Critical Reflexivity and Intersectionality in Human Rights: Toward Relational and Process-Based Conceptualizations and Practices in Psychology

Abstract

Within traditional social, community, and clinical psychologies, the human rights framework has typically been interpreted and adopted from a person- or patient-based perspective. While useful and well meaning, ideological values concerning empowerment, agency, and resiliency have often framed human rights interventions or programs within psychology. We propose in this manuscript a theoretical shift for psychology to decentralize the role of the individual human being while at the same time avoiding forms of social behaviorism that tend to portray the person as passive or as reacting to external stimuli. Following this first shift from the individual to the collective, we suggest adopting anti-essentialist discourses about the parties, agents, and issues involved in human rights. To this goal, the philosophical framework of process or relational ontology may be especially useful. Based on critical theory, critical feminism, social constructionist, and post-human views of knowledge and reality, process ontology considers reality as complex, fluid, discursive, and dialogical. The separations between the personal and the political are questioned to underscore the entanglement and inseparability of dimensions of possibility and actions, which are continuous reconstructions. To conclude, we reflect on the ways in which these two movements toward anti-individualism and relational ontology might inform specific practices and reflections within human rights frameworks in psychology.