Special issue introduction – working towards allyship: acknowledging and redressing power imbalances in psychology

ABSTRACT

In this special issue, we create space to discuss and extend on conceptualisation, theorisation, and practice of allyship in qualitative psychology research. Allyship can be defined broadly as a way of redressing power imbalances between privileged and marginalised groups and individuals and is thus strongly aligned with qualitative methods founded on social justice. The discipline of psychology, in contrast, has traditionally contributed to oppression of people considered not White, not heterosexual, not male, disabled, poor, not sane, and/or Indigenous. The contributions in this special issue consider the role of psychology in redressing this oppression. In this introduction to the special issue, we explore some of the common threads across these contributions, namely the ways in which power and control, relationships, and intersectionality and diversity relate to research involving allyship. Overall, the work presented in this special issue furthers knowledge and innovation in allyship and the particular place of allyship in qualitative research within psychology and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Allyship
• co-production
• power
• lived experience leadership
• consumer leadership

The history of psychology is entwined with systems of oppression that have marginalised various groups of people including colonised Indigenous peoples and those who are not White, not heterosexual, not male, disabled, and/or poor (Cullen et al. 2020). Psychology has a troublesome history of relying on research that involves doing things ‘to’ the very people it purports to support rather recognising autonomous research from within marginalised groups or championing research alongside the unprivileged by judiciously applying the notion of ‘allyship’ – the focus of this special issue.

Mental health care is a case in point, and practitioners such as clinical psychologists are often seen as and refer to themselves as the ‘expert in mental health’ (The Australian Clinical Psychology Association 2021), but psychology does not seem to have questioned its foundation in sanism as the systematic forms of prejudice towards people with non-normative mental health experiences (Poole et al. 2012). Nor does there seem to be moves to begin to collaborate with mental health service users in policy, practice, education and research as in some other disciplines (such as mental health nursing; Happell et al. 2018, 2020; Scholz et al. 2018, 2019). For the most part, the discipline of psychology continues the unfortunate tradition of ignoring the value of experiential knowledge (Scholz, Bocking, and Happell 2018). Even research that aims to privilege experiential knowledge – such as participatory action research – is criticised for being based on agendas set and decisions made without acknowledgement of power imbalances (Ozkul 2020).

Working definitions of allyship have provided a start point for considering how to redress the power imbalances evident within psychological research and beyond by exploring how privileged group members can actively engage in processes of disrupting power imbalances in order to enable real partnerships with people from traditionally unprivileged positions and knowledge bases (Happell and Scholz 2018). However, there are still a lot of questions to be asked about our role in working towards such allyship as researchers in psychology or allied fields. The articles in this special issue demonstrate significant developments in scholarship on allyship. The collective range of ways in which allyship is conceptualised and enacted, and the inclusive approaches to research and authorship, are testament to how qualitative research in psychology can be a site where allyship can be fostered. Each article can of course be read on its own, but we note that collectively the articles address interrelated themes relevant to anyone interested in allyship: power and control; relationships; and intersectional marginalisation.

Power and control

Given the centrality of redressing power imbalances as a principle of allyship, it is no surprise that the articles included in this special issue engage with and contribute to a range of conceptualisations of power and control. Power imbalances were a common feature of the context in which each article was developed, including the context of professional isolation facing the lived-experience workforce in forensic mental health (Lambert, Egan, and Thomas 2021), or the context of structures that psychology has reproduced through scholarship contributing to the oppression of fat people (Manokaran et al. 2020). The articles in this special issue touch on a range of ways in which attempts to address such power imbalances might be improved.

First, most of the articles engage with practices and principles of co-production – with four of them drawing directly on models of co-production that resonate with Roper, Grey, and Cadogan's (2018) core principle that power differentials be acknowledged, explored and addressed in co-production (Gordon et al. 2020; Lambert, Egan, and Thomas 2021; Lambley 2020; Moss et al. 2020). In terms of a co-production approach to allyship, power imbalances might be redressed such as in the manner articulated in the article by Lambley (2020), which encompasses how research can prioritise the interest of partners with lived experience, supporting those with lived experience to take the lead on projects, establishing project groups where those with lived experience are equal to others, and having ongoing reviews of how the partnership is going while ‘noticing, voicing, tabling, and addressing power differentials’ (p. 593).

The second way in which the articles in the special issue explore how to address power imbalances is through considering identities. This includes critiques of binary logic whereby ‘researchers’ traditionally move into ‘community’ to gather data. To resolve or rethink this power imbalance, Dierckx et al. (2020) conceptualise a ‘third sphere’ (beyond the academic sphere and the community sphere) shared by all actors in research, separate from academic, policy, and community silos, and controlled by none. Similarly, Li, Hung, and Hodgetts (2020) interrogate identity and reflect on what it is like to be seen as an outsider (recently arriving in a rural town, and holding social status as an academic) and not yet an insider (despite sharing a cultural background with the ‘in-group’). The way that power imbalances can be reproduced or challenged by identities of researchers and a sense of place (including universities as places of research) is an important consideration for those wanting to work towards allyship in their research.

The final aspect of addressing power imbalances relates to the way that allyship was enacted through redressing epistemological violence wherein mainstream approaches to research in psychology have perpetuated the inferiority of the ‘researched’ by privileging psychological theory built on appropriation or misuse of the knowledge shared by participants. Each of the articles included in the special issue included at least one author working from a lived experience perspective. The study by Maynard et al. (2020) perhaps pushes particular boundaries about co-authorship in reporting a project including two children involved in the conceptualisation and co-authorship. The authors discuss the ethical considerations for this application of co-authorship and expand on ways in which the safeguards were in place for the child to opt out and minimise the risk of coercion, while still respecting their experiential expertise and right to be part of the knowledge synthesis and production processes.

Relationships

The next way in which the articles included in this special issue contribute to the conceptualisation of allyship is through emphasising the importance of the relationships between partners of the allyship. Indeed, meaningful and sustainable relationships were considered the foundation on which allyship developed (Dierckx et al. 2020). Authors reflected on the importance of spending time building these relationships (Seymour-Smith et al. 2020). Two of the articles explicitly referred to the fluidity of identities and lived experience in relation to the research and the way that this impacted their relationships. One of these was the article by Li, Hung, and Hodgetts (2020) in which it was only after time and efforts that the lead author’s trustworthiness and good intentions were visible to the local Chinese community group in an Australian town, and their identity became a Zijiren (自己人; lit. ‘one of us’) as a means towards allyship. In another article, a group of service user academics who were not of the specific target demographics reflected on whether they were themselves allies in the context of a specific project (Gordon et al. 2020). These studies expand on the conceptualisation of allyship as a fluid rather than fixed identity.

In Moss et al.’s (2020) study about allies’ motivations for engaging in allyship, one of the themes developed was specifically about shared values, including particularly those related to social justice, were a motivation to work towards better allyship. This finding is consistent with values shared by all of the articles in the special issue – whereby people from outside communities (or in liminal spaces in relation to community) sought to work with people with lived experience to ensure epistemic justice in research outputs.

Intersectional marginalisation and diversity

Many of the articles in the special issue feature intersectional marginalisations where more than one aspect of oppression intersect to create unique or layered experiences. For instance, Lambert, Egan, and Thomas (2021) explore the role of allies in taking a lead to challenge embedded discriminatory systems that reproduce intersectional marginalisation in forensic mental health contexts. Seymour-Smith et al. (2020) discuss the importance in recognising diversity in marginalised communities when co-producing an app for prostate cancer both for and with the Black British African-Caribbean community, and the people engaged in the work noted that diverse views existed across marginalised cultural, linguistic, and gender identities. Even within research groups that had been constructed to ensure equality in numbers of members who are service users and non-service user allies, there was acknowledgement that other types of diversity may be an issue – in one case leading to the service users who were engaged acknowledging that their experiences would likely be different to people experiencing multiple disadvantages (Gordon et al. 2020).

Conclusion – working towards allyship

The corpus of work included in this special issue furthers scholarship on the role of qualitative psychology research and researchers in allying with traditionally unprivileged communities and individuals. The diversity of ways in which these studies operationalise, enact, and demonstrate acts of allyship has important implications and considerations for those wanting to think more critically about how they themselves might work towards allyship, or better allyship.

One of the important contributions of the special issue is in advancing understandings about the synergies between qualitative research in psychology, and redressing power imbalances between those who have traditionally acted as ‘researchers’ and those who have been the ‘researched’. The included studies explore in depth the way that power relations between and within groups are reproduced or challenged by certain practices in qualitative research. While there has been rhetoric about qualitative research being itself a form of co-production merely through engagement on the part of the researchers (including claims that individuals with lived experience relevant to the research have been co-researchers (Forbat and Hubbard 2016) or involved in co-construction (Mah et al. 2020) while seemingly excluding them from authorship of research outputs), the special issue corpus demonstrates that addressing power imbalances is a necessary element of allyship, building on existing scholarship about this core principle of meaningful co-production (as a core principle of co-production; Roper, Grey, and Cadogan 2018). Nonetheless, qualitative research may offer valuable ways to collaboratively engage in epistemic and analytic processes together with people who were traditionally excluded from the epistemic justice of owning and being valued for their experiential expertise.

Finally, based on the messages of articles in this special issue, we would like to make three suggestions for researchers who wish to work towards allyship with those who have traditionally been ‘researched’:

1. Work to move beyond ‘involvement’ to co-production. The articles included in this special issue demonstrate how research can and must be collaborative across all stages from conceptualisation to dissemination if allyship and co-production are to be achieved.

2. Be more transparent about reporting collaborations. The included articles include rich reflections about who was involved in what research practices and thus inform good practice. While there are checklists for reporting ‘involvement’ in research of patients and members of the public (e.g., Staniszewska et al. 2017), these do not replace rich details about how research was (or was not) conceptualised, conducted, reported, or disseminated through collaborative processes. If we are to work towards better allyship, then more transparency and rich detailed accounts are necessary.

3. Develop the capacity to enact allyship. Allyship is not a passive undertaking. Arguably, the first step involves awareness of the self in relation to those who are marginalised and made other. It can be useful to identify a more experienced ally who can act as a mentor in support of developing approaches and expertise in support of allyship. Allyship is then about identifying the individuals, groups and/or organisations that you want to ally with and next establishing a process of initial engagement that involves the empowerment and privileging of those voices in order to discover what their goals are as well as the needs and wants they have in order to pursue those goals. Being a proactive ally also involves a commitment to supporting those needs and wants in a manner that is cognisant and proactively attends to the themes as identified and informed by the current scholarship on allyship: power and control, relationships, and intersectional marginalisation and diversity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brett Scholz

Brett Scholz is a Senior Research Fellow based in the Medical School at the Australian National University on Ngunnawal Country in Canberra, Australia. Brett’s research is largely concerned with consumer leadership of health policy, practice, research, and education, and in acts of allyship that other health professionals can engage in to make space for greater consumer leadership. Most of these publications are co-authored by and coproduced with collaborators with a lived experience of the health service, condition, or experience in question.

Sarah E. Gordon

Sarah E. Gordon, is a Senior Research Fellow, Clinical Lecturer— Service User Academic at the Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago Wellington where she leads a team that undertakes service user-led and co-produced teaching and research aimed at ending discrimination, promoting recovery, social inclusion, and respect for the human rights of people who experience mental distress.

Gareth J. Treharne

Gareth J. Treharne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago in Aotearoa/New Zealand. He applies a range of critical methods to explore diverse issues in relation to health, disability, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. He is a co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Ethics in Critical Research (2018) and a contributor to The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics (2018) and Qualitative Research in Clinical and Health Psychology (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). He is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a member of the committee of the Qualitative Methods in Psychology section. He is also a longstanding member of the International Society of Critical Health Psychology and was Chair of the Society for 2017-2021.