Turning the lens in the study of precarity: On experimental social psychology's acquiescence to the settler‐colonial status quo in historic Palestine

Abstract

This review examines the coloniality infused within the conduct and third reporting of experimental research in what is commonly referred to as the ‘Israeli‐Palestinian conflict’. Informed by a settler colonial framework and decolonial theory, our review measured the appearance of sociopolitical terms and critically analysed the reconciliation measures. We found that papers were three times more likely to describe the context through the framework of intractable conflict compared to occupation. Power asymmetry was often acknowledged and then flattened via, for instance, adjacent mentions of Israeli and Palestinian physical violence. Two‐thirds of the dependent variables were not related to material claims (e.g. land, settlements, or Palestinian refugees) but rather to the feelings and attitudes of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. Of the dependent measures that did consider material issues, they nearly universally privileged conditions of the two‐state solution and compromises on refugees' right of return that would violate international law. The majority of the studies sampled Jewish–Israeli participants exclusively, and the majority of authors were affiliated with Israeli institutions. We argue that for social psychology to offer insights that coincide with the decolonization of historic Palestine, the discipline will have to begin by contextualizing its research within the material conditions and history that socially stratify the groups.

In a double‐bind: Time–space distanciation, socioeconomic status, and coping with financial stress in the United States

“…Lower SES individuals in societies such as the United States seem capable of utilizing TSD resources to cope with financial threats, even at the potential cost of worse mental health. However, our findings may not generalize outside of the US or other “WEIRD” populations (Henrich et al, 2010), such as contexts of comparatively low access to TSD affordances and forms of precarity in the Global South and elsewhere that centre around hierarchical geopolitical relations such as coloniality or the use of borders to control migration (Mahendran, et al, 2022; Hakim, et al, 2022).…”

On the precariousness of address: What narratives of being called White can tell us about researching and re/producing social categories in research

“…Rather, I see the women's narratives as an intervention and an invitation to reflect on how social psychological naming practices and our place of enunciation shape and limit how researchers see/know/ name their research and the people participating in their research. As such, I see this article as being in dialogue with other articles in this Special Issue including Hakim et al (2022), who draw our attention to the settler-colonial gaze that shapes and frames experimental social psychological studies conducted from a supposed position of distance and neutrality, or a zero-point epistemology (Castro-Gómez, 2021;Decolonial Psychology Editorial Collective, 2021;Mignolo, 2009). By centring history, place (also, of enunciation) and context, Hakim and colleagues show how these studies contribute to the coloniality of knowledge, that is, knowledge which privileges Western, hegemonic knowledge over other forms of knowledge.…”

“…So how can we make space in social psychological theories on social categorization for different, local understandings of Whiteness (Frankenberg, 1997), which shape the organization of meanings, the positioning of bodies within matrices of power and domination, and social relations in a particular context at a given point in time? Disentangling what Whiteness signifies for different people and in different contexts, I offer in dialogue with Paris (2019), Hakim et al (2022), Rua et al ( 2022), and Reddy and Amer (2022), shows how naming and framing in academic research is often closely linked to the coloniality of knowledge, that is, the re/production of knowledge which privileges Western, hegemonic knowledge over other forms of knowledge.…”

“…For Wynter (1994), new modes of knowing and epistemological orders become possible when a person's inner eyes, moulded by the particular social categories in a society and rooted in culture‐specific knowledges and epistemes are disrupted, challenged and faced with the social realities on the ground. Wynter thus calls for us, scholars/researchers/writers, to pay attention to our own inner eyes and for an epistemic praxis which allows for what Mignolo and Walsh (2018) describe as “thought otherwise ” (p. 18), which challenges, transcends and, ultimately, unravels the enduring patterns of power and dominance which structure identities, social relations, culture, nation and knowledge production to this very day (Decolonial Psychology Editorial Collective, 2021; Hakim et al, 2022; Reddy & Amer, 2022).…”

Towards a social psychology of precarity

“…Expanding on this, Lukate (2022) unpacks the analytic and ethical complexities of working against hegemonic practices of categorization in research and reflects on the ways in which researchers can be complicit in the re/production of social categories that 'name, see, and know' research participants through the colonial logic of Western epistemes. Both of these papers connect with Hakim et al (2022) in highlighting how researchers can be complicit in coloniality and discriminations, purely through the ways in which we represent social phenomena, and the language and terminologies that we use.…”