Bhatia, S. (2018). Decolonizing psychology: Globalization, Social Justice, and Indian Youth Identities. Oxford University Press.
Abstract
This book is essentially a narrative and cultural study of lives—I examine how youth and families imagine, re-fashion, create, and re-create their stories of self and other against the backdrop of cultural change. The cultural context of a new urban India provides a rich and compelling example of a ‘future-forming psychology” that also attempts to map out the possibility of what psychology can become. A future-forming psychology with a social justice orientation would then ask the following questions: What kind of a world could we create? How can principles of social justice shed light on identities that are messy, multilayered, marginalized, excluded, and highly class bound? The story of globalization and neoliberalization can be analyzed and mapped through statistics and numbers, but narratives of social class differences illuminate Indian urban youth’s daily experiences with practices of globalization. I analyze Indian youth’s definition of globalization; their fashioning and refashioning of their identity as “Indians”; and their stories of aspirations, ambition, failure, family expectations, and their larger struggles with social inequality in a new India. Narrative psychology provides a very powerful theoretical frame to answer questions about self and identity in contemporary urban India. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)