In recent years, we have witnessed a growing polarization of political and ideological positions in public debate. The debate has moved from face-to-face forums to the digital environment. From a historical-cultural perspective (Wersch, 1998), we understand that the mediating tools used in social communication in this context, such as social networks and various digital media, with their characteristics, limitations, and possibilities, could be conditioning expression and, therefore, the internalization of discourses and affective-symbolic logics that tend toward extremism and the radicalization of messages (Marantz, 2020).

On the other hand, those of us who participate in these scenarios maintain a perception of freedom. We consider ourselves radically autonomous, while unknowingly cooperating with our own domination or surveillance. Hypnocracy (Xun, 2025) is based precisely on this paradox: the more intensely we experience the feeling of choice, the more deeply rooted the criteria by which we are classified, evaluated, and/or normalized become. Predictive algorithms, security protocols, and risk management systems do not need to prohibit; it is enough to filter, order, and hierarchize our possibilities for action and present them as agency-driven and spontaneous options, as proposed by Foucault's (2007) notion of biopolitics and governmentality, because we believe that we are witnessing a new phase: it is no longer just a matter of managing populations, but of governing from within the subject's own self-relation, that is, the way in which they think of themselves as free agents.

In this context, radical discourses, such as anti-feminist and anti-immigration discourses (Elis & Bhatia), and even those that imply a subhumanization of “others” (immigrants, minorities, women, etc.) (Teo, 2020), are consumed and recreated in monochromatic digital environments that reinforce confirmation biases and, therefore, the polarization of citizens' attitudes.

This dark political and social landscape has led us to inquire, within the framework of projects in which different scenarios of activity and social groups interact, those conditions that could build bridges between subjectivities that would otherwise remain isolated and, at present, opposed. From our practice in emancipatory projects in disadvantaged communities in contexts of cultural diversity, in which we have participated for 30 years, we have observed the emergence of hybrid scenarios of activity and hybrid psychological agents, which we will present as transformative possibilities (Macías-Gómez-Estern, 2020; 2021; Macías-Gómez-Estern et al., 2025).

These scenarios and agents have emerged throughout the process of face-to-face participation in activities with low levels of formalization, often mediated by artistic languages (e.g., music), and have generated systems that are resilient to crises and emancipatory transformations in the different groups and individuals participating (Martínez-Lozano et al; 2023; Lalueza et. al, 2024; Macías-Gómez-Estern & Lalueza, 2024). In this presentation, we will share our ongoing reflections on these ideas.

Our contribution is therefore situated at the intersection of political philosophy and critical psychology, and questions those other possible figures of the subject that can operate as counter-devices against the new regimes of power.

References:

Ellis, B. D., & Bhatia, S. (2019). Cultural psychology for a new era of citizenship politics. Culture & Psychology, 25(2), 220-240.

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978.

Lalueza, J.L.; Martínez-Lozano, V. & Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2024). University-community partnerships as “hybrid contexts of activity”: learnings from two projects with Roma children in Spain. En M.W. Mahmood, M. Faulstich Orellana & J. Cano (eds). University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal, pp. 265-282. Springer Nature.

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2020). "Hybrid psychology agent": Overcoming the about/for dichotomy from praxis, Theory & Psychology, 30 (3), 430-435. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354320923726

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2021). Critical Psychology for community emancipation: insights from socio-educative praxis in hybrid setting. In Machin, R. (Ed.) The new waves in Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Empirical and theoretical tendencies and Challenges. Palgrave-McMillan (pp.25-54).

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. & Lalueza, J.L. (2024). Navigating I-positionings in higher education Service Learning as hybrid scenarios: a case study, Language, Culture and Social Interaction, 45, 100805.

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B., Martínez-Lozano, V., & Lalueza, J.L (2025). Re-envisioning collaborative university-community engagement through a critical ethnographic lens: transformative hybrid scenarios. Ethnography and Education, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2025.2565009

Marantz, A. (2020). Antisocial: Online extremists, techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation. Penguin.

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Xun, J. (2025). Ipnocrazia. Trump, Muske l’architettura della realtà. Edizioni Tlon.