Conference Agenda

This paper contributes to ecocentric and decolonial reorientations of psychology by exploring how young people in Finland, Senegal, and Brazil learn to contribute to climate transformations. We propose a transdisciplinary research approach that focuses on youth navigating onto-epistemologically diverse worlds – scientific, Indigenous, spiritual, and civic – when making sense of and responding to the climate crisis. Drawing on sociocultural theories of learning ecologies and decolonial notions of epistemicide and epistemic pluriversality, we examine how young people develop adaptation and mitigation strategies around the climate crisis across school, family, activism, and everyday life, and how these repertoires of knowledge and practice co-exist and conflict in youth lives. The research approach involves a participatory methodology, which engages the youth as co-researchers through collaborative ethnography. We will illustrate our research approach by discussing findings that foreground the relational, embodied, and intergenerational dimensions of learning and care that link human and more-than-human worlds. We will discuss how our work invites psychology to problematize its anthropocentric and Eurocentric foundations and focus by conceptualizing learning as an ethical, multi-sited, and collective process situated within varied sociocultural environments. Our cross-case analysis across three continents illuminates how care for the planet is entangled with social and epistemic justice, and struggles for recognition of marginalized knowledges.

As part of an emerging ecocentric psychology (Tateo, 2025), it becomes necessary to question and challenge conventional understandings of the human subject as only exceptional and radically separated from the rest of the living world (Plumwood 1993, 2002). Drawing on insights from an action research project developing a new pedagogy of World-care, this presentation analyses empirical material on how animals are represented to children in early education in Denmark. The findings reveal paradoxical practices that risk perpetuating alienated, exploitative, and careless attitudes towards non-human animals—attitudes prevalent in Danish mainstream culture. Building on a newly established conceptual framework of caring domains relevant to early childhood education, the paper explores ethical and practical dilemmas related to world-care, self-care, other-care and we-care (Winther-Lindqvist et al., 2025). It suggests a possible way forward by applying ecofeminist and postcolonial perspectives to “defrost” our conceptions of the human subject and our own animality. Recognizing that reimagining human–animal with reference to a common ground of animality, also entails profound ethical challenges, the presentation discusses how acknowledging the potential humanness in animals may open new horizons for developing an ethics of care which includes animal others and nature, as a foundation for sustainability education.

The ongoing planetary crises challenge prevailing perspectives on learning and education (Jornet, 2024) and call for a psychology able to think and act beyond anthropocentric foundations. Yet, moving beyond a human-centered focus raises a key question: how can we reimagine subjectivity, agency, and care as ecologically entangled while sustaining commitments to justice and transformative change? We propose a dialogue between cultural-historical and ecological psychologies and posthumanist and feminist perspectives to advance an ecological psychology that conceives of subjectivity as emerging within world-making events—processes that weave material–environmental and socio-affective dynamics in the unfolding of life. Building on the cultural-historical view (Vygotsky, 1987; Engeström, 2015; Stetsenko, 2017) of human life as collective, situated, and transformative activity, we draw from posthumanist and environmental humanities approaches (Haraway, 2016; Braidotti, 2020) that emphasize life as relational, vulnerable, and more-than-human. From this dialogue emerges a view of human–nonhuman ecologies as continuously reconfigured through relations of justice and injustice, where caring and affectivity are central to ethical–political engagement. Drawing on ethnographic work with public-school teachers in an impoverished municipality in Catalonia (Spain), we show how communities enact sustainability as a collective process of commoning and world-making under conditions of precarity. Their resistance to evictions and everyday caring practices expand the meaning of sustainability beyond behavioral adaptation, revealing it as a struggle for dignified living and learning conditions—and as part of the planetary effort to sustain life in dark times.

The psychological profession wants to be a helping profession, and in various ways, psychological theorizing has been supporting the quest of developing concepts that can help with helping others – and at times, with helping oneself. According to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, meanwhile, the art of helping an Other and thereby serve the Other requires humbling oneself and one’s own understanding of the Other. In this light, arguably, were we to consider the Other being our Planet, theoretical psychologists could not be considered very good at humbling themselves to help that specific Other. But perhaps, the problem already starts here: in considering the Planet an Other, and in considering the ‘help’ given as connecting humility to servitude, if not even to sacrifice. With strong inspiration from feminist ethics of care, especially on Tronto (2023, 2017, 2013) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, 2012), psychology’s art of helping is in this presentation translated into a praxis psychology of caring-with. The latter entails understanding one’s help not as servitude to an Other, humbling not as devaluing a psychologist’s knowledge and action. Rather, caring-with invites understanding help as a solidary, trustful process of developing a common that IS both the Other and oneself, on the grounds of not precisely knowing of what ‘we’, of what our Planet’s more-than-human common and simultaneously uncommon worlds need from each one of ‘us’ psychologists, but calling upon ‘us’ to humbly act to gradually find out together.