Just Because We Don't See It,Doesn't Mean It's Not There: Everyday Resistance in Psychology

This article outlines some contentions within conventional Western psychology and across the social sciences to define what counts as legitimate forms of “resistance” amongst members of historically marginalized groups (e.g. people of Color, working class/poor groups) in efforts to push back against injustice and foment social change. Without an expansion of what is understood as resistance, the discipline risks imposing narrow models and reifying deficit narratives about marginalized groups' capacity for resistance. In contexts where overt forms of resistance (e.g. marches), may lead to incarceration, deportation, death, or other egregious punishments, people located in “tight spaces” of oppression may engage in everyday off‐stage practices of resistance that are covert and not observable to those in positions of privilege or who exercise state power. This article encourages psychologists to take a political stance in solidarity with marginalized groups to acknowledge that not all forms of resistance are observable or measurable. This stance can allow psychologists to begin to dismantle deficit narratives of people mistakenly understood as being passive in the face of oppression and instead observe agency, aspirations for change, and resistance.     

A note on a very early academic quality ranking by James McKeen Cattell

Academic quality rankings are efforts to rank order colleges and universities or their individual departments in order of their presumed quality, based upon one or more criteria. The earliest such ranking is generally believed to have been published by Raymond M. Hughes in 1925. In actuality, however, the eminent psychologist James McKeen Cattell published one as early as 1910. He did so because he wanted to show the institutions where leading American scientists currently worked and to demonstrate that his home institution, Columbia University, had recently declined in scientific strength.