After decades of political stability, people in Europe have once again been confronted with the reality of war. Although most people in Germany are only indirectly affected—through encounters with refugees, media images, and political debates about arms supplies, conscription, and rearmament—the topic of war has become omnipresent in everyday life.

This also applies to young people, who engage with public discourse through media use and encounter the topic at school. While the impact of war on the mental health of directly affected children has been studied to some extent, little is known about how those indirectly affected perceive and imagine war.

Building on historical studies of children’s perceptions of war by William Stern and others in 1915, this study invited high school students in northern Germany in 2025 to create a drawing in response to the question: “How do you picture war?” A qualitative-reconstructive analysis of these drawings reveals the participants’ implicit knowledge—shaped by media discourses, everyday experiences, and socio-cultural narratives.

Initial findings indicate that, on the one hand, war is still imagined much as it was in previous times, while on the other, it is increasingly seen as a technical phenomenon in which human actors seem absent. At the same time, war appears as a broader social catastrophe extending far beyond immediate suffering.

The presentation discusses these findings from a historical perspective and explores the implications of a militarised public discourse for children’s well-being, meaning-making, and agency.

Dark times are not only global or geopolitical but are also lived in the intimate ruptures of everyday life. This paper attends to such darkness when exploring grief among young relatives of serious illness among a parent or sibling. It presents tentative analysis from an ongoing Ph.D. project on living and anticipated losses among Danish young relatives aged 19-25.

Although pre-death grief has received rising attention it struggles to find ground beyond clinical paradigms focused on risk, adjustment, and measurement. I turn instead to a critical phenomenological approach (Guenther, 2019 ) that combines phenomenological attention to the lived textures of grief with an analysis of the quasi-transcendental social conditions, expectations and structures that shape and delimit specific affective experiences (Hochschild, 1979 ; Ahmed, 2004 ; Jakoby 2012 ).

This perspective unsettles the ontological idea of (pre-death)grief as intrapsychic by showing how it unfolds as deeply lived in everyday life while being structurally silenced. Following Hochschild’s notion of feeling rules (1979) and Ahmed’s idea of happy objects (2010) , the paper reveals how youth operate as a cultural promise of happiness. When the lived realities of illness and loss collide with these affective and temporal “scripts” of youth life, grief becomes misfitting, shamed, and often quieted.

By extending the conceptualization of grief beyond bereavement and situating it within broader social and cultural dynamics, the paper re-theorizes grief as relational, temporal, and political phenomenon that does not belong solely in clinical spaces. Through this work I aim at approaching theory both as an act of paying attention to the silenced voices while unveiling the conditions of these lived experiences.

References:

Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.

Guenther, L. (2019). Critical phenomenology. In G. Weiss, A. V. Murphy, & G. Salamon (Eds.), Fifty concepts for a critical phenomenology (pp. 11–17). Northwestern University Press.

Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575.

Jakoby, N. R. (2012). Grief as a social emotion: Theoretical perspectives. Death Studies, 36(8), 679–711. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2011.584013

Theory in dark times cannot remain a distant, neutral architecture of concepts; it must become a lived practice of meaning-making that is capable of holding what culture tries to unsay or silence. This paper offers an autoethnographic and theoretical exploration of children’s grief after bereavement by suicide, using this taboo terrain as a test case for what “theorizing in dark times” can and must do. I argue that children’s bereavement by suicide creates a distinctive epistemic and ethical demand on theoretical psychology: it exposes the limits of technocratic, risk-managed, and individualised models of distress, while simultaneously calling forth forms of knowledge that are relational, aesthetic, narrative, and politically resistant. Through creative practice and reflective scholarship, I position art and narrative not as adjuncts to theory but as theory-making methods in their own right.

The paper is organised around five interwoven strands aligned with the conference theme: (1) alternative epistemologies in theoretical psychology; (2) intersections of theory, art, and narrative; (3) agency, identity, and global crisis; (4) art as transformative theorizing; and (5) narrative as a site of resistance. Across these strands, I draw on the creation and circulation of my children’s picture book The Way Home and my public and institutional pedagogical work on children’s grief as inter-connected sites of meaning production. Rather than treating these as illustrative “outputs,” I treat them as autoethnographic data, affective theory in motion, and public-facing interventions into the cultural politics of suicide, grief, and childhood.

The first strand argues for an expanded epistemology that resists the implicit hierarchy in psychological knowledge that privileges what is measurable, replicable, and clinically codified over what is experiential, relational, and culturally contested. In dark times, when trauma is not only personal but social, ecological, and political, what counts as knowledge becomes inseparable from questions of power. Children bereaved by suicide sit at the intersection of multiple silences: the cultural taboo of suicide; the protective impulse to shield children from death; the professional tendency to translate suffering into risk metrics; and the educational impulse to present “appropriate” narratives of resilience. These silences can produce epistemic injustice in which children are positioned as passive recipients of adult meaning rather than as contextual and relation meaning makers. I suggest that alternative epistemologies, particularly those grounded in phenomenology, contemporary neuropsychology, critical and decolonial approaches, feminist standpoint theory, and neuroaffirmative relational ethics—offer theoretical psychology a way to treat children’s meaning as authoritative, even when it disrupts adult comfort.

The second and third strands situate children’s grief within wider crises of agency and identity. The paper argues that suicide-bereaved children are not only grieving a person but also grieving a fractured social reality - a rupture in the trustworthiness of adults, institutions, and narratives that promise safety, coherence, and continuity. This resonates with the broader condition of global crisis, the sense that the world adults hand to children is increasingly unstable, unjust, or uninhabitable. Within this frame, children’s grief becomes a microcosm of dark-time theorizing. The child asks versions of the same questions society asks in political rupture - Why did this happen? Who could have stopped it? What does love mean now? What story can carry this without lying? The paper suggests that theoretical psychology must move beyond individualised intrapsychic models towards ecological, relational, and political understandings of suffering, where agency is reconstructed not as self-sufficiency but as shared meaning-making in the aftermath of rupture.

The fourth strand develops the central claim that art is transformative theorising. I analyse the aesthetic decisions, symbolic economy, and narrative structure of The Way Home as a form of “theory done otherwise.” Children’s picture books are often understood as tools for emotional literacy or psycho-education. Here, I propose a different reading: the picture book as a miniature theory-lab that can hold ambiguity, paradox, and tenderness without collapsing complexity into clinical reassurance. The visual and narrative grammar of children’s literature offers a unique capacity to convey what cannot be directly stated, particularly around suicide, where explicitness can be either ethically risky or emotionally uncontainable. In this sense, art does not merely communicate theory; it generates it. It offers an epistemic bridge between embodied affect and conceptual meaning, enabling children and adults to co-inhabit a shared symbolic space where grief can be approached sideways, through metaphor, sensory imagery, rhythm, and moral imagination.

The fifth strand positions narrative as a site of resistance. If dominant cultural narratives of suicide oscillate between sensationalism and silence, then the deliberate crafting of an alternative story becomes political work. I examine how public engagement in forms such as a TedX Talk, radio interviews and public panel discussions, functions as a public intervention into stigma and as a narrative re-authoring that explicitly contests the privatisation of grief. The talk, alongside the book’s public life, is treated as autoethnographic evidence of what happens when mourning is moved from the clinical-private to the civic-relational. This shift matters for children. When adults locate suicide-bereavement purely within the family or the clinic, they risk reinforcing the sense that the child’s grief is dangerous, contagious, or shameful. When grief is acknowledged as a community reality, the child gains access to a broader ecology of care and to narratives that legitimise their experience without requiring them to become prematurely “resilient.”

Methodologically, the paper blends autoethnography with theoretical synthesis. I trace my positionality as a clinician, researcher, parent, and artist navigating the ethical tensions of representing children’s grief without appropriating it. The paper is attentive to the risks of aestheticising suffering, instrumentalising art, or over generalising from experience. I therefore adopt a reflexive stance that asks not only what my creative work means, but what it does, emotionally, relationally, and politically. The analysis privileges moments of friction: places where clinical language fails; where a child’s question disorganises adult certainty; where an image carries a truth that a diagnostic category cannot. These moments are treated as generative sites for theory-building.

The contribution to theoretical psychology is threefold. First, the paper offers a framework for understanding children’s suicide-bereavement as a politically saturated space where epistemology, ethics, and affect converge. Second, it argues for art and narrative as legitimate modes of theorising capable of expanding the field’s conceptual repertoire in the face of taboo, stigma, and cultural silence. Third, it proposes a model of agency-in-grief that is relational and community-embedded, challenging the neoliberal tendency to locate recovery solely within individual coping. In dark times, theory must be accountable to the realities it claims to illuminate. Children’s grief after suicide demands a theory that can stay with pain without colonising it, that can invite meaning without forcing closure, and that can treat stories and images as forms of knowledge that resist both silence and simplification.

Ultimately, I suggest that the child’s grief is not only an object of theory but a teacher of theory. It asks theoretical psychology to widen the borders of what counts as evidence, to recognise art as a way of knowing, and to treat narrative as a civic practice of resistance. In the face of taboo loss, the most courageous theorising may be the kind that is gentle enough to be held by a child and strong enough to challenge the structures that make certain kinds of grief unspeakable.