How colonial is our work? Building feminists and liberating paths through research activism and alliances

Decades of training in colonialist, racist, and positivist paradigms have ingrained in us a hierarchical perspective on knowledge production, where Anglo-Eurocentric viewpoints claim primacy by leveraging the notions of research objectivity and neutrality to legitimize its inherent ideological agenda. In our study, employing a feminist, critical and decolonial framework, we aim to deconstruct this prevailing perspective within the domain of psychological research, in order to re-build trust and solidarity-based relationships among researcher hailing from the global North and South. As a case study, through a series of conversations within Italian, North American and Palestinian clinicians and researchers, we discuss how psychological research explores and describes gender-based violence in Palestine, and the colonial and racists assumptions that these narratives and researchers reproduces. We engage in a deep reflection on these assumptions, exploring transformative process for fostering collaborative work among Southern and Northern researchers, grounded in trust rather than in reinforced hegemony. We posit that this process of consciousness-raising, enacted and facilitated through cross-border dialogues among researchers, epitomizes a daily form of activism that should be seamlessly integrated into every facet of the research process. Research activism can act as a way to evade power within processes of knowledge creation and to rebuild trust and liberating relationships within researchers from the global South and the global North.