Date: 29 March 2022,
Time: 19:00 - 20:30
Event Title: Psychology in your living room: “Intensely white”: Psychology curricula and the (re)production of racism’
Brief description of event:
Psychology in the UK has witnessed an upsurge in discussions around institutional racism as a response to global anti-racist activism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in summer 2020. Within academic institutions, students have been challenging institutional racism for years, highlighting how the whiteness of curricula serves to uphold systems of racial injustice, and further reflection is crucial if universities and accrediting bodies endorsing educational and professional courses seek meaningful systemic change.
Drawing on analysis of focus groups with students of colour studying psychology courses at a UK university, this talk will seek to explain, first, how psychology curricula are marked by knowledges that (re)produce racism; second, how students are calling for change; and finally, confusion over where responsibility for change lies.
This analysis has important implications for the perpetuation of institutional racism within psychology, academia in general, and subsequent professional psychological practice.
Biography:
Dr Sarah Gillborn is a critical psychologist in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham.
Using qualitative methodologies and drawing on feminist and anti-racist theory, Sarah’s research focuses on analyses of discourse and voice in order to understand how social issues are officially constructed and re/negotiated by those implicated by them. In addition, Sarah’s work takes a critical look at the role of psychology as a discipline in reproducing and challenging racism through research, knowledge, and practice.
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