Critical and Participatory Methods in Psychology Beyond the Global North Vol. 1 : Gender Sensitive Research and Mental Health

How can research move from observation to transformation without sacrificing rigor? This volume brings together cultural, feminist, decolonial, and community-engaged approaches that make voices too often silenced in mainstream psychology both audible and authoritative. Across 2 volumes, spanning gender equity, mental health, education, and community development, contributors from Latin America and Spain present grounded research designs, dialogic analyses, and creative artefacts that reconfigure who speaks and what counts as knowledge. The collection is a call to humanize academia and broaden the methodological horizons of the social sciences, proposing an ethical framework that redistributes epistemic authority.  In this first volume, focusing on feminist and gender-sensitive research and mental health, chapters interrogate diagnosis and discourse through phenomenology and psychoanalysis, co-produce knowledge with survivors and caregivers, and pilot arts-based, participatory designs that support recovery. Grounded in concrete field projects, the book offers a tested methodological toolkit. Its contributions foreground the agency and subjectivity of research participants, and scholar-practitioners with “one foot on the street and one in the university.”Read alongside Volume 2, which extends this into research on education and community development, the two-volume set traces how participatory methodologies travel across contexts while remaining locally situated. By centring the research subject, the book challenges dominant assumptions and prevailing power structures, opening new avenues for intervention and inquiry. It will be essential reading for students and scholars in critical psychology, mental health, medical anthropology, Latin American and Hispanic studies, and public policy.