“[It] may be fair to conclude that 11% of the world’s population is now being represented in psychology’s most prominent journals, but that 89% of the world remains neglected in this database. The improved inclusion of this 89% remains an ethical, intellectual, and professional imperative for psychological science.” (Thalmayer et al., 2021, p. 128).
A key feature of decolonial psychology is the renewed call for psychological science to recenter the experiences, knowledge, and narratives of people living in marginalized communities across the globe and the Majority World (e.g., Adams et al., 2015; Bhatia et al., 2025; Sonn et al., 2024). Although interest in decolonial psychology has grown, expressions of the field vary and are shaped by social, political, and historical conditions emerging from slavery, colonialism, and intersecting structures of power. These structures continue to influence privilege, opportunities, and life chances for differently positioned groups.
In a 2025 Methodological Retrospective published in Qualitative Psychology, Christopher Sonn and Sunil Bhatia focus on colonialism in psychological science and the roots and routes of decoloniality (see Fernández et al., 2021), asking, What makes decolonial methods distinct from other critically grounded methodological perspectives? To answer this question, the authors drew on work developed through collaborations with local and translocal scholars from diverse disciplines, as well as activists engaged in critical and emancipatory struggles—each contributing from specific histories and social locations.
From this body of work, Sonn and Bhatia distilled five enactments and modes of inquiry that can characterize decolonial qualitative methods. These approaches draw on plural qualitative traditions such as life stories, ethnography, storytelling, decolonial feminist, and liberation-oriented methodologies that center relational epistemologies and dialogical ethics (Bell et al., 2020; Fals Borda, 1987; Lugones, 2010; Macleod et al., 2020), decolonial love (hooks, 2018; Sandoval, 2000), and liberation psychology (Montero & Sonn, 2009).
- Emphasizing positionality and self‑reflexivity: Researchers critically examine their biographies and social locations as part of research and engagement.
- Grounding investigations in Indigenous reclamation: Researchers center Indigenous struggles to reclaim land, language, and collective memory, reorienting research questions and methods toward self‑determination.
- Centering legacies of colonialism and coloniality: Researchers foreground how power and oppression shape research contexts, relationships, and interpretations.
- Approaching communities as co‑producers of knowledge: Researchers highlight the value of community knowledges and relationality in producing emancipatory forms of inquiry.
- Practicing mutual accompaniment and solidarity: Researchers use research as a site of solidarity, supporting collective efforts to resist multiple forms of oppression.
The article offers pathways to “unlearn” Eurocentric colonial knowledge and build decolonial forms of understanding. Central to this work is elevating the lives and voices of formerly colonized peoples and Indigenous groups dispossessed from their lands under continuing settler colonialism. Through examples of decolonial qualitative inquiry, the authors demonstrate how such methods can disrupt enduring colonial legacies. Their approaches provide methodological and theoretical entry points for reclaiming, recovering, and reproducing decolonial and anticolonial knowledge.