Qualitative Psychology, Vol 12(1), Feb 2025, 34-51; doi:10.1037/qup0000296
Psychology has been critiqued for misrepresenting human experience, development, and behavior by routinely reducing complex sociopolitical phenomena to individual psychological processes. This pattern of psychological reductionism has plagued the discipline with a knowledge base riddled with blind spots and of questionable relevance to the lives and interests of marginalized individuals, communities, and peoples. Scholars have increasingly characterized this antipathy toward the structural as a pernicious form of epistemological violence, and as a remedy, they have frequently called for the discipline to adopt approaches to research that can capture the role of structures shaping individual and collective understandings and agency. In many social sciences and interdisciplinary fields, ethnography plays a prominent role in rendering richly contextualized representations of human experience, development, and behavior negotiated through structures that facilitate and constrain possibilities. However, ethnography has also been critiqued as a tool used by researchers to exoticize and objectify marginalized peoples. These critiques led us to explore ways ethnography can be used in service of those that have been historically exploited by research. To demonstrate this approach, we detail two ethnographies that aim to elucidate structural barriers to community efforts toward health, wellness, and justice. First, Hartmann describes funding and discursive structures operating in an American Indian community behavioral health clinic, and second, Eccleston describes church polity, history, and theology as structures shaping a racial justice movement in the Episcopal church. Together, these examples illustrate the promise of ethnography for a more complete and socially just approach to knowledge production in psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)