FEATURED
‘Culturally resonant counseling’ background also sought
The University of Rhode Island wants to hire a psychologist who will offer counseling and provide training “informed by multicultural, systemic, decolonial, and/or other orientations.”
The Kingston public university wants someone with a background in “culturally resonant counseling,” according to a job posting, which expired on May 6.
Jennifer Mullan popularized the idea of decolonizing therapy. She says the therapy involves “bravely and earnestly confront[ing] the multi-generational impact of colonization on all of us.”
Mullan says counselors should help patients “recenter a collective healing process for all indigenous peoples.”
She did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The College Fix in the past several weeks. The university also did not respond to multiple emails and a phone call in the past several weeks seeking more information on the position and for updates on the hiring process.
However, a former counseling graduate student criticized the approach in comments to The Fix.
“What they’re talking about with decolonization is that they don’t want to use any of the things that can be identifiable to what they call whiteness,” Suzannah Alexander told The Fix in a phone interview. She is a former counseling student and now the external affairs coordinator for the National Association of Scholars.
Mullan’s website describes decolonial therapy as calling for “an end to individualistic and pathologizing Eurocentric methods of wellness–one that includes those who have been purposely excluded and historically forgotten.”
Alexander said that Mullan’s book, “Decolonizing Therapy,” made claims that therapy is “an extension of white-bodied supremacy” and “inherently white supremacist.” She called this mindset “wildly racist” and told The Fix she believed it was actually a danger to mental health.
“It sets people up in a dynamic where they’re making comparisons, and they’re making comparisons on historical grounds, so it totally drains people of their agency,” Alexander said.
“And what makes any kind of psychotherapy work is the belief that you can change and that you might not be able to change all of your circumstances, but that you have some power to change how things are going in your life,” she said. “And whenever you set up circumstances where you create a mental framework where people cannot help themselves, it’s very damaging for people’s mental health.”
The counseling community has been promoting more focus and practice of decolonial therapy, though Alexander said that, in her experience, it had been pushed less explicitly since Trump’s election in 2024.
In October of 2023, the then-president of the American Counseling Association wrote in an announcement:“Decolonization primarily pertains to the historical process of former colonized nations gaining political independence from colonial powers. . . It questions the prevailing Eurocentric frameworks that have perpetuated hierarchies and marginalization.”
Alexander criticized this perspective, telling The Fix, “What they’re saying is that they don’t want to do any of the things that really can be tied to what we think of is Western civilization.”
“This is not therapy anymore, because therapy is something that’s based on scientific inquiry and testing that was done largely through the field of psychology,” she said. “If we’re decolonizing therapy, I’m not sure what we’re doing anymore, because it’s a process that was created out of a branch of science.”
The approach “undermines the very framework with which people interact with the world around them,” Alexander said.
“It’s a way to upend their worldview and make them try and think in a completely different way,” she said.
The university currently runs a “Multicultural Therapy Clinic,” which caters to people who have experienced “systemic oppression and social marginalization.”
