Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 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.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Apfelbaum, E. R. (2000). And now what, after such tribulations? memory and dislocation in the era of uprooting. American Psychologist, 55(9), 1008–1013. 10.1037/0003-066X.55.9.1008 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Bhatia, S. , & Priya, K. R. (2021). Coloniality and psychology: From silencing to re‐centering marginalized voices in postcolonial times. Review of General Psychology, 25(4), 422–436. 10.1177/10892680211046507 - DOI
    1. Buckingham, S. L. , Emery, L. , Godsay, S. , Brodsky, A. E. , & Scheibler, J. E. (2018). You opened my mind’: Latinx immigrant and receiving community interactional dynamics in the United States. Journal of Community Psychology, 46(2), 171–186. 10.1002/jcop.21931 - DOI
    1. Bulhan, H. A. (1985). Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression. Plenum Press.
    1. Deaux, K. , & Ethier, K. A. (1998). Negotiating social identity. In Swim J. K., & Stangor C. Eds., Prejudice (pp. 301–323). Elsevier. 10.1016/B978-012679130-3/50049-1 - DOI

LinkOut - more resources