ISTP 2026 Conference
“Theorizing in Dark Times – Art, Narrative, Politics”
June 8 – June 12, 2026 | Brooklyn, NY, USA
Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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Panel: Beyond Critique: Reimagining Psychology in Times of Crisis Location: North Hall 113* link to join Session Chair: Anne Morin | |
| Presentation 3 | |
Psychology as Politics instead of Psychology as Police: Re-thinking Theory and Research Through the Lens of Jacques Rancière (ONLINE) Moscow State University of Psychology & Education, Russian Federation Critical psychologists have demonstrated that psychological theory and research are not neutral and apolitical, but rather contiguous to strategies for governing people and operate in the service of power – therefore, psychology has always got a political dimension. However, if we look at psychology through the lens of Rancière, it pertains to police, not to politics proper. According to Rancière, police is not a social function, but a symbolic constitution of the social, establishing a social order which is always based on hierarchies and presupposes inequality. Politics on the other hand incessantly questions the status quo through equality being actively claimed and asserted. In this sense, “psychology, all psychology, is a department of police” (P. Richer). As Rancière reveals, even critical approaches may contribute to the police order, since they imply a hierarchy in access to truth: the researcher, free from ideology, exposes the “false consciousness” of participants. We believe Rancière's work to be essential for a radical rethinking of psychological theory and research, and following his ideas we sketch a project of psychology as a part of politics that dismantles the police order maintaining inequality, marginalization and exclusion. Its main points are: 1) a political ontology of the “unaccounted for”, which questions the ontology of single individuals and considers the subject as situated “between” identities, and subjectivity as a field of intertwining forces; 2) (political) aesthetic epistemology aimed at the “redistribution of the sensible”, at the reinvention of the research object and the subjectivity of the researcher through “poetic activism” (K. Gergen); 3) a methodology of fragmented interpretation that works not so much with meaning as with its excess. The ethics of actively claimed equality and ways of implementing it in psychological research and practice are discussed as well | |

