This talk will outline transformative activist stance (TAS) approach and methodology as a way to further critical, non-objectivist/positivist mainstream approaches predicated on the ethos of social justice and political engagement with broadly defined liberatory and decolonial goals of social transformation. This approach disrupts the ideology of adaptation, acquiescence, social hierarchy and top-down control. Its conceptual core, building off from Marx and other works in the scholarship of resistance, is about people changing the world and them being changed in this same process – as two poles of a simultaneous self- and world/history-corealizing. A conceptual innovation consists in foreground the notion that every person matters in this world-historical process, always making a difference (however small or large) via activist conotburuitons and, thus, irrevocably changing it through and through, every step of the way. Every person’s action reverberates within the total process of historical world-making/corealizing, changing it in toto. This set of notions carries distinctly political connotations. Using it means challenging social systems that reduce people to passive beings who merely adapt to and “fit into” pre-given structures. Instead, people are posited as active co-creators of the world and themselves, who agentively contribute to their simultaneous co-arising/realizing in light of their sought-after futures (expressed as commitments and activist stances). The socio-political ethos (commitment/endpoint) is highlighted as constitutive of being-knowing-doing, including research, to therefore insist on doing research differently – as an activist pursuit of sociopolitical projects/transformations.

Increasingly, education is coopted by the neoliberal ethos of competitive individualism, adaptation to the status quo, and technocratic meritocracy. Arguably, mainstream reductionist and individualistic psychological theories, such as the biomedical approach to mental health, serve to relentlessly promote this neoliberal ethos. At the core of the psychology undergraduate curriculum, psychological theories decontextualize, objectify, naturalize, and individualize social problems under the guise of biologically oriented attribution. Crucially, if the ethico-political entanglement of mainstream psychological theories with oppressive social practices is not critically examined, traditional psychology teaching will continue to stifle possibilities of social transformation in college and beyond. Far from being neutral or objective, this teaching coopts and stifles students’ voices and agency, instead promoting conformist attitudes of accepting reality as immutable. This paper explores how psychology can be taught to provide space for students’ agentive inquiries, rendering education a site of transformative agency. Drawing on Stetsenko’s transformative activist stance (TAS), I address my pedagogical strategies and struggles in psychology courses at a community college in the United States while engaging and problematizing student resistance. Introducing critical-theoretical tools based in liberatory and decolonizing perspectives, and inviting students to apply these tools to explore their own struggles and potential for agency, is the core step in implementing TAS, coupled with the goal of radically transforming the very mode of education – from passive transmission of knowledge to a collective/collectivist quest for meaningful answers to questions that matter to students and challenge oppressive structures that silence and subvert their identities and agency.

Dark times arose in 2025 when the author’s university proposed disestablishing its School of International Studies and Education, leaving many staff facing redundancy. Throughout, the university reminded staff of the availability of free counselling (limited to three sessions), and a sharepoint site hosting a suite of resources to promote wellbeing for those affected (including advice to floss our teeth as part of a wellbeing routine). This paper offers a counter-narrative, critiquing the neoliberal framing of wellbeing as the individual staff member’s responsibility, and the offer of limited counselling as providing cover for institutional actions that caused unnecessary distress. I re-theorise wellbeing through Stetsenko’s transformative activist stance (TAS), a basis for a scholarship of resistance. TAS foregrounds social change and activism, so I argue that well-being is inextricably tied to individual contributions to collective transformation of institutional/social practices, centralising agency development as key to wellbeing. This connects wellbeing to agency as a situated, relational, and transformative process at the nexus of individual and collective dynamics. While the university focused on individual responsibility to accept the situation and contain our emotions, we validated our emotions, fostering well-being through collective acts of resistance and condemnation, and recognising each individual’s unique voice as part of a chorus of rebellion but also mutual care and concern. Through these analyses, this paper explores the ethico-political implications of defining well-being as an inherently agentive, indeed activist, process: wellbeing as a communal tool of resistance

This work emerges from encounters and collaboration with Indigenous populations of the Amazon belonging to the Pano linguistic branch, who, after centuries of colonization, are now leading a movement of cultural rebirth, including the affirmation of knowledge and the revitalization of their languages and traditions. This collaboration began in 2006, when Indigenous leaders from Pano communities invited me to co-develop projects broadly related to psychology within their communities. Resulting from this work, this paper examines, almost twenty years later, the dynamics of our collaboration during a singular historical moment of Amazonian Indigenous peoples’ renewed and self-directed encounters with the contemporary world. I reflect on and problematize experiences of witnessing and collaborating with Indigenous peoples, especially the Pano populations, living in relatively isolated forest regions, as they establish new cycles of contact. Rejecting deficit-based narratives that portray Indigenous life as lacking, and questioning the notion that Indigenous peoples must remain isolated to preserve their authenticity, I draw on critical methodologies that foreground researchers’ ethical stances (including TAS) while integrating community-based collective inquiry and knowledge-making with practical collaboration in the communities. Emphasizing the sovereignty of Indigenous culture, the potential of collaboration, and the urgency of confronting the ongoing impacts of colonization, environmental destruction, and land dispossession, the study is premised on a decolonial inversion of knowledge, recognizing that Indigenous peoples possess not only their own philosophy but also a psychology and pedagogy, not fragmented, as in the West, but integrative: knowledge-body-praxis-nature.