Decolonial Methodological Refusal: Reconfiguring Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Within an Africana Critical Race Framework

This article outlines the qualitative methodology adopted in a study of Black British-born males of African heritage navigating counselling and psychotherapy training within a white-dominated, neo-colonial university context. Grounded in an Africana Critical Race Framework and guided by a decolonial stance, the article critiques the epistemological limits of Eurocentric qualitative methods and challenges assumptions of methodological neutrality. Through critical engagement with Structural Existential Analysis, Heuristic Inquiry, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), it demonstrates how phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions universalise the human and risk reproducing epistemic and ontological violence when applied to Black Africana lives. IPA was ultimately employed—but only through a deliberate refusal of its philosophical foundations and a selective repurposing of its procedural steps. The article argues that ethical qualitative research with Black Africana participants requires not fidelity to inherited European traditions but methodological rupture, cultural alignment, and epistemic accountability.