‘Context in a Textbox’: How Textbooks Erase Place and Reproduce Curriculum Authority

South African curriculum transformation is lived through teaching decisions: what gets prescribed, what becomes ‘basic’ and what students can realistically access. This paper examines prescribed textbooks as epistemic infrastructure in Industrial and Organisational Psychology (IOP), an applied subfield of psychology that prepares students to interpret workers, workplaces and organisational problems. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with eight IOP academics across three differently resourced university types, we examine how textbook use routinises epistemic violence and epistemic oppression by standardising Euro-American knowledge as ‘proper psychology’, while locating South African work histories as a late application. Reflexive thematic analysis identified three linked mechanisms: disciplinary standardisation, context erasure and material gatekeeping. Participants also described working with, around and against textbook limits through reading packs, articles, multimedia materials and differentiated use across levels. We argue that transformation becomes decolonising work when it changes curriculum infrastructure: selection rationales, assessment design, collation, language expectations and material access. Textbooks need not be discarded; they can become objects of critique rather than silent foundations of disciplinary authority. The analysis frames textbook choice as a question of epistemic justice, professional formation and students’ capacity to participate in knowledge-making.