Abstract
This thesis explores Global Majority (GM) trainees’ experiences of clinical psychology training, how they navigate its demands, and the institutional outcomes of this navigation. Together, both parts offer a structurally grounded understanding of how safety is shaped, withheld, and contested—and how the profession must transform to become a place where GM trainees can shape, contribute, and belong on their own terms.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"></p><p class="ql-align-justify"><strong>Part A </strong>presents an empirical paper addressing the question: <em>What are Global Majority trainees’ experiences of microaggressions whilst on clinical psychology training? </em>Using reflexive thematic analysis and a critical-interpretivist epistemology, qualitative survey data from GM trainees across UK training programmes were analysed to develop four core themes—Navigating Power and Threat, Normativity and Erasure, Epistemic Harm, and Dehumanisation and Essentialism—underpinned by a meta-theme of <em>Silence and Being Silenced</em>. Findings revealed an ecology of harm, culminating in a five-domain model of structural and psychological impact. Based on these domains, targeted recommendations are offered to support systemic change.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"></p><p class="ql-align-justify"><strong>Part B </strong>offers a conceptual review that critically re-theorises psychological safety through a structural, systemic, and historically situated lens. It draws on the concepts of difference, psychological safety, power, whiteness, and minority stress to develop the <em>Ecology of Psychological Safety</em>—a framework grounded in Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory and extended through four analytic dimensions: Who, How, Experience, and Consequence. The review challenges prevailing notions of safety as interpersonal or neutral, instead proposing psychological belonging as a justice-oriented, relational, and institutional alternative.