Growing inequality, ecological destruction, and political shifts toward autocracy suggest a bleak picture of the world. Critical scholars have long had a role in documenting and articulating resistance to these trends. In this presentation, I argue that while resistance is important, it is insufficient without clarity of vision of the future we aspire to.

That the current direction of global affairs is leading us to multiple disasters is difficult to refute; as agentic beings we are all called upon to individually and collectively resist. However, simply resisting does not give us guidance as to what we should be aiming for in our efforts. There is no self-evident, consensual vision for a perfect world. What kind of political and economic systems would provide the kind of justice that is currently lacking for so many? What social and cultural fabric would enable healthy and expansive lives that are currently denied to so many? What institutional and psychological foundations would ensure that we live in harmony with our ecological environments for generations to come, and not teetering at the edge of planetary destruction? After we have resisted successfully, what visions of the world will guide us as we clean up the mess that the current insanities have left for us.

Theoretical psychologists can play an important role in contributing to aspirational visions of the worlds we want to live in and create, and that we need to survive as a species. Because the future is unwritten, it is up to us to create the building blocks (psychological, social, cultural, institutional, and ecological) that will make up the foundations of the future world we move toward. Because no one has a god’s eye point of view from which to assert the superiority of their vision over others, our approach has to be situated, humble, and open to dialogue. We need to learn from each other to build our visions collectively, even when – and especially when – we disagree with each other.

I argue that developing visions for worlds we can aspire to requires us to attend to three domains, which I call 1) epistemological/ontological, 2) ethical, and 3) aesthetic. I explore each of these domains in turn, and discuss some of the contributions theoretical psychologists might bring into larger conversations to guide our aspirations.

In these dark times of systemic crisis, theory becomes a site of political resistance. We argue that our current ecological and psychological anxieties are the material symptoms of a dominant, 10,000-year-old narrative of power that is no longer sustainable. We use a descriptive-observational method, grounded in Vygotskian cultural-historical psychology, to perform a narrative archeology, tracing this dominant ideology of conquest to its political-narrative origin at the dawn of the agricultural revolution.

We demonstrate this origin was a foundational act of political erasure, which systematically reframed a viable, complex, pre-agricultural way of life (e.g., Göbekli Tepe) as a “sinful" or "failed" past (e.g., the Edenic myth). This was an ideological "retcon" designed to legitimize a new, hierarchical mode of production.

To resist this dishonest narrative, we employ language rooted in art as a transformative, theoretical tool. We introduce a creative intervention of "conceptual ghosts"—such as speculative, non-existent societies reliant on alternate forms of energy as early hominids adopted fire—to exorcise this dominant ideology and theorize alternative political realities. This artistic method moves beyond mere critique to propose a new, materialist form of political agency: a "Generation Logic" (e.g., open-source principles, regenerative agriculture) that constitutes a practical resistance, seeding the more honest narrative our dark times demand.

Critical psychologists have demonstrated that psychological theory and research are not neutral and apolitical, but rather contiguous to strategies for governing people and operate in the service of power – therefore, psychology has always got a political dimension. However, if we look at psychology through the lens of Rancière, it pertains to police, not to politics proper. According to Rancière, police is not a social function, but a symbolic constitution of the social, establishing a social order which is always based on hierarchies and presupposes inequality. Politics on the other hand incessantly questions the status quo through equality being actively claimed and asserted. In this sense, “psychology, all psychology, is a department of police” (P. Richer). As Rancière reveals, even critical approaches may contribute to the police order, since they imply a hierarchy in access to truth: the researcher, free from ideology, exposes the “false consciousness” of participants. We believe Rancière's work to be essential for a radical rethinking of psychological theory and research, and following his ideas we sketch a project of psychology as a part of politics that dismantles the police order maintaining inequality, marginalization and exclusion. Its main points are: 1) a political ontology of the “unaccounted for”, which questions the ontology of single individuals and considers the subject as situated “between” identities, and subjectivity as a field of intertwining forces; 2) (political) aesthetic epistemology aimed at the “redistribution of the sensible”, at the reinvention of the research object and the subjectivity of the researcher through “poetic activism” (K. Gergen); 3) a methodology of fragmented interpretation that works not so much with meaning as with its excess. The ethics of actively claimed equality and ways of implementing it in psychological research and practice are discussed as well

In this paper, a dialectical theoretical framework of critical psychology (Dreier 2011; 2023) and expansive learning theory (Engeström 2018) is outlined to discuss how inner contradictions in or-ganizations’ task management can work as a driver for development processes including profes-sional learning. Research studies describe how services for children with mental health problems are failing to meet their needs, speaking of a crisis in the help system. Studies link these problems to organizational challenges which increases the risk of extensive waiting time for children and of resource waste (Shahidullah 2019; Bradley-Klug & Armstrong 2014; Morin 2023). At the same time, a lack of research and knowledge about: “The micro-level of interactions, where the in-volved partners enact different sectoral scripts and resolve emergent tensions and conflicts…” (Vogel et al. 2022) is adressed. In this paper results from an ongoing research project: “Interprofes-sional and cross-sectoral collaboration – professional change” is presented analyzing the condi-tions for intersectoral collaboration and work on developing new procedures for intersectoral col-laboration. The analysis shows how logic of a model referred to as the Intervention Ladder Model creates structural inconsistencies between sectors increasing the risk of a longer case processing time. Against this problematization, it is discussed how development and implementation of new procedures for intersectoral collaboration creates opportunities for expansive learning (Engeström 2018) transforming the professionals´ options for action in the collaboration. Based on this analysis the paper will discuss how the new procedures implemented in the collaboration provide new op-portunities for organizational change and how local anchoring of development can result in mean-ingful reorganization of intersectoral collaboration between school psychology and psychiatry.