Bio

I received undergraduate education in China and am currently completing my PhD in the History and Theory of Psychology program at York University, Toronto, Canada. I approach indigenous psychology from theoretical, qualitative and historical perspectives. Theoretically, I developed a research approach that incorporates qualitative components into quantitative, experimental research to make the latter more sensitive to cultural diversity through facilitating the researcher’s reflexivity. With qualitative methods, I am working on the issues of memory, identity and social conflict in contemporary China. Currently I am spending more time working on the history of Chinese psychology in general though more intensively around the turn of the twentieth century and in the 1950s. The latter project examines the “Pavlovian-Marxist psychology” as a political product and argues that the generally perceived “disastrous” leftist criticism in fact unexpectedly enabled Chinese psychologists to resist the Pavlovian hegemony. It also addresses the historical myth why in the late 1950s Pavlov’s theory was continuously regarded as politically correct in physiology and medical science yet reactionary in psychology. Some of my works are available at https://yorku.academia.edu/ZhipengGao