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Psychology curricula and the (re)production of racism

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Psychology has witnessed an upsurge in discussions around institutional racism as a response to global anti-racist activism. Informed by Critical Race Theory, Sarah Gillborn discusses how students of colour experience psychology curricula in the United Kingdom.

Image courtesy of interviewee. June 26, 2024

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This video discusses a study conducted by psychology lecturers in the UK, which examines the 'whiteness' of psychology curricula and its implications for students and the discipline itself. The study stems from the authors' critical engagement with the psychology courses they teach and is influenced by movements like the "Why is My Curriculum White Campaign."

Key points include:

1. **Whiteness of Psychology**: The authors argue that the psychology curriculum is predominantly based on theories developed by white individuals, which are often presented as universal and neutral. This video context overlooks the cultural and racial influences on psychological theories.

2. **Impacts on Students**: Students expressed concerns that their training inadequately prepared them for working with diverse populations, emphasizing the need for a curriculum that reflects a broader range of perspectives and experiences.

3. **Critical Race Theory**: The research draws on critical race theory to highlight how racism is normalized in academia and the importance of centering the voices of people of color in discussions around psychology.

4. **Curriculum Analysis**: The analysis revealed three main themes:
- The whiteness of the curriculum and its color-evasive nature.
- The implications of this whiteness for students' professional practice.
- The participants' thoughts on challenging the curriculum's whiteness and the responsibility for change.

5. **Call for Change**: The authors conclude that psychological curricula reproduce systemic racism and argue for accreditation bodies to prioritize anti-racism in training. They emphasize the need for curricula to weave anti-racist principles throughout, rather than treating it as an optional or separate subject.

6. **Future Directions**: The study suggests the importance of future research focusing on successful incorporation of anti-racism in psychology education, aiming for tangible changes in how psychological knowledge is taught and applied.

Overall, the text advocates for a critical examination of psychology's structures and knowledge systems to foster a more inclusive and equitable discipline.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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We were inspired to do this study, I guess firstly

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by our own kind of critical engagement

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with the psychology courses that we teach on.

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So all the authors of the paper.

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Um, a psychology lecturers working in

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universities in the uk.

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Um, so we were inspired to do this study

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based on our own kind of critical engagement

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with the psychology courses we teach on

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and the kind of content that we engage in

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and engage students in.

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Um, and also our understanding of psychology's whiteness

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and the implications of it.

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So there's been a

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campaign called the Why is My Curriculum White Campaign,

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and that's spanned back much longer than,

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since this paper got published.

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Um, and that's kind of highlighted the whiteness

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of curricula across higher education.

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But in psychology, it's really only been since the murder

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of George Floyd in 2020 that the discipline has in some ways

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begun to kind of more seriously confront its whiteness

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and its role in upholding white supremacy.

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So we believe that, the curriculum

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that psychologists undergo is a key way

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that psychology psychology's whiteness is reproduced,

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is the starting point

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for most people's journeys in psychology.

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And psychology as a discipline is very white

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and it's very male.

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And in psychology courses you are mainly learning about the

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theories of white people that are based on white people

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and on very western contexts.

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So since psychology students often go on

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to work in education, in psychotherapy,

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policing the legal system

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and other systems that are increasingly informed

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by psychology, we think it's a value for us to understand to

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what extent whiteness is reproduced in psychology

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curricular, and what the implications of

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that are in the systems that are informed by psychology

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and how we might challenge that whiteness in psychology,

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curricular and knowledge in ways

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that can create positive change, kind

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of down the line in the systems

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that are then informed by that.

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Um, that knowledge, the whiteness

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of psychology is more than just who is doing it,

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but it's about the kind of assumptions

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and beliefs that are reproduced and justified

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and kind of given scientific backing through psychology.

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Um, so when we talk about whiteness, it's not about

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identity, but it's about the kind of assumptions

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and discourses that are drawn on that benefit white people.

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And this is important because it separates things like

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decolonization from diversification.

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So there's research about the need to diversify psychology,

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which would be about bringing in more authors

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and more examples from people of color,

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but that doesn't necessarily challenge the whiteness

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of psychology and the kind of assumptions that we hear

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if some of the authors

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that we bring in are still reproducing the same

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kind of assumptions and ideas.

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So when we talk about whiteness, it's about,

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the yeah, the beliefs, the assumptions,

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and the kind of practices

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that systematically privilege white people.

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And it's not always only white people who kind

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of reproduce those assumptions and ideas.

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So the whiteness of psychology is more about the knowledges

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and the discourses that are reproduced

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and not only about who is in the room,

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but about what is being talked about

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and also what's not being talked about.

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There is a mixture. I just talked about decolonization

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and diversification,

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and there's increasing amounts

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of literature talking about diversifying psychology.

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But this study fits in more with, literature

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around decolonizing psychology

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and decolonizing psychological knowledge.

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So we wanted to think with this study, not just about who

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is included, not just about who's in the room

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or who's on the reading lists,

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but when things are talked about in psychology,

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whether it's something explicitly to do with race or racism

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or anything in psychology, who is being included

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when they are included, how are they talked about?

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What are the kind of assumptions that are drawn on?

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Um, and who benefits from those assumptions

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or what systems benefit from those assumptions?

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So our research fits within the kind of decolonizing,

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work around psychology.

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Um, it's inspired by author such as a WSU Mper

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and Howett, Linda Tui Smith, who do work on kind

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of methodologies and talk about how,

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mainstream psychological knowledge is based on a kind

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of psychological imperialism

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that undermines the knowledge produced by, indigenous

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and other minoritized communities and upholds white

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and western knowledges as being the kind

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of correct knowledge.

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Um, so the whiteness of psychology is often kind

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of normalized and there's this kind of colorblind,

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or more accurately maybe color evasive as an Amal call it

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approach to race in psychology, where there's this kind

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of idea that it's not that psychology's white,

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it's just neutral.

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And that's because whiteness

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and using white people as participants

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and as researchers, they're seen

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as a more inherently neutral sample.

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They're seen as un racialized.

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And there's this kind of idea that if we do research on

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and with white people,

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we can generalize those findings more broadly.

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Um, so there's this kind of normalized absence

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of people of color in research.

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And on the other side of that,

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there's also this pathologized presence,

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and that's what Anne Phoenix refers to.

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So she calls it normalized absence pathologized presence.

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And that's the idea that the absence of people

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of color in psychology is seen as normal.

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It's not seen as an issue,

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but when people of color are included in samples,

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for example, they're usually included as a kind

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of comparator, the white norm.

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Um, and this is very relevant to considering

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how psychology reproduces whiteness,

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and also white priv privilege and white supremacy.

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Um, so it's drawing on those kind of ideas.

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We want to see how in this study, we wanted to see

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how those issues are being reproduced

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in psychology curricula.

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And the study also draws on critical race theory,

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which is helpful here

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because critical race theory acknowledges

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how racism is normalized in these ways.

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And it also holds storytelling by people of color

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as being an important defense against these kind of claims

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of colorblindness and neutrality.

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Um, because people of color's, everyday experiences

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of racism illuminate the everyday nature of racism

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and the ways that racism appears that might be thought of

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as subtle to the people who aren't experiencing it.

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So with our study, we wanted to amplify the voices

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and stories of students undertaking psychology degrees,

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and utilize those stories to kind of challenge

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that prevailing color evasive narrative about psychology.

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The research,

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took place at a post 1992 university in the uk.

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Uh, it consisted of six focus groups,

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22 participants altogether about three

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to four in each focus group.

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Um, it was staff members at the university were involved in

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data collection, but we did the focus groups in a way

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whereby students weren't in any focus groups with a member

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of staff who taught them directly.

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Um, so students were a mixture of undergrad

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and postgraduate students.

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They were all studying either psychology

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or a re a psychology related degree.

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All of the degrees were accredited either

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by the British Psychological Society,

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and that was the majority of the degrees.

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Um, and some of them were accredited

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by the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy.

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And those are the two kind of key representative bodies

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for psychologists in the uk.

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Um, so most of the participants were women, 17 of them.

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And that is reflective of, the kind of makeup

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of psychology degrees at both undergrad

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and postgrad level in the uk.

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Um, participants, when they, when we advertised the study,

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we advertised it as being for Bain students, which is black,

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Asian minority ethnic, which is the dominant kind of

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phrasing in, academia and elsewhere for that.

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Um, but the participants self,

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described their own ethnicities,

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and it included participants who identified themselves as,

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Asian, British, black British, black Caribbean,

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British Indian, Iraqi, Pakistani, and South Asian.

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Um, and so we held the focus groups,

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they were transcribed verbatim,

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and we analyzed them using reflexive thematic analysis as,

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laid out and explained by Brown and Clark.

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Um, so the analysis was, conducted primarily by me

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as the first author, and it was informed theoretically by

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critical race theory, by my understanding of, racism,

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institutional racism in psychology. Um, and that

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Informed the way in which I engaged with the data.

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We generated three themes from the analysis these pertained

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to the whiteness of the curriculum, the implications of

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that whiteness and ideas, students' ideas around,

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challenging the whiteness of the curriculum

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and also where the responsibility for that change lies.

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So in the first theme,

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participants called attention in various ways to the kind

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of color evasive whiteness of the psychology curriculum.

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Um, one really stark example of

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that in my mind is one student

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who was a black African woman, who highlighted

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that when they were being taught theories about child

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development, she immediately noticed,

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that the theories they're being taught are very

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western theories.

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They're dealing with very, white

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and western ways of bringing up children,

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but that context isn't provided.

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Um, they're kind of, these theories are presented

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as decontextualized, very general human theories

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of child development,

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and there's no context given about

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where those theories have come from or who they're based on

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or the kind of cultural norms that they might be based on.

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So she'd immediately recognized the difference

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between those theories and approaches

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and the approaches to childcare in her home country.

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And in that way then the dominant kind of white

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and western ways of bringing up children were here

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normalized and not presented in that way, just presented as

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the kind of standard of child development.

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And this participant's kind of lived expertise

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of her own culture, were positioned as pathological

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by way of their absence.

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Um, in terms of the second theme, the implications of

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that white curriculum became more clear here in that theme.

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Uh, we looked at, several different examples of the kind

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of implications of this including for students kind

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of professional practice and reflections in that.

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One of the things, that I think is interesting

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to talk about here in reflecting on

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what I've highlighted about the first theme was an Asian

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British participant, a woman who had wanted to apply

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for a job working with people seeking asylum in the uk.

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She had said that she felt

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that her degree had not prepared her to work

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with people from very different cultures

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and very different contexts from herself.

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Um, so kind of very contrary to these ideas

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of any subtlety in the whiteness

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of curriculums our participants were fully aware of

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and critical of the limitations

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of the psychological knowledge

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that they're introduced to on their courses.

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They were very critical about their ability to kind of apply

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that to wider groups of people

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and people who many psychologists will want to work

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with them or want to support.

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They had felt like their curricula

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hadn't prepared them for that.

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There were very kind of clear

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and specific acknowledgements

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that the curriculum prepares them to work

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with very specific groups of people.

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And also the, the curriculum assumes, it's kind of assumes

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that students themselves relate to the white

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and western content that's privileged in the curriculum.

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And this is really similar to, a paper

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by Vannie etal in 2019 where they argued

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that counseling training is catered to the positionality

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of a white student being trained to be a white counselor.

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I think students and participants in this study are really

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highlighting that the psychology curriculum is catered

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to white students training to be white psychologists working

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with white people.

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Um, and the third

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and final theme was around kind

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of challenging the whiteness of curriculum.

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This theme was interesting

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because it kind of inadvertently revealed to us

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that there's some confusion

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or certainly a lack of clarity about who it is

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that writes the course material

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that these students engage with.

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So many participants expressed kind of empathy for lecturers

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who they felt really cared about this

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and wanted to make changes,

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but worried that they didn't have the time

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or the resources to incorporate different

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perspectives into the curriculum.

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Um, and many of them kind of off the back of

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that start also talking about, accrediting bodies

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and the power that lecturers have within the requirements

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that are set out by accrediting bodies.

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So participants were in agreement that whoever it is

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that's in control of the curriculum should be making

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diversification and decolonization more of a priority.

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And we would echo that call too.

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Um, so accrediting bodies in particular should be doing more

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work to encourage

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and support psychology departments

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to decolonize psychological knowledge and training

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and the curricula that they, engage students with.

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We concluded from this analysis

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that the psychology curricula these students

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undertake are white.

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Um, they falsely represent white theories

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and experiences as race neutral and universal.

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And they also rarely deal with issues related to race

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and racism, despite the clear relevance of those issues

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to the discipline of psychology

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and to professions that rely on and draw on psychology.

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So we argue that psychological curricular reproduce racism

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through the knowledge and experiences that it privileges,

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and consequently through those that it pathologizes,

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we think it's reasonable to expect that the white curricular

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that psychologists are trained under contributes

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to the institutional racism that's evident in those systems

14:27.715 --> 14:30.365
that are increasingly informed by psychology.

14:31.265 --> 14:33.005
So because of this key role

14:33.005 --> 14:34.845
that psychology plays in the workings

14:34.845 --> 14:37.175
and guidance of those systems, and

14:37.175 --> 14:40.495
because of psychology's reproduction of racism, we argue

14:40.605 --> 14:44.775
that psychology as both a system of knowledge

14:44.835 --> 14:47.455
and a profession of practice needs

14:47.455 --> 14:50.135
to engage in a much deeper

14:50.755 --> 14:54.885
and probably going to be quite messy critical examination

14:54.885 --> 14:57.885
of the context through which our scientific knowledge is

14:58.085 --> 15:00.325
acquired and also what knowledges are privileged

15:00.325 --> 15:01.485
within the discipline.

15:02.345 --> 15:04.965
So we think that a starting point is

15:04.965 --> 15:06.245
that accrediting bodies can

15:06.245 --> 15:09.565
and should do more to make anti-racism a key part

15:09.565 --> 15:10.965
of psychological curricular.

15:11.625 --> 15:14.685
Um, not just as a kind of tick box exercise,

15:14.985 --> 15:17.885
and certainly not as something that's offered

15:18.185 --> 15:19.885
as an optional module to students

15:19.905 --> 15:21.605
who already have an interest in it,

15:22.105 --> 15:25.325
but as something that's weaved throughout the curriculum

15:25.325 --> 15:29.805
and throughout training and treated as a key priority

15:30.065 --> 15:32.165
for effective practitioners in psychology.

15:33.065 --> 15:36.685
Um, in terms of future research too,

15:36.735 --> 15:39.445
there are psychology courses and departments,

15:39.465 --> 15:42.165
and lecturers that are taking the initiative

15:42.185 --> 15:43.805
to incorporate anti-racism into

15:43.805 --> 15:45.125
their training and curricular.

15:45.665 --> 15:48.725
Um, and I hope that in future research we'll see the

15:49.005 --> 15:50.045
outcomes from those

15:50.145 --> 15:52.165
and the reflections of the people involved in them,

15:52.165 --> 15:54.205
including staff and lecturers,

15:54.205 --> 15:55.845
but also trainees and students.

15:56.705 --> 15:59.245
Um, and I think with that we can begin to understand

15:59.705 --> 16:00.805
how this work can be done,

16:01.625 --> 16:03.525
how anti-racism can effectively be

16:03.525 --> 16:05.205
incorporated into psychology.

16:05.905 --> 16:09.085
Um, and I think it's important to move into research

16:09.115 --> 16:11.565
that is trying to do something

16:11.835 --> 16:16.685
because psychology is, is since 2020 has been,

16:16.795 --> 16:18.045
there's a lot of statements

16:18.065 --> 16:21.925
and there's a lot of kind of exploratory, workshops

16:22.105 --> 16:24.685
and talks, but there's not a huge amount of action.

16:24.825 --> 16:26.285
And I know that there are pockets

16:26.285 --> 16:28.525
of action going on in different kind of training courses,

16:28.525 --> 16:31.285
different schools, different universities.

16:32.025 --> 16:34.445
And I think it'll be good when we start to see the outcomes

16:34.465 --> 16:36.565
of those and can think about how we can implement

16:36.565 --> 16:39.245
that more widely in a way that will start to actually create

16:39.845 --> 16:42.165
positive change in terms of anti-racism in psychology.

00:00 - We were inspired to do this study, I guess firstly by our own kind of critical engagement with the psychology courses that we teach on. So all the authors of the paper. a psychology lecturers working in universities in the uk.

00:13 - so we were inspired to do this study based on our own kind of critical engagement with the psychology courses we teach on and the kind of content that we engage in and engage students in. and also our understanding of psychology's whiteness and the implications of it. So there's been a campaign called the Why is My Curriculum White Campaign, and that's spanned back much longer than,

00:35 - since this paper got published. and that's kind of highlighted the whiteness of curricula across higher education. But in psychology, it's really only been since the murder of George Floyd in 2020 that the discipline has in some ways begun to kind of more seriously confront its whiteness and its role in upholding white supremacy. So we believe that, the curriculum that psychologists undergo is a key way that psychology psychology's whiteness is reproduced,

01:04 - is the starting point for most people's journeys in psychology. And psychology as a discipline is very white and it's very male. And in psychology courses you are mainly learning about the theories of white people that are based on white people and on very western contexts. So since psychology students often go on to work in education, in psychotherapy, policing the legal system

01:31 - and other systems that are increasingly informed by psychology, we think it's a value for us to understand to what extent whiteness is reproduced in psychology curricular, and what the implications of that are in the systems that are informed by psychology and how we might challenge that whiteness in psychology, curricular and knowledge in ways that can create positive change, kind of down the line in the systems that are then informed by that.

01:57 - that knowledge, the whiteness of psychology is more than just who is doing it, but it's about the kind of assumptions and beliefs that are reproduced and justified and kind of given scientific backing through psychology. so when we talk about whiteness, it's not about identity, but it's about the kind of assumptions and discourses that are drawn on that benefit white people. And this is important because it separates things like decolonization from diversification.

02:27 - So there's research about the need to diversify psychology, which would be about bringing in more authors and more examples from people of color, but that doesn't necessarily challenge the whiteness of psychology and the kind of assumptions that we hear if some of the authors that we bring in are still reproducing the same kind of assumptions and ideas. So when we talk about whiteness, it's about, the yeah, the beliefs, the assumptions,

02:57 - and the kind of practices that systematically privilege white people. And it's not always only white people who kind of reproduce those assumptions and ideas. So the whiteness of psychology is more about the knowledges and the discourses that are reproduced and not only about who is in the room, but about what is being talked about and also what's not being talked about. There is a mixture. I just talked about decolonization

03:21 - and diversification, and there's increasing amounts of literature talking about diversifying psychology. But this study fits in more with, literature around decolonizing psychology and decolonizing psychological knowledge. So we wanted to think with this study, not just about who is included, not just about who's in the room or who's on the reading lists, but when things are talked about in psychology,

03:47 - whether it's something explicitly to do with race or racism or anything in psychology, who is being included when they are included, how are they talked about? What are the kind of assumptions that are drawn on? and who benefits from those assumptions or what systems benefit from those assumptions? So our research fits within the kind of decolonizing, work around psychology. it's inspired by author such as a WSU Mper and Howett, Linda Tui Smith, who do work on kind

04:19 - of methodologies and talk about how, mainstream psychological knowledge is based on a kind of psychological imperialism that undermines the knowledge produced by, indigenous and other minoritized communities and upholds white and western knowledges as being the kind of correct knowledge. so the whiteness of psychology is often kind of normalized and there's this kind of colorblind, or more accurately maybe color evasive as an Amal call it

04:49 - approach to race in psychology, where there's this kind of idea that it's not that psychology's white, it's just neutral. And that's because whiteness and using white people as participants and as researchers, they're seen as a more inherently neutral sample. They're seen as un racialized. And there's this kind of idea that if we do research on and with white people,

05:13 - we can generalize those findings more broadly. so there's this kind of normalized absence of people of color in research. And on the other side of that, there's also this pathologized presence, and that's what Anne Phoenix refers to. So she calls it normalized absence pathologized presence. And that's the idea that the absence of people of color in psychology is seen as normal. It's not seen as an issue,

05:36 - but when people of color are included in samples, for example, they're usually included as a kind of comparator, the white norm. and this is very relevant to considering how psychology reproduces whiteness, and also white priv privilege and white supremacy. so it's drawing on those kind of ideas. We want to see how in this study, we wanted to see how those issues are being reproduced in psychology curricula.

06:05 - And the study also draws on critical race theory, which is helpful here because critical race theory acknowledges how racism is normalized in these ways. And it also holds storytelling by people of color as being an important defense against these kind of claims of colorblindness and neutrality. because people of color's, everyday experiences of racism illuminate the everyday nature of racism and the ways that racism appears that might be thought of

06:32 - as subtle to the people who aren't experiencing it. So with our study, we wanted to amplify the voices and stories of students undertaking psychology degrees, and utilize those stories to kind of challenge that prevailing color evasive narrative about psychology. The research, took place at a post 1992 university in the uk. it consisted of six focus groups, 22 participants altogether about three to four in each focus group.

07:02 - it was staff members at the university were involved in data collection, but we did the focus groups in a way whereby students weren't in any focus groups with a member of staff who taught them directly. so students were a mixture of undergrad and postgraduate students. They were all studying either psychology or a re a psychology related degree. All of the degrees were accredited either by the British Psychological Society,

07:30 - and that was the majority of the degrees. and some of them were accredited by the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy. And those are the two kind of key representative bodies for psychologists in the uk. so most of the participants were women, 17 of them. And that is reflective of, the kind of makeup of psychology degrees at both undergrad and postgrad level in the uk. participants, when they, when we advertised the study,

07:58 - we advertised it as being for Bain students, which is black, Asian minority ethnic, which is the dominant kind of phrasing in, academia and elsewhere for that. but the participants self, described their own ethnicities, and it included participants who identified themselves as, Asian, British, black British, black Caribbean, British Indian, Iraqi, Pakistani, and South Asian. and so we held the focus groups, they were transcribed verbatim,

08:32 - and we analyzed them using reflexive thematic analysis as, laid out and explained by Brown and Clark. so the analysis was, conducted primarily by me as the first author, and it was informed theoretically by critical race theory, by my understanding of, racism, institutional racism in psychology. and that Informed the way in which I engaged with the data. We generated three themes from the analysis these pertained to the whiteness of the curriculum, the implications of that whiteness and ideas, students' ideas around,

09:09 - challenging the whiteness of the curriculum and also where the responsibility for that change lies. So in the first theme, participants called attention in various ways to the kind of color evasive whiteness of the psychology curriculum. one really stark example of that in my mind is one student who was a black African woman, who highlighted that when they were being taught theories about child development, she immediately noticed,

09:37 - that the theories they're being taught are very western theories. They're dealing with very, white and western ways of bringing up children, but that context isn't provided. they're kind of, these theories are presented as decontextualized, very general human theories of child development, and there's no context given about where those theories have come from or who they're based on

10:01 - or the kind of cultural norms that they might be based on. So she'd immediately recognized the difference between those theories and approaches and the approaches to childcare in her home country. And in that way then the dominant kind of white and western ways of bringing up children were here normalized and not presented in that way, just presented as the kind of standard of child development. And this participant's kind of lived expertise of her own culture, were positioned as pathological

10:33 - by way of their absence. in terms of the second theme, the implications of that white curriculum became more clear here in that theme. we looked at, several different examples of the kind of implications of this including for students kind of professional practice and reflections in that. One of the things, that I think is interesting to talk about here in reflecting on what I've highlighted about the first theme was an Asian British participant, a woman who had wanted to apply

11:03 - for a job working with people seeking asylum in the uk. She had said that she felt that her degree had not prepared her to work with people from very different cultures and very different contexts from herself. so kind of very contrary to these ideas of any subtlety in the whiteness of curriculums our participants were fully aware of and critical of the limitations of the psychological knowledge

11:30 - that they're introduced to on their courses. They were very critical about their ability to kind of apply that to wider groups of people and people who many psychologists will want to work with them or want to support. They had felt like their curricula hadn't prepared them for that. There were very kind of clear and specific acknowledgements that the curriculum prepares them to work

11:50 - with very specific groups of people. And also the, the curriculum assumes, it's kind of assumes that students themselves relate to the white and western content that's privileged in the curriculum. And this is really similar to, a paper by Vannie etal in 2019 where they argued that counseling training is catered to the positionality of a white student being trained to be a white counselor. I think students and participants in this study are really highlighting that the psychology curriculum is catered

12:22 - to white students training to be white psychologists working with white people. and the third and final theme was around kind of challenging the whiteness of curriculum. This theme was interesting because it kind of inadvertently revealed to us that there's some confusion or certainly a lack of clarity about who it is that writes the course material

12:45 - that these students engage with. So many participants expressed kind of empathy for lecturers who they felt really cared about this and wanted to make changes, but worried that they didn't have the time or the resources to incorporate different perspectives into the curriculum. and many of them kind of off the back of that start also talking about, accrediting bodies and the power that lecturers have within the requirements

13:11 - that are set out by accrediting bodies. So participants were in agreement that whoever it is that's in control of the curriculum should be making diversification and decolonization more of a priority. And we would echo that call too. so accrediting bodies in particular should be doing more work to encourage and support psychology departments to decolonize psychological knowledge and training and the curricula that they, engage students with.

13:39 - We concluded from this analysis that the psychology curricula these students undertake are white. they falsely represent white theories and experiences as race neutral and universal. And they also rarely deal with issues related to race and racism, despite the clear relevance of those issues to the discipline of psychology and to professions that rely on and draw on psychology. So we argue that psychological curricular reproduce racism

14:10 - through the knowledge and experiences that it privileges, and consequently through those that it pathologizes, we think it's reasonable to expect that the white curricular that psychologists are trained under contributes to the institutional racism that's evident in those systems that are increasingly informed by psychology. So because of this key role that psychology plays in the workings and guidance of those systems, and because of psychology's reproduction of racism, we argue

14:40 - that psychology as both a system of knowledge and a profession of practice needs to engage in a much deeper and probably going to be quite messy critical examination of the context through which our scientific knowledge is acquired and also what knowledges are privileged within the discipline. So we think that a starting point is that accrediting bodies can and should do more to make anti-racism a key part

15:09 - of psychological curricular. not just as a kind of tick box exercise, and certainly not as something that's offered as an optional module to students who already have an interest in it, but as something that's weaved throughout the curriculum and throughout training and treated as a key priority for effective practitioners in psychology. in terms of future research too, there are psychology courses and departments,

15:39 - and lecturers that are taking the initiative to incorporate anti-racism into their training and curricular. and I hope that in future research we'll see the outcomes from those and the reflections of the people involved in them, including staff and lecturers, but also trainees and students. and I think with that we can begin to understand how this work can be done,

16:01 - how anti-racism can effectively be incorporated into psychology. and I think it's important to move into research that is trying to do something because psychology is, is since 2020 has been, there's a lot of statements and there's a lot of kind of exploratory, workshops and talks, but there's not a huge amount of action. And I know that there are pockets of action going on in different kind of training courses,

16:28 - different schools, different universities. And I think it'll be good when we start to see the outcomes of those and can think about how we can implement that more widely in a way that will start to actually create positive change in terms of anti-racism in psychology.

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