Toward a Decolonial Psychology: Recentering Global Marginalized Knowledges

• Speaker: Sunil Bhatia, PhD,

• Date: Friday, May 8, 2026

• Time: 7:30 PM ET

• Location: Virtual and In-Person NYC

• Source: William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology

"Dr. Bhatia grapples with a fundamental question: how do we imagine and build futures in psychology that are genuinely grounded in Indigenous cultures, peoples, places, and lands — futures no longer entangled in the logic of colonialism and coloniality? He offers a rich, place-sensitive map of decolonial scholarship that has taken shape within psychology over the last decade.

Speaking to the experiences of the majority world, and to communities whose lives remain marginalized in postcolonial and settler-colonial nations, he draws upon his 25 years of work in cultural and decolonial psychology, to address the question: Why decolonize psychology?

In particular, the presentation is organized around five thematic threads, each distinct yet deeply interconnected, all oriented toward retrieving and reclaiming knowledges that have been suppressed or sidelined: 1) the discipline’s colonial history and its ongoing colonial present; 2)  transnational expressions of decoloniality that move past the oversimplified Global North/South divide;  3) the entanglements of race, racism, and colonial domination with psychology; 4) alternatives to individualism that center community, relational agency, and collective liberation; 5)  Indigenous psychologies and settler colonialism, with particular attention to the reclamation of land, culture, spirituality, and ecology. Dr. Bhatia’s presentation invites the audience toward fundamental rethinking of psychological theory and practice, pointing toward decolonial futures built on justice, relational ways of being, and the revival of epistemologies long silenced."