Conference Agenda

This paper challenges the assumption – explicit in the conference call and pervasive in critical psychology – that theory operates as a form of political engagement. Different critical strands of psychological theory often present theoretical work as inherently political. I argue, however, that such claims frequently overestimate the transformative capacities of theory and obscure the institutional conditions under which it is produced and circulated. I examine how theoretical claims are shaped by the positionality of their academic producers, the constrained audiences they address, and the disciplinary histories that condition their political reach. Theory produced within academia is structurally limited as a political tool: its political potential depends not on its conceptual content but on its embedding within institutional, pedagogical, administrative, or activist practices. Within neoliberal universities, however, theory circulates largely as a symbolic gesture – a moral vocabulary for scholars rather than a driver of political transformation – since academic labor is shaped by performance metrics, precarious contracts, and distinct institutional cultures. This raises two key questions: from what position can theorists claim political agency, and who is the subject of theory under such conditions? A related question concerns the audience of theory, since universities function as echo chambers in which most theoretical writing addresses only other academics in closed circuits of journals, conferences, and university programs. Critical theory thus remains largely insulated from the social fields it purports to critique. Moreover, psychology’s disciplinary history (Danziger, Morawski, Rose) shows that its political impact has traditionally emerged through its entanglement with governance, administration, and technologies of control rather than through its theory or conceptual critique. Finally, I argue for the temporal asymmetry between theory and political action. Following Hegel’s dictum that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, I propose that theory is typically reactive rather than catalytic: it arrives after social and political ruptures, offering retrospective interpretation rather than antecedent intervention. This dynamic is illustrated by a recent wave of spontaneous and decentralized student and civil mobilization in Serbia, which unfolded without theoretical articulation or academic guidance and only later demanded scholarly explanation. The example underscores the limited political agency of theoretical psychology and highlights the gap between theory’s political aspirations and its actual effects.

Theory is often invoked as a moral or political gesture - a means of resistance, enlightenment, or critique, especially in dark times. Yet such invocations often rest on the assumption that theory stands outside the very social conditions it seeks to explain. This talk proposes a different view: theory itself is an operation of observation within the social system of science. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (Luhmann, 2020a, 2020b), it argues that psychological theories do not merely describe human reality but construct it through their own distinctions, such as normal/pathological, rational/irrational, or resilient/vulnerable. These distinctions are communicative acts through which psychology organizes its visibility - and its blindness.

Against the backdrop of the current theory crisis in psychology (Eronen & Bringmann, 2021; Oberauer & Lewandowsky, 2019), the problem lies not in a lack of models but in a blindness to the very forms of observation through which psychological knowledge is produced. This blindness is not a deficit but the necessary shadow of observation itself – the darkness theory constructs in order to see. It becomes visible in contemporary narrative discourses, where stories themselves function as psychological and social categories that distribute meaning, responsibility, and truth. When we speak of “true” or “false” narratives - about resilience, climate, or war - psychology itself participates in the political production of truth. In dark times, observing this darkness may be the most political act theory can perform.

References

Eronen, M. I. & Bringmann, L. F. (2021). The Theory Crisis in Psychology: How to Move Forward. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(4), 779–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620970586

Luhmann, N. (2020a). Theory of Society, Volume 1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804786478

Luhmann, N. (2020b). Theory of Society, Volume 2. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804787277-fm

Oberauer, K. & Lewandowsky, S. (2019). Addressing the theory crisis in psychology. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(5), 1596–1618. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01645-2

The objective of this paper is to present Political Epistemology as a field that encompasses the works of the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Even though the term Political Epistemology includes quite diverse schools of thought, such as historical-dialectic philosophy or Foucaultian archaeology and genealogy, the focus here is to discuss this singular approach and its important repercussions in the field of psychology. To this end, initially we will see how Political Epistemology understands that the invention of modern sciences took place through a rare conjugation of certain powers or potentialities which are able to actualize it. The powers appoint an operator, which is the singular way how human and non-human beings produce testimonies. This is followed by the appropriation of the meaning of this operator in a more generalized interpretation and, finally, we have the potency of this device in connecting interests. The creation of these powers also brings into being as counterparts operations that try to produce scientific knowledge through a methodological recipe ou an a priori concept. Without the risk of the operator, these are considered artifactual productions of science. The latter part of the paper examines how Stengers evaluates the methods of scientific operation of certain well-known psychological schools of thought, such as behaviorism, constructivism, and psychoanalysis.

Policing has always put safety first. What marks today’s “dark times” is that, despite this enduring orientation, a growing sense of unsafety is felt within the police—and this perception increasingly spills over into society, shaping public expectations, legitimacy discourses, and everyday encounters with authority.

This paper develops a systems-theoretical account of this paradoxical dynamic: the Officer-Safety Paradox. Drawing on form theory and the concept of operational closure, “officer safety” is analyzed as a reflexive operation that seeks to guarantee the continuation of policing by securing the conditions of its own possibility. Within the distinction safe/unsafe, every attempt to produce safety necessarily reproduces the difference that makes safety meaningful—thus continuously generating new observations of danger.

From this perspective, danger is not an external threat but an internal semantic function that stabilizes the form of policing under conditions of uncertainty. The well-known “danger narrative” of contemporary policing (Eisenberg, 2023; Sierra-Arévalo, 2024; Staller et al., 2023) appears not as deviation or pathology but as the operative expression of this structural paradox.

Theorizing does not aim to eliminate paradox but to make it visible without collapsing operations. A “paradox-first” mode of theorizing transforms danger into insight: it turns the impossibility of complete safety into a condition for reflexivity. In doing so, it reframes officer safety—not as the prevention of danger, but as an invitation to observe how systems reproduce their own conditions of insecurity.

Eisenberg, A. K. (2023). Policing the Danger Narrative. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 113(3), 473–540.

Sierra-Arévalo, M. (2024). The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing. Columbia University Press.

Staller, M. S., Koerner, S., & Zaiser, B. (2023). Danger, Fighting, and Badassness: A Social Systems Perspective on Narratives and Codes in Police Conflict Management. In M. S. Staller, S. Koerner, & B. Zaiser (Eds.), Police Conflict Management, Volume I, Challenges and Opportunities in the 21st Century (pp. 35–59). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41096-3_3