Sunil Bhatia – författare

In recent years, the news media has directed a significant amount of attention to the effect of globalization on the second most populous nation in the world: India. With the emergence of new economic opportunities and the influx of foreign popular culture and commodities, India has experienced an enormous sea of change in the last few decades. In Decolonizing Psychology: Globalization, Social Justice, and Indian Youth Identities, author Sunil Bhatia focuses on the psychological tensions that these changes have brought upon Indian youth today.Drawing on dozens of interviews, Bhatia offers readers a compelling glimpse and analysis of how these youth populations are engaging with the emerging presence of globalization in their day-to-day lives. As Bhatia explains, young Indians use the term 'world class selves' as a way to identify and describe the ways in which globalization has strengthened their standing in the world. By frequenting urban cafes and bars, watching American television and cinema, traveling abroad, and regularly consuming foreign commodities, Indian youth absorb the westernized culture and view themselves as peers to their western counterparts. At the same time, however, these young Indians proudly hold onto their homeland's traditions governing family and religious values.With remarkable clarity and nuance, Bhatia sheds an important light on the universalizing power and the colonizing dimensions of Euro-American psychology. By integrating insights from postcolonial, narrative, and cultural psychologies to explore how Euro-American scientific psychology became the standard approach, Bhatia reminds readers of whose stories are not being told, what knowledge is not being considered, and whose lives are not included in the central understanding of psychology today.

The Indian American community is one of the fastest growing immigrant communities in the U.S. Unlike previous generations, they are marked by a high degree of training as medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and university professors.American Karma draws on participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how these highly skilled professionals have been inserted into the racial dynamics of American society and transformed into "people of color." Focusing on first-generation, middle-class Indians in American suburbia, it also sheds light on how these transnational immigrants themselves come to understand and negotiate their identities.Bhatia forcefully contends that to fully understand migrant identity and cultural formation it is essential that psychologists and others think of selfhood as firmly intertwined with sociocultural factors such as colonialism, gender, language, immigration, and race-based immigration laws.American Karma offers a new framework for thinking about the construction of selfhood and identity in the context of immigration. This innovative approach advances the field of psychology by incorporating critical issues related to the concept of culture, including race, power, and conflict, and will also provide key insights to those in anthropology, sociology, human development, and migrant studies.

The Indian American community is one of the fastest growing immigrant communities in the U.S. Unlike previous generations, they are marked by a high degree of training as medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and university professors.American Karma draws on participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how these highly skilled professionals have been inserted into the racial dynamics of American society and transformed into "people of color." Focusing on first-generation, middle-class Indians in American suburbia, it also sheds light on how these transnational immigrants themselves come to understand and negotiate their identities.Bhatia forcefully contends that to fully understand migrant identity and cultural formation it is essential that psychologists and others think of selfhood as firmly intertwined with sociocultural factors such as colonialism, gender, language, immigration, and race-based immigration laws.American Karma offers a new framework for thinking about the construction of selfhood and identity in the context of immigration. This innovative approach advances the field of psychology by incorporating critical issues related to the concept of culture, including race, power, and conflict, and will also provide key insights to those in anthropology, sociology, human development, and migrant studies.

This cutting-edge book re-imagines what a truly decolonial psychology could look like. It explores questions of what counts as psychological knowledge and whose knowledge is valid, and who controls the production of knowledge in psychology. This book builds on the expanding knowledge base in decolonial psychology to meaningfully address the varied social and psychological trajectories of decolonization and liberation.Featuring a wide range of international contributors, this book is grounded in an ethic of inclusion and includes contributions from researchers as well as contributions from those who engage in decolonial work outside of academia. It considers how the discipline of psychology could be transformed and how it can embrace a decolonial resistance with ideas about justice, freedom, and liberation. Drawing together a variety of expertise and ways of knowing that centers psychological research from the Global South, this book explores how we can decolonize the field and curriculum of psychology, imagining new future possibilities for the discipline.Accessibly and compellingly written, this will be essential reading for students and researchers interested in decolonizing psychology. It will be especially relevant for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students of cultural psychology, social psychology, and community psychology, as well as researchers, psychologists, and activists working with marginalized communities looking for ways to produce socially just knowledge.

This cutting-edge book re-imagines what a truly decolonial psychology could look like. It explores questions of what counts as psychological knowledge and whose knowledge is valid, and who controls the production of knowledge in psychology. This book builds on the expanding knowledge base in decolonial psychology to meaningfully address the varied social and psychological trajectories of decolonization and liberation.Featuring a wide range of international contributors, this book is grounded in an ethic of inclusion and includes contributions from researchers as well as contributions from those who engage in decolonial work outside of academia. It considers how the discipline of psychology could be transformed and how it can embrace a decolonial resistance with ideas about justice, freedom, and liberation. Drawing together a variety of expertise and ways of knowing that centers psychological research from the Global South, this book explores how we can decolonize the field and curriculum of psychology, imagining new future possibilities for the discipline.Accessibly and compellingly written, this will be essential reading for students and researchers interested in decolonizing psychology. It will be especially relevant for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students of cultural psychology, social psychology, and community psychology, as well as researchers, psychologists, and activists working with marginalized communities looking for ways to produce socially just knowledge.