Reconceptualizing the Counseling Profession

The decolonization movement has become an everyday language in the counseling field. Due to political influences, some debates exist about the real meaning of decolonizing mental health. This textbook attempts to bring the Global South's knowledge about the theoretical bases of decolonization to the North without misappropriating this knowledge and simultaneously providing practical applications and interventions. That is, in this book, the authors will first give the theoretical bases for the decolonization movement, beginning by describing the colonization process as a process of different stages and presenting the work of Enriquez, Dussel, Freire, Quijano, and others as a model of decolonization from a liberatory perspective.
From the model in decolonization, the authors will provide applications to counseling interventions, for example, using interventions rooted in Indigenous Ways of Knowing and liberatory principles. The book moves the audience from decolonization into decoloniality, which is the intervention of the "here" and "now" expressed in the references to liberatory practices. As explained in the chapter's description below, in the book's second part, the authors will concentrate on applications of the Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Liberatory practices, such as problematization and critical consciousness. Furthermore, contrary to other books about decolonization, the authors of this book are members of minority groups who, in the history of the United States, have been part of the colonized populations and will use many of the theories that were developed in the Global South (i.e., Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Amilcar Cabral, Ng-g- wa Thiong'o, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Walter Rodney, Homi K. Bhabha, Achille Mbembe, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Albert Memmi, Maria Lugones, Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel, Sylvia Wynter, Enrique Dussel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres) to move from an act (decolonization) to decoloniality as an ongoing process (i.e., Native Americans, Latine, African Americans, etc.).