Peace as Liberation by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031419652
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

The elimination of this history in our curricula is part of what upholds the perpetuation of deficit narratives in our field. Interrogating the dominant epistemologies upheld through the curriculum in social work and psychology programs is essential to disrupt these deficit narratives that perpetuate oppression. The way we view the world is connected to the type of knowledge available to us. Knowledge production is related to the conditions we live in, and the stance we take when discussing epistemologies can lead to hegemony or liberation. (Ladson-Billings, 2000).

The fields of social work and psychology chose hegemony when they upheld Eurocentric theories, assessments, and interventions. They chose Rene Descartes’s “I think. Therefore, I am” and not Ubuntu’s “I am because we are.” Eurocentrism in the classroom teaches students to separate thoughts from feelings and to think of themselves as objective, neutral, and as the credentialed expert. They are trained to replicate systems of oppression that hold one person as the knower, expert, and superior in the working relationship. These are the remnants of colonial epistemologies that dominated the study of human behavior by positioning themselves as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. They accomplished this by positioning this knowledge system as the most rigorous, specialized, scientific, and scholarly, rendering other knowledge systems less valuable to the field.

Ignacio Martin-Baro (1996) describes the hegemony of Eurocentric epistemologies in human behavior as scientistic mimicry. He thought that North American psychology, in search of validation within the scientific community, in the 1900s, compromised its goals in exchange for recognition. North American psychology picked up the instruments and assessments from natural science to be in proximity to power structures and ultimately upheld the status quo. In all fairness, he does call out Latin American countries for doing the same, as they used American theories and concepts without an in-depth interrogation of the embedded assumptions it held, such as individualism, hedonism, historicism, and the homeostatic vision. (pp. 20–23).

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