Decolonising Counselling and Psychotherapy: Reflections from Psychosocial Perspectives School: Health in Social ScienceTeam: Dr Nini Fang, Rhea Gandhi, Dr Mariya Levitanus, AbstractThe project aims to challenge the Eurocentric lens which informs traditional therapeutic approaches and to develop more politically progressive and decolonial alternatives to practice, training, and research in line with the University-wide decolonising initiatives. The project involves a public-facing seminar series exploring, through a psychosocial lens, the impacts of colonialism's violent history on current socio-political events, contexts, and relations. It also includes reflexive workshops directly engaging with counselling and psychotherapy trainees to further explore how counselling and psychotherapy may support clients impacted by socio-political oppression and violence, especially as they pertain to racial inequality. It will support them to consider critically and reflexively the influences of identity, worldviews, and positionality on their practice and how oppressive practices might arise and persist within therapeutic settings. The project will generate highly nuanced, contextual and experiential reflections which will be further examined and utilised to influence the training curriculum. The project uses critical and relational pedagogical practices that allow speakers and audiences, counselling trainers and trainees to learn from and reflect with each other. The project seeks to generate more sustainable, longer-term impacts towards racial and social justice in counselling and psychotherapy at the University of Edinburgh and beyond. This article was published on 2024-10-16