Listening for a leak: Students story their experiences in undergraduate psychology

There are cracks in academic Psychology’s pipeline: What starts out as a diverse stream of incoming students ends in a homogeneous trickle. We know racism and androcentrism contribute to the leakage, but we need to listen to students’ personal experiences to get a fuller picture. I conducted open-ended narrative interviews with nine undergraduate Psychology students at York University, and found consistent ambivalence and alienation. These seemed difficult to reconcile; participants seemed constrained by the ways of thinking trained into them by academic Psychology. A collaborative zine-making workshop made space for other modes of thinking: students hand-made an art book (zine) together, critically exploring their experiences. The zine reflects the complex conversations and tinkering that helped create it, contributing to a picture of how we might confront the cracks in Psychology education if we want the field to welcome in those it has tended to push out.