Conference Agenda

This presentation employs critical autoethnographic reflexivity to analyze the continuities between structural Islamophobia and contemporary anti-Palestinian rhetoric within U.S. psychology training programs. The author draws on two primary data sources: 1) interview data on experiences of Islamophobia, collected from Saudi Muslim graduate students during the political climate of Donald Trump's first presidential term, and 2) current reflexive journal entries detailing interactions with faculty, peers, and psychotherapists concerning Palestine-Israel amid the rhetoric of Trump’s second presidential campaign. Through a comparative analysis, the findings reveal a persistent pattern of epistemic violence across both eras, manifesting as derailing tactics (e.g., “whataboutism”), emotional gaslighting, and the centering of dominant comfort over critical engagement with oppression. The presentation specifically interrogates a jarring incident during a Clinical Psychology conference where a call to hold the suffering of genocide was violently undermined by a demand to recenter Israeli Jewish trauma, effectively unraveling the purported social justice ethos of the conference and the facilitating institution. The analysis argues that these rhetorical strategies are not isolated but are instead ingrained mechanisms that uphold settler colonial discourses and protect institutional complicity. The author presents these findings through an introspective narrative, articulating the affective weight of scholarly alienation, shame, and disappointment. Ultimately, this work challenges clinical and academic psychology to move beyond perfunctory commitments to justice and to critically confront its role in perpetuating ideological violence against Muslim and Palestinian communities.

In this presentation, the author uses a composite vignette narrative approach to detail the experiences of a Palestinian Muslim doctoral student in the U.S. navigating Clinical Psychology—both in the classroom with peers and faculty and in clinical training as a future therapist. More precisely, the author collected data over a two-year period on interactions within the PsyD program in which she is enrolled at a private university in Northern California. From these data, she created three narratives to describe instances of belonging, marginalization, and erasure. Drawing on autoethnographic and narrative methods, the author illustrates how clinical discourse can both invisibilize and pathologize non-Western forms of resilience while simultaneously reinforcing the boundaries of who is seen as “treatable”—or more precisely “pathological”—within psychology. The narratives exhibit how anti-Palestinian sentiment, othering, and institutional gaslighting, even in institutions committed to social justice and integral equity in their mission. The narratives inform the third presentation in this panel, where the presenters, in collaboration with the audience, engaged the somatics of these experiences to imagine interventions that both expand clinical practice and transform institutional cultures, disrupting the normalization of such violence within psychology.

This presentation begins by inviting the audience into a somatic check-in to surface the embodied impact of hearing narratives of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic epistemic violence. Drawing on somatic pedagogy and trauma-informed facilitation, the presenters guide participants to notice how stories of erasure, silencing, and gaslighting live in their bodies and professional identities. From this experiential grounding, the presentation transitions into a critical review of literature documenting epistemic violence in psychology and higher education. Particular attention is given to scholarship on Islamophobia, the marginalization of Palestinian and Muslim students, and the ways clinical training normalizes Eurocentric epistemologies while erasing alternative ways of knowing and the knowledges they produce. The literature is situated within broader critiques of settler colonialism and white supremacy in mental health education. By weaving together embodiment and scholarship, this paper highlights how epistemic violence is not only an intellectual abstraction but a visceral, ongoing harm that reverberates through training programs, classrooms, and clinical relationships. The session closes by preparing the audience to engage in praxis-oriented dialogue in the final paper, linking embodied awareness to possibilities for institutional and collective transformation.

This concluding paper turns from recognition of epistemic violence toward strategies for resistance and transformation. Building on the somatic and scholarly grounding of Paper 3, the presenters facilitate a praxis-oriented dialogue with the audience to envision actionable change at both micro and macro levels. At the micro level, participants workshop practices for classrooms, mentorship, and everyday professional interactions that resist erasure and actively support Muslim and Palestinian students, colleagues, and community members—such as integrating counter-narratives, revising language use, and cultivating culturally and politically responsive pedagogies. At the macro level, the discussion expands to institutional strategies, including curriculum reform, faculty training, and accountability mechanisms for addressing Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiment. The facilitators frame this work within decolonial, abolitionist, and intersectional ethics, emphasizing collective responsibility over individual heroics. Audience members will leave with concrete tools as well as reflective questions to continue unsettling the normalization of ideological violence in their institutions. In this way, the final paper serves as a bridge from narrative and analysis to collective praxis, modeling how psychology can more fully align with its professed commitments to justice.