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. 2025 Jun;75(3-4):489-494.
doi: 10.1002/ajcp.12817. Epub 2025 May 5.

Engaging decolonial approaches to deracialize and humanize migrants

Christopher C Sonn  1
Affiliations

Engaging decolonial approaches to deracialize and humanize migrants

Christopher C Sonn. Am J Community Psychol. 2025 Jun.

Abstract

We are continuing to live in unsettling times that demand responses from researchers, scholars and activists to create and mobilise knowledge for liberation, wellbeing, and justice. This commentary draws from my lived experience and research in migration that I use to highlight the rootshock of displacement and the contributions of community psychology to understand these impacts. The commentary invites engagement with the decolonial turn, the need to examine longer histories of colonization and imperialism and how these continue to shape understandings of self and others, and intergroup relations. The commentary also emphasizes decoloniality as a movement of embrace that involves expanding our ecologies of knowledge and practice to support critical solidarities for liberation, wellbeing, and justice.

Keywords: decolonial; dispossession; migration; relationality; solidarity.

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