Towards a Postcolonial Critical Realism

Abstract

This article proposes postcolonial critical realism (PCR) as an ontological framework that explains the structuring relationship between racialized, colonial discourses and the social world. Beginning with the case study of the global climate crisis, it considers how scholars and activists have made sense of the present crisis, and how their discourses reflect and reproduce the climate crisis at large. To theorize the relationship between racialized, power-laden discourses and material reality, it derives five tenets of PCR: first, colonial discourses underlie, and interact with, material structures; second, coloniality is global and made visible through differential events and experiences; third, subaltern lived experiences reveal the nature of reality at large; fourth, coloniality is power-laden, sticky, and often invisible; and finally, decolonization must target all three domains of the social world and their interactions. The article concludes by considering how this framework might enrich anticolonial thought in the social sciences, as well as social movements.

AQI revisioned: a critical realism approach to transforming air pollution

“…Real freedom is the ability to reconstruct new discourses for a different description of ourselves (Sayer, 1999). Discourse, in this respect, is not simply knowledge about an object; it is also knowledge that produces an object” (Tinsley, 2021. p. 4).…”

“…Decolonization involves the empowerment and restoration of the oppressed group and their knowledge and traditions. It is the practice of undoing the past and redoing the present epistemic constitution, the act of which enables critical discourse regarding the dominating knowledge and ways of being which preclude the future of knowing and becoming (Alonso, 2008; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Tinsley, 2021).…”

“…Colonial discourses produce material structures whose powers exist independently from conscious human experience. CR’s ontological framework enables us to recognize the imposition and causal powers of these discourses (Tinsley, 2021). Explicit power is identifiable and prone to defiance.…”

Situating international histories of psychological assessment in a changed scientific landscape

“…The fortunate advantage of critical realism is its methodological pluralism implying that the nature of the thing under investigation determines the applicability of the method (Danermark et al, 2019). The epistemological relativism, realism and critical orientation of critical realism provide a proper postmodern metatheoretical framework that can address our postcolonial concerns and global assessment aspirations (Tinsley, 2022).…”

Infection and Social Dislocation: Wellbeing Impacts of COVID-19 on Children and Young People - Perspectives of Rwandan Leaders

“…To do this, we draw on a series of 25 narrative interviews carried out with 25 local and national leaders possessing a grounded understanding of how the lives of CAs have been affected and how CA have exercised agency (or not) in the context of structural, political, and cultural changes wrought by the pandemic between March 2020 and January 2021. In doing so, we go beyond the existing research, which tells us what has happened, to develop a sociological understanding of how and why COVID-19 has had the impact it has (Archer, 2020b;Monaghan, 2020;Tinsley, 2022).…”