Stabilising Repair in Psychological Science

ABSTRACT Psychological science has responded to the WEIRD critique through a broad agenda of inclusion, expanding the diversity of research participants, international collaborations and systems of scholarly recognition. While these reforms have generated important gains, concerns about epistemic inequality persist. This article argues that many contemporary reforms function as forms of stabilising repair : institutional responses that absorb critique by broadening participation and visibility while leaving underlying distributions of epistemic authority largely unchanged. Drawing on debates in decolonial scholarship, I show how inclusion can become a substitute for transformation when critique is translated into administratively manageable questions of representation. The result is a discipline that becomes superficially inclusive without necessarily becoming more diverse. I then review emerging proposals for institutional capacity building and epistemic reconstitution, arguing that a genuinely global psychology requires infrastructural pluralisation : the development of multiple centres, networks and knowledge infrastructures through which psychological theory, methods and research agendas can be produced, sustained and recognised.