Psychosocial justice:Always morethan to consider

Abstract

Aim:Psychology can be implicated in the mitigation and exacerbation of injustice. Arguably, this results from conventional ways of knowing/being supported by long held distinctions between individual/community and psychology/sociality. The aim of this analysis is to offer a way to think about knowing, being, justice and relationships that transcend polemics to realise just practices in education. This orientation invites the pursuit of psychosocial justice.Rationale:Psychology plays a contradictory and complicated role in the pursuit of social justice. Practitioners in educational settings may claim they are challenging equity and fairness through their application of psychological frameworks and methods yet do so employing reductionist and ableist models implicated in reproducing inequality. Examples are reflected in commitments to measure and cultivate characteristics such as grit, growth mindset, lifelong learning and emotion regulation.Implications:Distinctions between research and applied psychologists are rendered redundant as historically separated actions and matters remerge. Resonant within and across all aspects of our work then is an ethic of relationality. There we recognise the consequence of theory in practice, the entangled nature of people and institutions and the continuing emergence of psychosocial life.Conclusions:Thinking about relationality in this way fundamentally challenges and changes how psychology impacts the use of certain concepts and methods, as well as the formation of assumptions and conclusions about education. If committed to just practice educational psychologists cannot be given to finding finalised outcomes because there is and always will be morethan to consider.