Finding the Missing Puzzle Pieces

For those not familiar with me, by undergraduate and graduate education has all been in the field of psychology. While my undergraduate degree was in Psychology (general), my Masters and PhD were both in Applied Social Psychology, not in Clinical Psychology as everyone assumes.

As an academic field, psychology is not, in general, critical. In fact, most of psychological research conducted using Western paradigms has worked to help maintain the status quo of society – capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and Western imperialism. There is certainly a strong, but small, contingent of the field which is critical and works hard to maintain that critical mantle and hold psychology accountable for its harmful history, while doing psychology differently moving forward.

It should be no surprise, then, that I was not exposed to much critical theory in my education, especially around race. My undergraduate program had feminist professors from whom I was able to learn about the psychology of women and feminist psychology. This is an education I am grateful for, certainly, as it provided the foundation for my work going forward.

My exposure to critical academia such as critical race theory, queer theory, decolonial theories, etc., came from friends, in graduate school, who were in other programs such as sociology, communication studies, and education. Within psychology, my courses in Community Psychology expanded my thinking.

All this to say that most of my education around critical work has been self-driven. When I could find time during graduate school, my post-doctoral work, or employment, I would try to learn more. But….that’s not a lot of time. This has meant that most of THAT learning has been from social media, online lectures, conversations with friends, academic journal publications.

But I was never able to find the time, or mental energy, to actually sit down and read all those books written by all those theorists whose work I kept being exposed to and hearing about from the above mentioned sources. Theorists such as bell hooks, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, James Baldwin, etc.

So, now, I’m catching up. I’m trying to fill in those missing puzzle pieces. And as I’m reading I realize that I already understood so much of what these brilliant scholars and activists have offered the world, but missing pieces are falling into place. Their thinking, their reasoning, the connections, etc.

And as I read my ADHD brain begins to light up all over the place, making connections between not only what I’m reading, but what I’m reading what I’m seeing in the world, and what I’m reading and what I want to incorporate into my work, in a meaningful way.

This blog will be where I untangle and make sense of it all, the ideas, the questions, the sparks of understanding, and explore how they might take root in my life and work and as I keep learning what it really means to do this work with intention..