“Method and meaning”: Storytelling as decolonial praxis in the psychology of racialized peoples

Highlights

• Western psychological research uses methods that perpetuate colonialism and racism.

• Researchers must work to decolonize and indigenize research with racialized groups.

• Storytelling is a decolonizing method that honors Western and indigenous knowledge.

• Decolonization must be explicitly defined by researchers to promote accountability.

• Researchers should collaborate with racialized communities in all research stages.

Abstract

In psychology, there is a growing recognition of how racialized groups are often dehumanized and pathologized, and how racist and colonial legacies still inform our research and practices today. In order to dismantle racism within academic institutions we must decolonize and indigenize psychological science. One promising strategy is the use of storytelling methodology wherein participants from racialized groups share their lived experiences. However, the process of how storytelling contributes to decolonization is rarely explained, and decolonization is rarely defined. The present paper systematically reviewed studies that examined racialized individuals’ lived experience using storytelling methodology in order to synthesize conceptualizations of decolonization and of how storytelling contributes to decolonizing psychological research. Findings suggest storytelling meaningfully contributes to decolonial praxis in psychology. Researchers must work consciously and collaboratively, center research around liberating racialized communities, and explicitly define how their study decolonizes in order to be accountable to their community of study and to the colonial history of the lands on which they're situated.

Introduction

Early psychologists' narratives about racialized groups² are attributed as the source of scientific racism in psychology (Okazaki et al., 2008; Teo, 2011). Western psychological methods and practices on colonized groups are recognized as contributing to upholding colonial perspectives while misrepresenting racialized groups with the least power (Bell et al., 2012). Although the field of psychology's racist history has been well documented and critiqued (see Newnes, 2021; Richards, 2002; Teo, 2011; Winston, 2004, pp. xi–303), its racist and colonial legacies continue to exist today through research agendas and designs, psychological interventions, and attitudes that affirm and perpetuate white supremacy culture in our institutions (Pillay, 2017).

In the past 30 years, there has been a shift towards decolonizing and indigenizing psychological science to begin to dismantle institutionalized racism in psychology (Adams et al., 2015; Yang, 2012). One promising area is the use of storytelling as methodology in psychological research in which participants from racialized groups orally share their lived experiences. In many indigenous societies, stories are considered both “method and meaning” (Kovach, 2009, p. 96), such that collective storytelling is a culturally grounded way of transmitting community knowledge between generations. Storytelling is also a method of communicating the values and norms of a particular culture in order to naturalize their commonly held beliefs (Barthes, 1972). In social sciences research, narratives are seen as a way to construct meaning from one's lived experience (Crossley, 2000; De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012). While several psychological studies have included storytelling in their designs, they each conceptualize how storytelling contributes to decolonization differently. Researchers should clarify what it means to “decolonize” through storytelling as a way to hold themselves accountable. Pillay (2017) captures this critique well: “Is decolonization just the latest trendy buzzword and a lofty aspiration that academics claim to do in their spare time?” (p. 135).

The present study aimed to review research that examined stories of racialized individuals' lived experience and used a storytelling method to “decolonize” psychological science. The studies were reviewed for their conceptualization of decolonization and how storytelling contributed to this framework. By reviewing this literature, it will be understood how psychology as a field is interpreting storytelling as decolonizing praxis. This presents the possibility for future researchers to extend and critique storytelling methods and decolonial practices, and ultimately shift the culture of psychological science to one that honors and naturalizes the experiences and knowledge of racialized groups. The importance of storytelling as a decolonial praxis in psychology becomes clear through a discussion of scientific racism in Western psychology and psychology's complicity in colonial legacies, followed by our conceptualization of decolonization and the contribution of storytelling.

Psychology's contribution to scientific racism began with Sir Francis Galton whose studies searched for differences between racialized groups. His findings were used to validate white superior intelligence and orchestrate a campaign of pathologizing racialized groups as evolutionarily stunted (Richards, 2002; Teo, 2011). One of the founders of neuropsychology, Paul Broca, used scientific studies to “prove” that white people were superior to non-whites (Teo, 2011). Herbert Spencer made popular a theory that white people allocated much more energy to higher reasoning processes than “primitives”, and as such excelled in a number of psychological domains including reasoning, reaction times, and impulse control (Richards, 2002). G.S. Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association, later “advocated” for the “lower races” by proposing that they were not stunted, but immature and moving through a kind of evolutionary adolescence that required the wise and righteous guidance of white people to reach their full potential (Richards, 2002; Teo, 2011). These views provided the rationale for racial segregation, residential schools, and Black disenfranchisement (Richards, 2002; Teo, 2011).

Some of the strongest proponents of scientific racism throughout history have been psychologists, and to this day some psychologists still argue there are inherent biological differences in intelligence due to race (see Rushton & Jensen, 2005; Herrnstein & Murray, 1995 in Teo, 2011). In current psychological research and practice, the experiences of members of oppressed groups are often dehumanized and pathologized in order to dismiss them as insignificant or abnormal (Marecek & Hare-Mustin, 2009). For example, there has been concern about the overidentification of racialized students for special education programs that stem from invalid, decontextualized, and racist assessment practices (see Artiles et al., 2002) and recent criticisms of Attachment Theory which has been used to apprehend Indigenous children and place them in non-Indigenous homes (Choate et al., 2020).

Modern day psychological scientific racism also occurs in its methodology and epistemology. Western psychological science is often positioned as the standard for normality, in which variations are seen as incorrect, pathologic, and departing from objective science (Atallah et al., 2018; Barnes, 2018; Newnes, 2021). For example, Wendt and Gone (2012) posit that positivist approaches are too often portrayed as neutral when in reality they tend to remove nuance and context that justify and maintain the social order, which in this case is scientific racism. Furthermore, biases against non-Western perspectives in research not only silences indigenous ways of knowing, but perpetuates and reflects “the understandings and interests of people in positions of dominance” (Adams et al., 2015, p. 217) that serve to benefit them over people in positions of oppression.

Since scientific racism in psychology and colonialism are intricately intertwined (see Figueiredo et al., 2018; Newnes, 2021; Okazaki et al., 2007), it is worth examining the legacies left behind by colonialism that have influenced global psychology. First, coloniality continues to be reproduced in contemporary society through the veil of globalization (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). Globalization is not a multidirectional and equitable influence of ideas, goods, and people, but rather a dominant force of neocolonialism. For example, Bhatia (2018) documented how Western evaluations of Indian youths’ performance in global workplaces (e.g., call centers) transformed their cultures and identities, such as learning how to talk without an “accent” and in more Western, efficient ways of answering questions, recreating the colonial power differences in which the colonized Indian workers transform themselves as less Indian in order to work as customer “service” to the West. Global corporations modify previously colonized countries through neocolonial practices to better serve nations who have benefitted the most from colonialism. In fact, Western nations have a global influence in the study of psychology, and scholars argue that Western psychology continues to dominate due to the lasting imbalances of power that stem from colonialism (Bhatia, 2018; Teo, 2011; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012; Yang, 2012).

Another colonial legacy is the adoption of Western psychology among colonized nations out of necessity despite it being incompatible with their own culture. Not only is Western psychology enforced from top-down structures, but previously colonized groups now reinforce these Western ideas from the bottom up. This is because groups that were colonized experienced cultural erasure and loss of resources, and thus they often adopted Western psychology in order to provide psychological services and knowledge for their people. Yang (2012) labelled adaptations of Western psychology as “Westernized” or “Americanized” psychology, as other cultures’ psychologies are simply variants of Western psychology rather than endogenous to their own contexts. Furthermore, colonialism has been argued to foster a “dependency complex” (Mannoni as cited in Nobles, 2013) in colonized African nations in which the colonized individuals depend on the colonizer for societal advancements. Similarly, after centuries of Spanish and American colonization, some Filipinos may endorse “colonial debt” in which they believe Filipinos should be grateful to them for “civilizing” the indigenous peoples of the Philippines (David, 2013). Colonial debt has also been endorsed by the colonized peoples of Guam (Dalisay, 2014), Ghana (Utsey et al., 2015), and Puerto Rico (Capielo Rosario et al., 2019). These contemporary experiences of dependency on Western frameworks as a result of colonialism contribute to the perpetual dominance of Western psychologies, and prevent the voices of racialized peoples from being included in shaping the field.

In some cases, Western psychology research on racialized peoples is used to further differentiate the racialized group as “Other”. Epistemological violence occurs when scientific data is interpreted as showing either the inferiority of the racialized group of study, or problematizes them and their experiences, when other equally valid interpretations are available (Teo, 2008, 2010, 2011). Problematization, as described by Foucault (2006), is the process of transforming a behavior, a phenomenon, and/or a people into a problem requiring a solution by labelling, analyzing, or treating it as such. This is the process by which the lived experiences of racialized peoples are pathologized as illness in need of healing (Marecek & Hare-Mustin, 2009), immaturity in need of training (Richards, 2002; Teo, 2011), or deviance in need of controlling (Foucault, 1978); and by which racialized peoples are dehumanized and disenfranchised under the guise of the helping profession, psychology, the Trojan horse of the scientific disciplines.

Psychology often makes the claim that it is unbiased and objective, without politics or culture. However, interpretations of psychological science are firmly grounded in specific historical-cultural-political contexts (Teo, 2015), most often a Western, positivist way of knowing. In fact, all psychologies, including Western psychology, are culturally-embedded (Teo, 2013). This is not problematic in and of itself, but it is the Western “settler perspectives and worldviews [that] get to count as knowledge and research and … [are] repackaged as data and findings … activated in order to rationalize and maintain unfair social structures” (Tuck & Yang, 2021, p. 2). It is this favoring of Western, settler perspectives over the worldviews and ways of knowing of racialized peoples that degrades and problematizes them as inferior Others and perpetuates systemic oppression. As such, it is essential that we interrogate and transform the psychology of racialized peoples through decolonial praxis.

Despite the influence of Western psychology, there are researchers committed to shifting psychological practices to reflect the needs of their communities by developing an “indigenized” psychology (Yang, 2012). These indigenized psychologies reflect a conscious effort to recreate psychological practices around the indigenous world without idealizing a psychology in the absence of a colonial past and present. In a study by Allwood and Berry (2006), fifteen indigenous and racialized researchers described the origin and development of indigenized psychology in their region. They found that almost all researchers described their local psychology developing in reaction against Western psychology, reflecting the necessity to be aware of the universalism Western psychology asserts. Similarly, Nwoye (2015) states that African psychology is the “psychology of rehabilitation” (p. 99) by emancipating itself from comparisons against Western psychology. By moving away from comparisons, African psychology exists in its own right, developed beyond its relation to Western psychology and colonialism. These articles suggest that indigenized psychologies are still finding themselves in relation to and distinct from Western psychology, and that more work is needed to foster their development.

One possible advancement towards indigenizing psychology is examining the methods appropriate for their respective peoples. In Allwood and Berry's (2006) study examining researchers' opinions on indigenous psychologies, there was a range of perspectives regarding which, if any, methods in Western psychology are appropriate for their local psychologies. Non-positivist methods that value human experience, such as certain forms of qualitative methods, gathered the most approval, potentially indicating that an acceptable methodological reaction against Western psychology should center the indigenous voices of the community being studied. Similarly, Atallah et al. (2018) suggested that decolonization is achieved through cultural narratives and testimonies, highlighting the “self-determined voice” (p. 491) that is not obstructed by Western influence. These perspectives suggest that there is a desire from indigenous cultures to resist Western practices through centering indigenous experiences as a source of knowledge production.

Resisting Western practices in psychology and integrating indigenous voices is often thought to imply decolonization. Colonization broadly refers to the current and historical patterns of hierarchical power that emerged from colonialism, however it now extends far beyond the boundaries of the original colonial framework to determine today's social structures (Singh et al., 2018). Decolonization may then be considered, in short, the process of disrupting and dismantling colonialism (Adams et al., 2016; Pillay, 2017; Singh et al., 2018). The patterns and practices of colonialism differ around the world, and interact with the unique culture, history, and lived experiences of the indigenous peoples of that land. As such, colonialism, and consequently decolonization, are understood differently across cultures, disciplines, and peoples.

In recent years the term “decolonization” has become a buzzword in the social sciences (Pillay, 2017), often used without a thoughtful discussion of what exactly it means to decolonize our research. Psychologists in particular often speak to “decolonizing research,” claiming to navigate the waters of institutional white supremacy and racism in their academic practice, when in reality very few psychologists do so authentically (Pillay, 2017). Decolonizing psychology is not a hobby that psychologists can pick up on the side, but rather involves “attempts to ‘crack the fortress’ … and start laying the foundation for a new enterprise altogether, one not complicit in varieties of violence” (Pillay, 2017, p. 136).

Settler colonialism is the integration of external colonialism (i.e., extraction from Indigenous worlds to amass the wealth and privilege of the colonizers), internal colonialism (i.e., the control and exploitation of people, land, animals, plants, and waters inside the borders of the colonial nation-state), and the resettlement of the colonizers on Indigenous lands (Tuck & Yang, 2012). As racialized settlers on Turtle Island (or colonially known as Canada), and members of diasporas with indigeneity to other colonized territories (i.e. diasporic indigeneity), our (the authors’) relationship to decolonial praxis in Western psychology is more complicated than if we were white settlers. While our peoples experienced historic settler colonialism on their own lands, and external and internal colonialism presently, as settlers on Turtle Island we are also complicit in settler colonialism and the theft of land from Indigenous peoples, a lens that informs our understanding of decolonization.

When psychologists speak of decolonization they often cite goals like “decolonizing clinical supervision, decolonizing mentorship, decolonizing curriculum [and] decolonizing research practices” (e.g. the Decolonizing Psychology Conference; Columbia University, 2021), which have little to do with Indigenous land sovereignty. In the seminal paper by Tuck and Yang (2012), they argue that academia has used decolonization as a metaphor for social justice in order to circumvent the conversation away from decolonization's original purpose: unsettling from Indigenous land. In fact, it is common that there is almost no acknowledgement of the settler colonial context of many Western academics' attempt to “decolonize”, or their complicity in land theft. In other words, as Tuck and Yang (2012) assert, if decolonization does not mean relinquishing lands then it is a metaphor. Using decolonization as a metaphor is not only superficial, it is appropriation, and perpetuates settler colonialism by enabling settlers' race to innocence (Fellows & Razack, 1998 in Tuck & Yang, 2012), easing their discomfort. Put succinctly, “when metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 3).

For these reasons, it is essential for us to be explicit in defining what is meant by decolonization in psychology when engaging in decolonial praxis among other racialized groups, and in this paper. We agree with Tuck and Yang's (2012) assertion that focusing on developing a critical consciousness as a way to “decoloniz[e] the mind” (p. 19) may yet be another way for settlers to absolve themselves and avoid discomfort without doing the real decolonizing work of returning stolen land. We also think of Fanon (1963), who believed decolonizing the mind was the first step in decolonization (but should not be the only step, as per Tuck and Yang's definition²), and described decolonization as an abrupt, chaotic process that “changes the order of the world” (p. 36). Maldonado-Torres (2017) interprets Fanon's (2008) decolonial process as the “cultivation of a decolonial attitude, which is profoundly epistemological, as well as ethical, political and aesthetic” (p. 439). Attitude, to Fanon (2008), took priority over methods and was conceptualized as the creation of meaning, power dynamics, subjectivity, and a collective unconscious. The decolonial attitude employs these as building blocks for individual and collective agency to liberate the mind, society, and the world (Fanon, 2008). In line with this perspective, we believe “decolonizing the mind” is about more than developing a critical consciousness (i.e. learning about white supremacy and colonization, and reflecting on one's complicity; Carter et al., 2017), and may indeed be an essential piece of decolonial praxis in psychology.

Kessi and Boonzaier (2017) discuss the process of decolonizing psychology as challenging the relationship between psychological science and the perpetuation of the various forms of systemic oppression. Psychology in its very conception embodies “epistemic colonization” (Maldonado-Torres, 2017, p. 433), as modern psychology developed from the normalization of Western methodological knowledge and rejection of other cultural or indigenous forms of knowing; and, as previously discussed, is used as a tool to pathologize, problematize, and paternalize racialized groups (Richards, 2002; Teo, 2008, 2010, 2011). Therefore, we see decolonial praxis in psychology as freeing the minds of racialized peoples and creating space for us, our lived experiences, and our epistemologies in psychology. Foucault asserted that “liberation is impossible because we are all trapped in the same game of oppression” (1997 as cited in Teo, 2015, p. 122). Upsetting the power structures and freeing us from the oppression that psychology has upheld will “change the order of the world” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36) and liberate the people.

We aim to discuss decolonization conceptualized as restoring the nation to the people and the liberation of the people (Fanon, 1963), by “challenging not only what counts as ‘psychology’ (its epistemic foundations) but also, how it is practised, where it is located, and who has access to it” (Kessi & Boonzaier, 2017, p. 304). As racialized psychologists, we see liberating the mind as essential to liberating the people, and thus is an essential step for decolonial praxis in psychology. We aim to discuss decolonial praxis as an ongoing process in psychology rather than decolonization as an end-state or goal that can be reasonably accomplished in or through psychology alone. For us, liberation of the mind, and thus decolonial praxis in psychology, is necessary because it is the main site of neocolonialism, and from this we derive several key processes: dismantling internalized racism and colonial mentality; indigenizing psychological practices to create psychologies rooted in the culture and lived experience of racialized peoples; denaturalizing conventional scientific praxis as the standard for normality; and engaging in our own storytelling of lived experience to counter harmful colonial and psychological narratives.

Through centuries of colonial violence and the relative absence of antiracist and anticolonial practices in modern psychology, colonial beliefs have been internalized by individuals from previously colonized countries (Okazaki et al., 2008). Within the context of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, this has been termed colonial mentality (David & Okazaki, 2008) or internalized colonialism in Ghana (Utsey et al., 2014), or even more generally internalized racism and internalized racial oppression that stems from colonialism (David et al., 2019; Fanon, 2008). This may look like feeling inferior to white people, putting down one's own and other racialized groups, and actively trying to seek and maintain proximity to whiteness (e.g., Bouchard, 2020; David, 2013). There has been a call to find ways to heal from colonial trauma and the suffering of racialized peoples (Degruy-Leary, 2017; Okazaki et al., 2008) which had been made normal and invisible through the dominance of Western understandings of trauma and pain. It is for this reason that decolonization must also occur within the mind, as Nandy (1997) put it, “This colonialism colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all. In the process, it helps generalize the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds” (p. 170). Racialized groups who have been colonized must dismantle their own understandings of racialized oppression that have come from modern day structures as well as passed down through their own family and culture.

Cultural and indigenous knowledge is used to modify and transform traditional Western psychological practices to produce psychologies that are more attuned and responsive to the lived experience of racialized people and their communities in a process called indigenization (Adams in Pillay, 2017). Through indigenization, cultural wisdom is reclaimed to produce forms of knowledge that resonate with local communities and are treated as legitimate and valuable ways of knowing (Adams et al., 2015). This combats the bias in Western psychology to treat indigenous understandings of mental health and well-being as folk wisdom rather than empirical truth, and reveals how Western psychology posits universalities that do not effectively or accurately capture the lived experiences of racialized people (Adams et al., 2015; Andermahr, 2016). Others see an essential component of indigenization being the creation of a social consciousness or community engagement that would motivate people to take revolutionary action (Adams et al., 2015).

The denaturalization of conventional scientific wisdom involves including the knowledge and experiences of racialized communities as an epistemic resource in research as a way of illuminating and unsettling the colonization of knowledge production in Western psychology (Adams in Pillay, 2017). As Western scientific pursuit encourages the perspectives and interests of those who benefit from colonial power structures and white supremacy, and positions Western psychological constructs as universal and normal (Adams et al., 2015; Atallah et al., 2018; Maldonado-Torres (2017)), a goal of decolonizing psychology should be to denaturalize mainstream psychological perspectives that systems of oppression claim are standards of normality (Adams et al., 2015). This will allow for the development of new psychological perspectives and standards that are grounded in the lived experiences and knowledges of racialized peoples.

The tools of colonial violence are not always apparent, and are often wrapped and concealed within dominant psychological narratives widely accepted as truisms, such as: (1) mental illness is a pathology of the individual self, isolated from relational, social, intergenerational and situational factors (Andermahr, 2015; Ansloos, 2018; Marecek & Hare-Mustin, 2009); (2) psychological constructs and theories are universal across groups rather than specific to the socio-cultural context and one's intersecting identities (Ansloos, 2018; Craps et al., 2015; Denzin et al., 2008; Teo, 2011); and (3) as a positivist science, knowledge production must be concerned with issues of objectivity, standardization, and prediction rather than the subjectivity, variation, and understanding of the human experience (Hjelmeland, 2012 in Ansloos, 2017; Teo, 2015; White, 2017; Wendt & Gone, 2012). These narratives lead to assumptions in the interpretations of “data” that position racialized peoples as inferior Others, or problematize them when researchers in psychology only acknowledge one way of knowing and ignore others. Similar to the concept of colonial mentality, Fanon (2008) describes how colonial narratives are internalized by racialized peoples in order to survive in colonial and white supremacist cultures, but have the effect of programming an unconscious sense of inferiority and inadequacy.

These narratives reflect the political-historical-cultural context of a white, colonial, Western psychology, and so must be dethroned by narratives situated in the political-historical-cultural context of the racialized peoples they oppress. Some scholars call this counterstorytelling, wherein narratives, stories, are used to “intentionally and strategically challenge the assumptions and logic of stories that ultimately work to reinforce racial domination …” (Baszile, 2015, p. 240). While Baszile (2015) is using counterstorytelling in the context of critical race theory (Delgado, 1989; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002), it has the potential for serving the same function in decolonial praxis: challenging and overwriting colonial narratives with narratives voiced by racialized peoples. Baszile (2015) even goes so far to argue that counterstorytelling is “the single most important strategy in ongoing struggles against colonialism, racism and white supremacy …” (p. 240). This is the framework in which we begin to implicate storytelling into decolonial praxis in the psychology of racialized peoples.

Although a purely endogenous indigenous psychology is too idealistic (Yang, 2012), to begin the process of developing decolonial praxis in psychology we offer storytelling, a method of research often described as decolonial in the humanities and social sciences, but less practiced in psychology (e.g., Caxaj, 2015; Doharty et al., 2020; Hampton & DeMartini, 2017; Mucina, 2011; Sium & Ritske, 2013; Weatherall, 2020). Sium and Ritske (2013) state that “stories are decolonization theory in its most natural form” (p. 2). In order to engage with decolonial praxis in psychology, we must make a “deliberate attempt to understand reality from the perspective of the oppressed” (Adams et al., 2015, p. 218), as Western psychology tends to oppress the voices of racialized groups, replacing them with dominant colonial perspectives that are accepted as truth (Adams et al., 2015). Storytelling accomplishes this by recalling history, events, and experiences through the lens of racialized voices (Adams et al., 2015); honoring experience as a powerful teacher (Mucina, 2011); and affirming the collaborative creation of knowledge (Dei in Mucina, 2011; Hallet et al., 2017) while also appreciating the diversity of lived experiences among racialized individuals (Mucina, 2011). This means that storytelling is both the “small” moments of an individual's life story, but for racialized people, it is deeply connected to their overall “big” story as well (see Freeman, 2011). In other words, storytelling refers to individual stories that are embedded within larger stories that form and inform histories, experiences, and communities.

The one area that may address storytelling in psychology is narrative psychology. Although a single definition of narrative psychology is difficult to communicate, one of its founders T. R. Sarbin described the “narratory principle: that human beings think, perceive, imagine, and make moral choices according to narrative structures” (Sarbin, 1986 in Schiff, 2017), and so narrative psychology can be thought of as what can be learned about the human experience based on how people understand themselves in the context of broader stories (i.e., narratives). Because its theory rests heavily on a person relying on socially constructed narratives as projectives to reflect deeper on oneself, narrative psychology uses storytelling to capture the dynamic nature of the self since stories are also dynamic. For the purposes of the current paper, the theoretical background of using storytelling (whether it be informed by narrative theory or other theory) is less important since it is our goal to understand how storytelling is used broadly in psychology regardless of specific psychological and clinical orientation. Additionally, while there are other forms of narrative and qualitative inquiry that may contribute to decolonial praxis such as visual methods (Malherbe et al., 2019), living objects (Cassim et al., 2015), and other creative methods (e.g., Lykes, 2013) that also invoke story, we focus on the orality of storytelling as it approximates other popular forms of qualitative methods (e.g., structured and semi-structured interviews, focus groups, open-ended survey questions) and is widely used in this form in other disciplines.

Storytelling also accomplishes an essential goal of decolonization: moving beyond simply eliminating the power hierarchies and practices of colonization to facilitating the resurgence of indigenous sovereignty by reclaiming epistemology and knowledge that was previously erased (Sium & Ritske, 2013). While Western psychological science has a tendency to claim methods such as autoethnography or traditional storytelling are not rigorous or objective (Adams et al., 2015), the voices of those who have lived experience of decolonization are integral to its praxis, and so methods of decolonization should be grounded in their realities (Sium & Ritske, 2013). Storytelling is also a form of participatory research that can honor the cultural lens through which psychological phenomenon is understood (Bell et al., 2012). In this way, storytelling then denaturalizes Western scientific wisdom as a universal standard of truth and replaces this oppressive epistemology with psychological perspectives and standards that are grounded in the lived experience of racialized people (Adams et al., 2015; Andermahr, 2015).

Importantly, storytelling is not inherently decolonizing and requires thoughtful engagement by the researcher to use it in such a way. Wendt and Gone (2012) argue that qualitative studies are not “automatically innocent of an implicit colonization agenda” (p. 165), and in their review of qualitative research on American Indians from the social sciences they recommend that researchers should provide more detail in their methodology as well as develop stronger community partnerships. Without this transparency and solidarity with marginalized communities, qualitative methods are not decolonizing methods. As a result of our own review, we hope they provide additional recommendations about when storytelling is and is not decolonizing.

Psychological research that claims to use decolonial practices may not explicitly describe how decolonization is defined or accomplished. Storytelling is often considered a “decolonizing methodology”, however the process of how this contributes to decolonization is rarely interpreted. Without explicit explanations, there is no opportunity for researchers to be accountable to whether their decolonizing approaches have meaningful impact or only intent. Reviewing how the existing empirical literature conceptualizes decolonization and storytelling among racialized groups gives a clearer understanding of the field's grasp of these concepts in application, which enables more accountability for researchers in psychology and provides guidance for future research. Therefore, the present study reviews empirical literature that uses storytelling as part of their decolonization framework. We examined these articles with two specific research questions in mind:

• How is decolonization conceptualized in psychology research that uses storytelling of racialized groups as a methodology?

• How is storytelling conceptualized as contributing to decolonization in psychology research?