Raul Valdivia Murgueytio

Role

Dr Raúl Valdivia-Murgueytio, BA (PUCP), MA (Nott), MSc (Edin), PhD (Lond) is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Social Sciences and Decoloniality in the Department of Psychology at NTU. His teaching deals with critical and decolonial perspectives in psychology. Raúl also supervises final-year undergraduate projects with a focus on environmental psychology and postgraduate projects that address issues related to racial discrimination and marginalisation. In addition, he co-chairs a university-wide network of academics interested in decolonising the curriculum in their respective subject areas.

Career overview

Originally trained in clinical psychology, Raúl also has postgraduate qualifications in health promotion and sociology. His doctoral thesis explored the visual self-representation of people living in deprived urban areas of Lima, Peru. Raúl’s diverse academic background allows him to go beyond disciplinary boundaries and appreciate different research methods, which in turn informs his teaching and scholarship.

Raúl has held post-doctoral research positions at the University of Bristol, University of Birmingham and Newcastle University. He is also an experienced teacher trainer, having spent an important part of his career designing and delivering workshops on global citizenship education and critical pedagogies for teacher trainees and school teachers across Nottingham. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Raúl’s interest in decolonising Higher Education began in his native Peru, after attending some seminars by the late Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, whose seminal work on coloniality has been highly influential worldwide. In 2024, he took part in an international summer school on decolonising knowledge and power taught by some of the leading scholars in the field. One of the key tenets of decolonial theory is its critique of the epistemic violence and epistemicide that is constitutive of modernity, which has resulted in the hegemony of Western scientific knowledge, seen as superior to other types of knowledge.

The birth of the social sciences took place during the age of imperialist expansion in the 19th century. Ideas about racial and cultural superiority were rife in those days, particularly in the form of eugenics and scientific racism, which are still present today, sometimes disguised under new terms and advanced through the banner of academic freedom, as shown in this article about one of the main controversies in IQ research. Psychology’s role in promoting and perpetuating racial and gender inequalities is well documented and although public apologies have been made, such as the APA resolution from October 2021, there is still some important work to be done. Raúl’s scholarship is concerned with the decolonisation of psychology as a field of theory, research and practice, which echoes current debates within the discipline (see the APA edited volume called Decolonial Psychology published in 2024).

External activity

Raúl has been involved with a range of community-based organisations and projects, both in the UK and internationally, such as Latin American House in London and the Education, Justice and Memory transnational network. He is keen to establish new partnerships with colleagues in other parts of the world who share his research interests, especially in decolonial psychology, critical psychology, liberation psychology and community psychology.