Decolonizing psychology through struggles for land

The conception of Indigenous land as terra nullius-territory without a master-was fundamental in globalizing the colonial project. Contemporary mechanisms of coloniality are no different. All over the world, people are expelled from their lands for purposes of mineral extraction, dumping, industrial development, control over territory, and suppressing resistance. In this, the histories, knowledges, and affective relations that people have with land are decimated by the insatiable demands of colonial capital. In present-day South Africa, the spatial legacies of colonialism and apartheid remain largely intact. Relatively little land redistribution has taken place in the country, and land continues to be treated as a commodity. In turn, decolonizing struggles in South Africa tend to take place most fiercely over the question of land. As with most politically urgent and emancipatory matters, in South Africa, the discipline of psychology has remained largely silent on land. There are, however, decolonizing Indigenous psychological practices that have taken land struggles seriously. In this article, we reflect critically on the psychological work-in the form of two participatory documentary films-that we have undertaken in collaboration with the Thembelihle and Nana's Farm communities in Johannesburg, where struggles for housing, land rights, water, sanitation, waste management, and in situ development persist. We argue that psychology can be useful for availing resources required to articulate and communicate struggles for land and for supporting activists in creating spaces of reflection and epistemic freedom. Nonetheless, there remain several challenges facing psychological work located in the planetary turn. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).