Conference Agenda

This paper proposes the application of the transtheoretical model, a stage-matched process for effecting change, to better encourage anti-racist behaviors and methods among health care professionals in medical settings. Despite widespread organizational implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which are aimed at reducing racial health and healthcare inequities across the United States, the absence of a theoretical framework for change has made it all but impossible to standardize meaningful anti-racist practices – a point of particular concern as President Donald Trump’s administration rolls back DEI efforts and requirements alike. Translational and clinical sciences aim for a gold standard of diversity, equity and inclusion amidst the dual threats of recent policy changes and ongoing complications born of capitalism, but the lack of a clinical and evaluative model for implementation – and lasting change – persists. Psychologists must account for, and solve for, individual differences in readiness to engage in anti-racist behaviors among medical professionals. The transtheoretical model of behavior change is an analytical framework for clinical applications that can facilitate change – even transformation – among individuals working in medical organizations.

How do young refugees in exile create a sense of who they possibly can be and the lives they possibly can live when their future is unpredictable in the most basic sense?

In this presentation, I will propose a methodological design and analytical approach to investigate how young Ukrainian refugees in Norway (in 2025, comprising the largest refugee group in Norway) negotiate their developmental projects together with their peers. They do so in a political climate that seems to welcome transnational practices, but still in a situation where the host country and home country take particular and conflicting interests in them: assimilating the host country’s norms and possible lives on the one hand and preparing for lives as future protectors of the war-torn home country on the other. How do young persons create situations that foster learning about the world and the world-to-be, and who they can be in it? How do they simultaneously shape particular social realities of the world and their place in it (“worlding practices” (Haraway)? I am particularly interested in how the development of their political subjecthood can be explored as connected to their worlding practices and developmental projects.

The specific situation of young Ukrainian refugees highlights general aspects of development for young people: that the future is uncertain and indefinite (Holzkamp), and that nation-states have interests in young people as citizens-to-be (Lee). I will conclude the presentation with a discussion of how personal development can be viewed as entangled with political projects of nations, for Ukrainian refugees as well as for other young people.

It has become cliche to observe that we are living in “unprecedented times.” Existential threats—climate collapse, skyrocketing wealth inequality, genocide—are ubiquitous, and are made constantly accessible through social media, its algorithms portraying each event as more catastrophic than the last. At the same time, people are also constantly reminded that they must act normally, that the world is conducting business as usual, and that the status quo need not be changed. This contradiction—everything is falling apart, and everything is fine—creates anxiety (i.e., dissonance) that results in compensatory reinvestment in individual mundane activities, and disinvestment in collective action needed to better the world. Integrating materialist economic perspectives with theories of compensatory cognition from social, political, and existential psychology, we theorize that the subjective experience of daily life amidst a slow-motion political and societal collapse a) induces a desperate reinvestment in the individual and b) demotivates collective action. Through the lens of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1962), we also predict that, paradoxically, these effects will grow stronger as existential threats become more salient, as this individualistic turn inward represents an attempt to resolve this contradiction. Crucially, we frame existential threat and its subsequent individualistic reinvestment as a mechanism that exacerbates inequality and, more broadly, reactionary political attitudes and behaviors, by incentivizing behaviors such as resource hoarding and social climbing instead of communal behaviors such as mutual aid and direct collective political action. Through this lens, we seek to apply theory to better understand—in order to radically change—the psychological attitudes and political behaviors of everyday people amidst a bleak political reality that is increasingly rife with contradictions.

The current socio-ecological crisis requires a fundamental change of our lifestyles – a key aspect is the transition from a private car centred mobility to more sustainable ways of transport. Nevertheless, the car is still at the centre of our world. Although this is the case due to an inherent infrastructural dependency, from a psychological perspective the affective and symbolic car dependency is a core interest. How can we understand the subjects’ relation to the car and their resistance to alternative modes of transportation? Therefore, we have to note that the affective-symbolic aspects of the car are closely linked to social conditions of production and distribution.

On the one hand the car represents the promise of social advancement and symbolizes wealth. Its affective-symbolic significance is closely linked to socio-economic status and the idea of individual social achievement. On the other hand, the car represents the domination of nature. It provides an option to express unconscious feelings such as aggression and disappointment that are structurally produced within the capitalist mode of production. The car can alleviate one's own experience of precariousness and/or powerlessness, e.g. by fantazising about owning an exceptional car one day or by driving by endangering others.

In our presentation we outline these affective-symbolic aspects of the car from an affect-theoretical and psychoanalytic social psychological perspective. We illustrate this theoretical discussion using the example of in-depth hermeneutical interpretations of two advertising videos for electric vehicles.