Refugee experiences in Cincinnati, Ohio: A local case study in the context of global crisis

Abstract

We examined refugees’ perceptions of their experiences living in greater Cincinnati, Ohio, USA and linked these findings to colonial context, coloniality theory, and decolonial psychology. We describe the process of developing a community based participatory research process with members of local refugee communities, and then discuss the findings of a survey completed by 280 local refugees that was collaboratively designed and administered. Noting historic and continuing disenfranchisement of the Black community in Cincinnati, in our survey analyses we compared the experiences of African refugees (Burundian, Congolese, and Somali) to the experiences of Bhutanese, Latinx, and Middle Eastern refugees residing in greater Cincinnati on several aspects of civic life. Analyses indicate that refugees from African countries reported more negative outcomes than other refugees residing in this area. Further, refugees residing in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of Black residents reported less satisfaction, likely due to neighborhood disinvestment. We discuss the costs and benefits of these findings and interpretation in the context of decolonial theory. Specifically, we connect racist colonial history to differences in treatment of refugees based on their physical appearance (i.e., Blackness) to the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans.

Internalization of inferiority and colonial system justification: The case of Puerto Rico

“…To be clear, our goal is to link critical theory and empirical research as a way of bridging methodological, disciplinary, and other divides between decolonial scholarship, on one hand, and traditional social science, on the other (see also Jost & Jost, 2007). By acknowledging and appreciating the richness and pluralism of various forms of knowledge production (e.g., see Dutt et al., 2021; Osei‐Tutu et al, 2021; Lukate, 2021 in Readsura Decolonial Editorial Collective, 2021b), we believe that all of the theoretical and methodological tools of social psychology may be brought to bear on important and timely questions of coloniality and decoloniality.…”

Psychology as a site for decolonial analysis

“…Many of the articles consider the psychology of colonial violence among communities that were the targets of European imperialism. These include contributions from psychologists who work with Indigenous Peoples in North American settings to document and confront the explicit forms of colonial violence associated with the historical trauma of the residential school experience (Burrage et al., 2022) or the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (Ficklin et al., 2022), quantitative analysis of survey research to document implications of colonial mentality in Puerto Rican settings (Rivera‐Pichardo et al., 2022), ethnographic analyses of Black hair salons in the UK as spaces of decolonial resistance (Lukate, 2022), and participatory action research to document differently racialized experiences of recently arrived refugees in the United States city of Cincinnati (Dutt et al., 2022). Other articles consider the colonial violence of modern individualist ways of being that might otherwise appear unproblematic.…”

Decoloniality as a social issue for psychological study

“…In contrast to the disciplinary decadence or “fetishization of method” (Gordon, 2014, p.81) that often characterizes mainstream psychology (see, e.g., Wilson, 2005), the contributions are methodologically pluralist. They include quasi‐experimental comparison and quantitative analyses of survey data (Dutt et al., 2022; Osei‐Tutu et al., 2022; Rivera Pichardo et al., 2022), as well as thematic analyses of video transcripts (Burrage et al., 2022), Foucauldian discourse analysis (Albhaisi, 2022), ethnographic‐styled participant observation (Lukate, 2022; Normann, 2022), and other techniques of qualitative research (e.g., Ficklin et al., 2022). As Atallah and Dutta (2021) note in their contribution to the second installment of the special issue, “Far too often, disciplinary criteria and standards of academic excellence work to silence critical questionings by colonized people” (p. 3).…”

“…In the other article in this section, Dutt and colleagues (2022) report the results of a participatory action research project with refugees living in and around Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. The decolonial orientation of their work is evident in both the process and product of the research.…”