In this presentation, Alexandra––a mixed-Xicana MFT and Expressive Arts Therapies Trainee––uses autohistoria-teoría––an embodied method of inquiry bridging personal experiences with broader social and political landscapes––and testimonio––a healing-centered expressive arts modality––to propose an offering: Mujerista Narrative Therapy as a framework for decolonization, liberation, and healing. Through stories of becoming self-as-therapist and vignettes of nepantla moments in practice, she illuminates the acts of creative resistance that emerge through the transformative process of telling and witnessing both individual and collective histories of trauma and resilience in the time and space of the therapeutic-relationship. Alexandra draws upon knowledge, wisdoms, and practices of women of color feminisms, psycho-spiritualities, and healing-arts traditions, along with narrative, critical-liberation, and expressive arts approaches to psychotherapy to build upon pre-existing practices that dissolve epistemological boundaries and empower both clients and therapists who navigate life at the intersections of diverse worlds.

The psych-disciplines present themselves as universal, yet their knowledge production and practices are predominantly shaped by urban contexts. Rural populations rarely appear as research subjects or service recipients, except in moments of crisis. This urban bias frames rural communities as outliers, reinforcing their marginalization. This presentation explores how systemic and cultural biases within the psych-disciplines contribute to this exclusion and its profound effects, while considering pathways to better integrate rural realities into the core concerns of these disciplines.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift from face-to-face to online qualitative research, reshaping social interaction and meaning-making. Digital tools are often seen as neutral, yet from a new materialist perspective, they actively participate in producing knowledge and power dynamics.

This presentation proposes a materiality-sensitive methodology grounded in Karen Barad's agential realism and Alfred Lorenzer's depth-hermeneutic method. Drawing on Barad’s concept of intra-action, the online interview setting is an entangled phenomenon where humans and non-humans—participants, technologies, spatial-temporal conditions, etc.—co-constitute meanings, boundaries, and identities. Thereby, Barad's notion of ethical response-ability guides attention to what comes to matter or is excluded, emphasizing justice as entangled with material-discursive practices. Lorenzer's method complements this by uncovering latent, affective layers beyond language, focusing on embodied, material interactions and memory-traces that shape power relations.

As a work in progress from the "Competence Management of Older Workers in Digitized Learning Environments" project, affiliated with the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), this contribution reflects on the political implications of qualitative research. It challenges ageist stereotypes about old(er) workers in the context of digital workplace learning by viewing them as emergent, negotiated effects of intra-actions, and reclaims theory as a form of political engagement—emphasizing qualitative research as a site of resistance and transformation in "dark times".

The presentation invites feedback on advancing materiality-sensitive methodologies to critically explore the role of entangled digitality in co-producing knowledge, power relations, and potentially exclusionary (ageist) stereotypes within digitally mediated (work and research) contexts.

This presentation explores how psychological theory operates within conditions of social inequality through the lens of academic self-efficacy: students’ belief in their capacity to plan, perform, and succeed in academic tasks. Within mainstream psychology, self-efficacy is often treated as an internal, value-neutral determinant of motivation and performance. Yet in times of widening social and economic inequality – dark times – the very idea of individual agency calls for renewed theoretical scrutiny.

The presentation examines how psychological theory can obscure or reveal the social structures that shape the experience of agency. When students’ ”confidence” or ”motivation” is explained as a matter of personal belief, structural conditions such as class, privilege, and access are displaced. Thus, theory risks naturalising inequality by framing systemic constraints as individual deficits.

Drawing on an ongoing pilot study among first-year psychology students at Aarhus University, the study investigates how socioeconomic background influences the development of academic self-efficacy during the transition into higher education. Preliminary analyses suggest that students with greater economic, cultural (educational) and social resources develop stronger and more stable confidence in their academic abilities, while others experience more fragile or situational forms of efficacy. By connecting these empirical insights with theoretical reflection, the presentation invites discussion on how psychological theory might resist normalising inequality and instead contribute to rethinking agency and education under unequal conditions.

In Denmark, almost all children under the age of three attend full-day nurseries – an institutional arrangement that reflects both collective trust in welfare institutions and a deep societal dependency on them. Yet this extensive institutionalization contains a paradox. While early childhood policy emphasizes learning, development, and participation, everyday life unfolds under conditions of staff shortages, administrative control, and the erosion of professional expertise. The very institutions that promise equality and care also come to produce new forms of inequality, vulnerability, and exclusion.

My PhD project explores these tensions through ethnographic studies of young children’s everyday lives in Danish nurseries. Drawing on critical psychology and practice research, I examine how children participate in settings shaped by institutional arrangements that both enable and constrain their possibilities for action and their ways of entering shared practices. Rather than understanding inequality as a background variable – typically linked to children’s socio-economic circumstances – I approach it as situated: something produced and negotiated in the micro-practices of care, attention, and organization, as well as in the children’s own engagements with one another. The study adopts an analytical child’s perspective to develop a deeper understanding of the fundamental institutional practices and the conditions of participation that shape nursery life.

In “dark times,” where early childhood care is increasingly framed by efficiency, standardization, and measurement, theorizing participation becomes a political act. Focusing on the subtle, situated forms of inequality emerging in everyday institutional life is simultaneously to ask what it means for young children to live, learn, and connect with one another in a world marked by institutional pressure. The presentation suggests that theorizing situated inequality requires remaining close to the lived, embodied practices of children and professionals.

This pitch proposes reframing consciousness studies through a critical-phenomenological lens, grounded in my research on the lived experience of intersex migrants in the United States. A recent symposium on consciousness studies (Frontiers Forum, 2025) highlighted an ongoing absence of theories that meaningfully connect consciousness with moral experience, suffering, social context, and the embodied conditions of life. Parallel debates (Houdart, 2025) suggest that consciousness theory may offer an alternative way of understanding political experience, particularly within LGBTQI contexts.

Drawing on findings from my PhD research, I conceptualize consciousness as an ongoing, affective, embodied, and situational activity of sense-making, processual, relational, and contextual (Thompson, 2007; Zahavi, 2005/2014). Within this view, identity is not an ontological starting point, but a flexible, contingent “sedimentation” of experience shaped by institutional encounters and normative expectations. Identity emerges from conscious life and, throughout life, constantly influences perceptual orientation, yet remains an outcome of relational and affective processes rather than a fixed structure (Saketopoulou, 2023).

Intersex migrants’ narratives demonstrate how consciousness operates through bodily attunement, temporal orientation, and meaning making, even when identity categories are undergoing internal and/or external transformation. Consciousness and lived experience remain present, while political and institutional systems may constrain subjectivity by suppressing or misrecognizing identity.

I invite discussion on how centering consciousness offers an account of human experience and how theoretical psychology might better understand embodiment, vulnerability, and lived meaning in “dark times.”