performing the World conferences. Over 40 years Holzman has built and supported
 ix

List of Contributors ix

grassroots organizations that are engaging poverty and underdevelopment util-

izing the transformative power of performance. She is the author/​editor of ten
books—​the latest being The Overweight Brain: How our Obsession with Knowing
Keeps us from Getting Smart Enough to make a Better World—​and dozens of chapters
and articles on social therapeutics, performance and play, Lev Vygotsky, critical
psychology, and postmodern Marxism. She blogs at loisholzman.org, Psychology
Today and Mad in America. Lois received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and
was recently appointed Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Vygotskian Practice and
Performance by the Lloyd International Honors College at University of North
Carolina at Greensboro.

Fernanda Liberali is a teacher educator, researcher, and professor at the Pontifical

Catholic University of São Paulo, in the Languages Department. She holds a
doctorate degree in Applied Linguistics and Language Studies from the same
university. She is an international member of the Eastside Institute Associates, a
member of the Global Network of the University of Leeds; an advisor to CNPq
and FAPESP; a Brazilian representative of the international committee of the
International Symposium on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education in Latin
America (BILINGLATAM); and the general coordinator of the national exten-
sion and research project, Digitmed Program. Within the framework of Socio-​
vi
Historical-​Cultural Activity Theory, her main research interests are related to
teacher education, teaching–​learning, multimodal argumentation, and multilin-
gualism /​bilingual education. CV: http://​lattes.cnpq.br/​0046483605366023

José Carlos Barbosa Lopes is a Ph.D. student and a Master in Applied Linguistics
and Language Studies at the Catholic University of São Paulo (PUCSP), affiliated
to the LACE Research Group –​Language in Activity in the School Context. He
achieved a specialization course in English Language at São Paulo State University
(UNESP), a specialization in Language Studies, and a major in Portuguese and
English at Mogi das Cruzes University (UMC). He has experience as an English
teacher in public and private elementary schools and high schools, language
institutes, and online courses. Currently, he is a professor in Higher Education at
Faculdade Méliès and at Faculdades de Tecnologia Mauá and Ipiranga, where he
was one of the coordinators in the Languages without Borders (LwB) program in
partnership with the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC). CV: http://​lattes.
cnpq.br/​7702814038846925

Michael J. Miller is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at

State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University in Syracuse,
NY.There, he is Co-​Director of Psychology Training and Co-​Director of Student
Counseling Services. His publications include Lacanian Psychotherapy and a con-
tribution to the recent Reading Lacan’s Ecrits: From “The Freudian Thing” to
“Remarks on Daniel Lagache.”
x

x List of Contributors

María-​Constanza Garrido Sierralta (Cony) is an MA student in philosophy at the

University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on intersecting topics in social
and political philosophy, in particular, from a phenomenological-​hermeneutical
perspective, but also in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. She has translated
the work of contemporary French thinkers such as Cornelius Castoriadis, Pierre
Vidal-​Naquet, and Patrice Vermeren. Some of her works have been published by
Palgrave Macmillan and others are forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.

Hans Skott-​Myhre is a Professor in the Social Work and Human Services

Department at Kennesaw State University. He is the author of Youth Subcultures
as Creative Force: Creating New Spaces for Radical Youth Work, co-​editor with Chris
Richardson of Habitus of the Hood, co-​editor with K. Gharabaghi and M. Krueger
of With Children andYouth, co-​editor withV. Pacini-​Ketchabaw and K Skott-​Myhre
of Youth Work, Early Education and Psychology: Liminal Encounters, and, with David
Fancy, co-​editor of Art as Revolt: Thinking Politics Through Immanent Aesthetics. He
has published multiple articles, reviews, and book chapters.

Kathleen S.G. Skott-​Myhre is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University

of West Georgia. She is the author of Feminist Spirituality under Capitalism: Witches,
Fairies and Nomads as well as the co-​author of Writing the Family: Women, Auto-​
ethnography, and Family Work. She is co-​editor with V. Pacini-​Ketchabaw and H.A. x
Skott-​Myhre of Youth Work, Early Education and Psychology: Liminal Encounters. She
has published multiple articles, reviews, and book chapters.

Patricia Marina Trujillo (BA, New Mexico State University; MA, University of
Nebraska; Ph.D., University of Texas at San Antonio) is a proud northern New
Mexican, born and raised in the Española Valley. She is the Director of Equity and
Diversity and an Associate Professor of English and Chicana/​o studies at Northern
New Mexico College (NNMC). Dr. Trujillo has been the founding director of
Equity and Diversity since 2013. Through three pillars of engagement—​critical
education, social justice, and beloved community—​the NNMC Office of Equity
and Diversity works to educate, engage, and inspire students, faculty, staff, and
the greater community. She serves on the boards of Tewa Women United,
NewMexicoWomen.org, the Northern Rio Grande National Heritage Area, and
the LANL Foundation. Trujillo also has a nationally regarded publishing record.
Additionally, Trujillo is the creative writing editor of Chicana/​Latina Studies: The
Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social and the co-​host of the weekly
radio show, Brave Space: Feminist News for Northern New Mexico, on KTRC 103.7
FM/​1260 AM.

Fu Wai is an Associate Professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology,

Hong Kong Shue Yan University. He is working on establishing courses, cur-
riculum, and material related to critical psychology in Hong Kong. His research
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List of Contributors xi

interests include: the history of psychology, ancient Chinese philosophy (including

the school of names and the school of diplomats), the history of the hypnosis
movement in Republican China, and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) as applied
in critical psychology. He is the founder of the Signifier (Chinese name Zhi Fei
Zhi), a hub of Hong Kong young scholars who share ideas in psychoanalysis, con-
temporary philosophy, and literature. Dr. Fu’s publications are mainly in Chinese,
and include City in Oral Stage (2010), Taipei/​Lotus (2011), 300.9 (F99)—​a novel
illustrating Lacanian concepts. Dr. Fu Wai is also a committee member of the
Hong Kong General Union of School Counseling Professionals to promote labor
rights of oppressed frontline workers in Hong Kong.

x
xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to sincerely thank Brent D. Slife, Lucy McClune, Akshita Pattiyani,
Lekshmi Priya S., Liz Williams Stephanie Amedeo Marquez, Ulises Ricoy, Lori
Franklin, Ivan Lopez, Mateo Frazier, Charles Knight, Charles Becknell, James
Annon, Mollie Kelly, Tammy Lucero, Juan Palacios, Santana Salazar, Meghan
Trujillo, and everyone else who helped me actualize the 2019 International
Critical Psychology Praxis Congress.
xi

PREFACE: REPORTING ON THE

2019 INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL
PSYCHOLOGY PRAXIS CONGRESS
Robert K. Beshara

In July of 2018, I launched criticalpsychology.org as a free resource for scholars,

activists, and practitioners interested in critical psychology. Then after receiving a
lot of positive feedback from international scholars, and encouragement from one
of my mentors (Ian Parker), I decided that I wanted to organize a conference at
Northern New Mexico College (NNMC) titled the 2019 International Critical
Psychology Praxis Congress (ICPPC).
As of August 2018, I began proposing the idea for the conference at NNMC
first to the Interim Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
then to the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and finally to the Provost.
After receiving approval at every level, I started publicizing the call for papers in
November of 2018. The deadline was on March 1st, 2019, but I later extended
it to April 1st. I received many submissions, which went through a single-​blind
peer-​review process, wherein two reviewers evaluated the anonymized abstracts
by commenting on the quality of each proposal and also by rating each proposal
using a five-​point rating scale.
The 2019 ICPPC took place on the campus of NNMC at the Center for the
Arts (CFA), and the location was significant because it is the historical land of the
Tewa people, which was colonized first by Spain then by Mexico and, finally, by
the United States. In other words, historical trauma is a very real experience for the
numerous Indigenous people who live here and whose ancestors have lived here
for more than a millennium, particularly members of the eight northern Pueblo
tribes, which surround the Northern campus. This history of struggle framed the
2019 ICPPC; it was meaningful for the students in the Española valley to take
pride in the fact that this land was attracting scholars from all over the world to
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xiv Preface

discuss different ways of decolonizing psychology through the key framework of

praxis, which is the combination of theory and practice.
For this reason, the first day of the conference (Friday, September 27, 2019) was
dedicated to panels on theory (e.g., critical theory, feminism, psychoanalysis,
etc.) with a keynote from the perspective of Black Male Studies delivered by
Dr. Tommy J. Curry and the second day of the conference (Saturday, September
28, 2019) was dedicated to panels on practice (e.g., clinical practice, politicized
healing, pedagogy, etc.) with a keynote from the perspective of Chicana studies
delivered by Dr. Patricia Trujillo.
The 2019 ICPPC was a very successful event thanks to our sponsors, namely:
the Regional Development Corporation, NNMC, the LANL Foundation, the
Africana Studies program at the University of New Mexico (UNM), and the
Office of Equity and Diversity and the Student Senate at NNMC. The sponsor-
ship allowed us to pay for a shuttle to pick up some of the presenters from and to
Santa Fe, to provide lunch to all conference affiliates (i.e., presenters, panel chairs,
student organizers, etc.) on both days, to pay Film and Digital Media Arts students
at NNMC to live-​stream and video record the conference as well as run the lights
and sound for the two-​day event, to supply snacks and refreshments that were
available on both mornings of the conference, to reimburse the Tewa Sunrisers of
the Santa Clara Pueblo who performed at the end of the first day and very much
blessed the conference with their powerful performance, to print the conference xvi
programs, to remunerate other promotional material (e.g., conference t-​shirts),
and to cover the expenses of Española Valley High School students so they could
attend on Friday.
To give you (the reader) a sense of the event’s success, I will break down the
demographic data in terms of attendance. There were a total of 29 presenters at
the conference, most of whom were hailing from either other countries (e.g.,
Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile) or other states
(e.g., Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, New Jersey, Washington, and
California). Out of the 29 presenters, seven presented virtually, either synchron-
ously through Zoom or asynchronously via a pre-​recorded video or PowerPoint
slideshow.
According to the data from Eventbrite (the website used for registration), 144
tickets were sold. Tickets were free for any member of the NNMC community
(students, faculty, and staff) as well as students from UNM (a co-​sponsor). In
addition to the registration data, we also conducted an anonymous demographic
survey using Google Forms. Seventy-​seven attendees filled out the survey, but
the six student organizers estimate that attendance was probably around 100
because 20–​30 people did not fill out the demographic survey. The majority of
attendees were NNMC students (70.1%), female (63.6%), Hispanic or Latinx
(72.7%), single and never married (77.9%), who make an income between $10k
and $50k (40.3%), live in Española, NM (70.1%), have completed a high-​school
degree or equivalent (41.6%), and are under 18 (35.1%). This demographic data
 xv

Preface xv

does not include the many online viewers who were live-​streaming the confer-
ence via YouTube.
With support from the LANL Foundation and with the help of Mr. Tobe
Bott-​Lyons (Director of Upward Bound at NNMC), we were able to invite 24
students from Española Valley High School along with two chaperones as well
as seven upward-​bound students at NNMC who were enrolled in Bott-​Lyons’s
Participatory Action Research class. In addition to busing the students to and
from campus and providing them with lunch, I scheduled a half-​an-​hour session
after lunch for all students, particularly high-​school students, to meet with the
presenters, and those conversations went very well.
The conference would not have been a success without the help of the six
student organizers who were registered in an upper-​division, special topics course
I created at NNMC called Conference Experience, wherein the students learned
about how to plan for as well as run an event or a conference.The students divided
their time during the two-​day conference between different tasks, namely: regis-
tration, support in the theatre, social media, and floating. Although there were
a couple of hiccups during the conference, the students were very professional,
calm, kind, and welcoming in their approach and they made the presenters feel
at home, which speaks to the overall positive impression that we were able to
give to attendees from outside of New Mexico, who do not hold a stereotypical
xvi
idea about Española in their minds and consequently enjoyed the experience
without bias.
Many of the presenters have written to me via email about how they were
impressed with the students and with NNMC, and that they generally had a won-
derful experience that was intellectually stimulating. It is also worth mentioning
that the CFA’s lobby included, in addition to registration and promotional leaflets,
tables for different organizations, such as the College Assistance Migrant Program
(CAMP), the Life Link, the American Indian Student Organization (AISO), and
a sculpture titled Pythagorean Forest created by math students at NNMC. Since
the entire conference was recorded, you can view the video recordings of the
presentations by visiting www.criticalpsychology.org and then clicking on “2019
ICPPC.”
Fifteen (Indigenous, Black, Brown, and white) authors, who reside in the United
States, Santa Clara Pueblo, Greece, Brazil, Chile, Hong Kong, and Scotland, wrote
the following 12 chapters. While not all of them are psychologists, they are in toto
contributing to a critical (world) psychology from the perspectives of Chican@
Studies, Marxism, radical feminism, poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis,
critical pedagogy, and Black Male Studies. In sum, this edited volume represents
the heterogeneity of theoretico-​methodological resources available to contem-
porary critical psychologists, and embodies what Ramón Grosfoguel (2012) calls
“epistemic diversity”,1 which is necessary for the worlding of critical psychology.
In the first chapter, I introduce ten concepts for critical psychology praxis. And,
in the final chapter, I conclude with the majority of authors’ responses to my
xvi
newgenprepdf

xvi Preface

question about how their chapters are contributing to the worlding of critical
psychology through transdisciplinary praxis.

Note
1 Grosfoguel, R. (2012). The dilemmas of ethnic studies in the United States: Between
liberal multiculturalism, identity politics, disciplinary colonization, and decolonial epis-
temologies. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-​Knowledge, 10(1), 81–​89.

xvi
 1

1
TEN CONCEPTS FOR CRITICAL
PSYCHOLOGY PRAXIS
Robert K. Beshara

Critical Psychology Praxis is an edited volume based primarily upon conference

proceedings from the 2019 International Critical Psychology Praxis Congress (ICPPC),
a transdisciplinary event that brought together global scholars, activists, and
xvi
practitioners who desire to cooperatively imagine a worldcentric critical psych-
ology from the perspective of the damnés (Fanon, 1961/​2004)—​what Burton and
Osorio (2011), following the decolonial turn (Maldonado-​Torres, 2017; Pickren,
2020), have termed a transmodern, or analectical, psychology, but which can also
be qualified as a pluriversal psychology (Beshara, 2019). The Congress took place
on September 27–​28, 2019, at Northern New Mexico College in Española, NM;
a campus dedicated to underserved Hispanic and Native American students and
surrounded by the eight northern Pueblos of Taos, Picuris, Santa Clara, Ohkay
Owingeh, San Ildefonso, Nambé, Pojoaque, and Tesuque.
The book chapters are united around the theme of psychosocial non-​alignment
to modernity/​coloniality. Psychosocial Studies (Frosh, 2003) emerged in the United
Kingdom as a critical psychological approach that recognizes the inherent link
between psyche and society and, therefore, rejects the reductionist impulse of
mainstream (Euro-​American) psychology (i.e., reducing psyche to behavior, cog-
nition, and/​or the brain).
Non-​alignment is a reference to the Global South’s Non-​Aligned Movement,
which embodies a third option beyond the First World’s (e.g., the United States
and the European Union) laissez-​faire capitalism and the Second World’s (e.g., the
People’s Republic of China after the collapse of the Soviet Union) state capitalism.
The Global South is both a politico-​economic and a geographical designation
that refers to transmodern cultures in the continents of South America, Africa, and
Asia. Furthermore, the Global South signifies outsiders within—​that is, decolonial
2

2 Robert K. Beshara

subcultures in the Global North (i.e., the descendants of Indigenous, Black, and
Brown peoples who were colonized, enslaved, and/​or over-​exploited since 1492).
Modernity/​coloniality is the name of a Latin American research program,
which is theoretically grounded in liberation theology and other non-​European
intellectual developments (e.g., liberation philosophy and psychology) since the
1960s (Escobar, 2007). Arturo Escobar (2007) describes modernity/​coloniality as
“a framework constructed from the Latin American periphery of the modern
colonial world system” that “helps explain the dynamics of eurocentrism in the
making of modernity” and “reveals the dark sides of modernity” (p. 189). He
adds, “Modernity/​coloniality also shows that the perspective of modernity is
limited and exhausted in its pretended universality” and “not only re-​focuses our
attention on the overall fact of development, it provides a context for interpreting
the various challenges to development and modernity as so many projects that
are potentially complementary and mutually reinforcing” (Escobar, 2007, p. 189).
To put it succinctly, following Mignolo (2007), what the modernity/​coloniality
research program clearly shows is that the oppressive rhetoric of modernity—​for
example, arguments regarding the supposed civilizational superiority of European
cultures—​is always sustained in practice by the violent logic of coloniality, par-
ticularly the “coloniality of power” (Quijano, 2000). In other words, coloniality is
the unconscious of Euromodernity. Subsequently, Enrique Dussel rejects the two
main critiques of modernity (i.e., critical modernity and postmodernity) since 2
they are essentially Eurocentric and proposes instead transmodernity as not only a
critique of modernity but also, and more significantly, as a worldcentric project
that “embraces both modernity and its alterity” (Dussel, 1995, p. 139) and which
is realized through liberation praxis.
Following from this, I encouraged authors to write their chapters in response
to the above-​mentioned theme and in the spirit of praxis (cf. Burton, 2013). The
goal of this edited volume then is to bridge the North–​South divide in critical
psychology, a function of ethnocentrism, through solidarity and dialogue. It is
worth mentioning here that the fifth volume of the Annual Review of Critical
Psychology, a peer-​reviewed journal published by the Discourse Unit, is dedicated
to contributions to critical psychology from different geo-​political regions. What
follows are ten “polycentric” (Amin, 1990) concepts for critical psychology praxis,
which is my contribution to liberation psychology (Burton & Ordóñez, 2015;
Martín-​Baró, 1994; Watkins & Shulman, 2008).

The Politics of Citation

I identify as a scholar-​activist because I do not believe, as a human scientist, that
knowledge is a neutral affair. I borrow this insight from Michel Foucault (1980),
who theorized the interdependence between power and knowledge through his
concept of “power/​knowledge.” The production of knowledge, in other words, is
inherently a political act, which has productive, or oftentimes, disciplinary effects,
3

Concepts for Critical Psychology Praxis 3

and so we have an ethical obligation, as academics, to think about the effects of our
specific positions within the network of power called academe.
In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed (2017) writes, “A citational chain is
created around theory: you become a theorist by citing other theorists that
cite other theorists” (p. 8). In other words, citation is a political act (Ahmed,
2013) because, as scholars, we have to consciously, or unconsciously, decide
which theorists to cite. Citation is also an act of solidarity. Ahmed (2017) writes,
“Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those
who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated
from the paths we were told to follow” (pp. 15–​16). For Ahmed (2017), citations
“are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings” (p. 16).
Furthermore, what Ahmed (2017) calls “citational practice” refers to “not only
who is cited in written texts but who is speaking at events” (p. 148), which
informed my decision of who to invite as keynote speakers at the 2019 ICPPC.
Another source of inspiration, another citation, is the Cite Black Women1 pro-
ject, which is described as follows: “In November 2017 Christen A. Smith
created Cite Black Women as a campaign to push people to engage in a radical
praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women’s transnational
intellectual production.”
I want to build upon these feminist initiatives, and urge the reader to Cite
2
Southern Theorists, or theorists from the Global South. They may be literally
outside of your comfort zone, hence the challenge. I recommend that you (the
reader) visit the following website, which is an open-​access encyclopedia of Global
Southern Theory: globalsocialtheory.org.This is the site’s description: “This site is
intended as a free resource for students, teachers, academics, and others interested
in social theory and wishing to understand it in [a]‌global perspective.”2

The Ethics of Liberation

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (1970/​2018) shows that oppression is
dehumanizing for both the oppressed and the oppressor; however, he argues that
the oppressed must lead the way toward liberation because they know oppression
first-​hand. Oppressors can become “comrades” as opposed to allies (Dean, 2019)
in the collective struggle toward liberation but, Freire (1970/​2018) emphasizes,
they must authentically follow the leadership of the oppressed without exhibiting
“false generosity” (p. 44), which entails “a profound rebirth” (p. 61). Solidarity
necessitates, among other things, a radical commitment to both antiracism—​
as opposed to the two forms of racism: segregation and assimilation—​ and
anticapitalism given the historical and ongoing oppressive reality of “racial capit-
alism” (Robinson, 1983/​2000). In sum, an ethics of liberation, as Enrique Dussel
(2013) asserts, is “transmodern” (p. 39), or from the perspective of modernity’s
alterity: the oppressed, the colonized, or the damnés, to use Frantz Fanon’s (1961/​
2004) term.