Conference Agenda

In our time nature is commonly understood as an object, a resource for our productive activities. But nature is not made for us. Nature is an ethical and not-ethical process. It also contains what we find in human lives, but apparently as a system of local processes that are politically unorganized. All the same it has proven it can survive one unapprehended crisis after the other.

However, we, too are nature. But there are important differences between us and the nature, we confront. We are by nature social creatures, that is, we become human beings in social praxis, produce for the general user, divide labor between us, strive to know how to do things. This means that each person cannot help but contributing to the common good, positively or negatively, making provisions for the common future.

Our activities are developed in social life and forming it. The production of goods, division of things, and need for knowledge contain problems of distribution, control, and regulation of what is needed. This means that we cannot avoid organizing our nature and nature politically. The political principles come out of the way we organize social life. We become aware of the political principles as we act. We may act for our own benefit and harm others, but we are still tied up in social life, shape it and contribute to it.

Political principles tend to tie us to a specific social organization whatever its impact on nature and our conception of it. The presentation will argue that an anthropocentric psychology is needed for analyzing our political principles in human praxis so that they embrace social life and nature. We human beings can only survive in this unity.

Considering theory as a function of becoming (Mannheim,1929), the present paper draws attention to theory as an aspect of the researcher’s embodied participation in the exploratory work of grasping-to-reconfigure the hanging-togetherness of global metabolic relations in everyday life. Seeking to foster a shared reflection on theory as a practical engagement, it asks: As the uncertainty of global ecological crisis confronts the inadequacy of psychology’s theories of planned behavior, does theory still matter to our indeterminate future-formings? What happens to theoretical concepts when staying with the trouble? (cf. Gergen, 2022; Haraway, 2016) Counteracting the global ecological crisis hinges upon our ability to redefine our relationship with nature (UN, 2020). Environmental historian Richard White (1996) posits that humans have historically known nature through work-energy relations. Building on White’s epistemic notion, this paper proposes that sustainably transforming human–nature interrelationships requires an exploration of existing energy practices—our petro-cultures (Wilson, Carlson, & Szeman) and fossil subjectivities (Vadén & Salminen, 2018). What energy, as an abstract entity, renders invisible—its social relations and ecological basis—must be made legible to socio-cultural analysis, according to the interdisciplinary field of energy humanities (Szeman & Boyer, 2017; Daggett, 2019; Franquesa, 2018, Lennon, 2025) Seeking to contributing to this transdisciplinary endeavor, present paper suggests the metabolic as theorizing-to-reconnecting global energetic relations with our everyday lives; the body, the psyche, and the social. Drawing on research collaborations with Renewable Energy Communities, the paper highlights key concepts - blind(ing) conditions, exploration, and affect (Jørgensen & Chimirri, 2025) – becoming within the metabolic processes of developing indeterminate common energy futures.

This paper analyzes the conditions and dynamics of interspecies encounters in urban spaces staging nature (Baxter & Marguin, 2024), with a focus on zoological parks and botanic gardens. We pursue here Abram's more-than-human perspective (1996), challenging us to go beyond our focus on human societies, to take into account multiple interdependencies and to overcome the dichotomy between nature and culture. The more-than-human world is defined by Abram as "the open spectrum of the interrelationships between the worlds of living and non-living beings and human societies". In spaces staging nature, this spectrum is explicitly designed, in order to meet the multiple needs of the human and non human living beings, thanks to a complex combination of architectural and semiotic means - or discourses in place (Scollon & Scollon, 2003)- that can be described. This design may lead to encounters, defined as singular events. We offer a dialogical perspective on these interspecies encounters, looking at the topic of mutual recognition thanks to Buber's work on I-Thou relations (Buber, 1923) and Broglio's surface encounters in performing arts (Broglio, 2011).

Drawing from the contributions of this symposium, and fertilizing them with the perspectives of indigenous psychology, cultural psychology, and queer ecology, I will try to delineate the features of an ecocentric psychology, its epistemological, ontological, ethical, and methodological principles. This is not just the attempt to describe a psychology of ecological behavior. It is a more ambitious attempt to situate human psychic phenomena within an ecosystemic network of interdependencies, able to make visible the consequences of our being part of a planetary network of beings, who largely exist despite and regardless of the neoliberal framework that we have naturalized as universal. By proposing this new framework, we aim to inspire new avenues of theorizing and practicing psychology beyond the Anthropocene.