Methods & Praxis
Decolonial feminist psychology is not defined by a single method, technique, or research design. In fact, Boonzaier and Savaş insist that there is nothing to any method that makes it inherently decolonial and/or feminist.
What unites the decolonial feminist psychologists featured here is a shared approach and praxis: treating participants as collaborators, and asking not only "What can I learn?" but "Who does this serve?" and "Who gets to be an expert?".
A method is decolonial-feminist in the way it is used and practiced, the ethical and accountable purpose of its use, in relationship with participants as knowledge holders and theorists themselves, and attentive to the specificities of place and gendered histories.
Certain methodological and praxical approaches discussed and used by our interviewees are noted below.
You may find that many of the methods here exist within broader traditions of critical and community-based participatory action research. What distinguishes their use in decolonial feminist psychology is a set of commitments carried into the method:
Colonial-gendered history is treated as constitutive of the present, not as background context
The method centers what (and who) has been made absent by the intersection of colonial structures and patriarchal silencing
Psychology's own colonial architecture is interrogated from within
Gender and coloniality are treated as analytically and theoretically inseparable
Arts-Based and Visual Methods, Testimony and Storying
Across these interviews, we see a frequent turn to visual, material, and narrative forms as ways of creating conditions for people to represent their own worlds. For example, Segalo works with women's collectives in South Africa who use embroidery (a skill the community already holds) as a medium for telling stories about apartheid-era violence that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission structurally excluded. Comas-Díaz opens with the Latin American concept of arpillera, a textile art form where oppressed people weave their stories in ways the oppressor cannot decode. She further shares that "as a psychologist, I try to find what is the arpillera in people's lives." Boonzaier organized an arts-based retreat, which used clay, Lego, painting, drumming, and photography, as her research team explored what it means to study the very violences they themselves may have experienced.
The medium varies and storytelling takes many forms. Testimony requires a form adequate to it.
Methods That Prioritize Community Needs and Community-Driven Knowledge Production
Decolonial feminist scholars resist the practice of data extraction, and insist that the people affected by research are not merely its subjects but its knowledge holders. This commitment shows up concretely in who defines the questions, who interprets the findings, who is recognized as a theorist, and who holds authority over what the research means and needs to do.
Where in traditional methods "the researcher has a lot of power there, because you're crafting the question that needs to be answered," Kessi, considers her role as one of a facilitator of “the process of consciousness” rather than as the expert. She underscores the importance of "understanding participants in your research as equals, as the researchers themselves." Dutta describes her work with women in conflict-affected Northeast India as attending to the analysis the women were already making, treating their narration of the interconnection between state violence, family life, and ethnic conflict as theory, not merely raw material for the researcher's interpretation. Segalo's embroiderers became not only creators but facilitators and presenters, carrying knowledge into other communities and dialogues with government.
QUOTES
Roots and Routes: Grounding Method in Place and Colonial-Gendered Histories
A decolonial feminist method is attentive and accountable to both place and gendered history, simultaneously.
Segalo argues for "theorizing from where we are," and Dutta similarly insists that "this is where life is happening, and this is the space from where we have to understand what is going on." Bell roots her analysis in Jamaica's specific class-race history, grounding her work in Caribbean anti-colonial thinking: "the critical theory I lean on most is anti-colonial thinking from the Black Archipelago from the Caribbean," drawing on Glissant, René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Suzanne Césaire. Savaş developed Kindred Narrative Inquiry in direct response to the cross-linguistic, cross-cultural demands of conducting life-story interviews with resettled refugees in Southeast Michigan, building the interpreter relationship into the method itself rather than treating translation as procedural
Boundary-Crossing as Method
These scholars make methodological choices that refuse the boundaries the discipline conventionally maintains. The boundary-crossing is the method. And it shows up in at least three registers across the interviews:
Between disciplines: Comas-Díaz insists you must go interdisciplinary because the issues demand it: she goes to psychiatry, social work, anthropology. Bell draws on Caribbean philosophy, Gordon's critique of "disciplinary decadence," and art rather than staying inside psychology. Boonzaier runs transdisciplinary conversations on spatial justice and intergenerational trauma because "you can't only have a conversation about social justice from a psychological perspective." And Kessi draws on Pan-African political theory because "why can't we have our own perspectives?"
Between forms: Segalo crosses embroidery and testimony. Bell crosses film, installation, and scholarly analysis. Boonzaier crosses clay, poetry, and academic inquiry. Kessi crosses photography and consciousness-raising. Comas-Díaz crosses espiritismo/folk healing traditions and psychotherapy.
Between academy/community: Segalo's embroiderers become facilitators. Comas-Díaz produces in Spanish for audiences academic journals cannot reach. Dutta's accompaniment dissolves the researcher's departure after data collection. Kessi designs a research space as a living room, not a classroom. Bell is guided by the community's own determination of what form their story should take.
