This paper investigates the phenomenon of Model Collapse in artificial intelligence through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. Model Collapse is observed when Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained recursively on AI-generated data, after which models progressively lose the ability to generate meaningful text. This reveals an empirical difference between human and machine-generated discourse that psychoanalytic theory may help explain. While AI systems can produce text often indistinguishable from human writing, they are fundamentally unable to produce what French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche terms "enigmatic signifiers": the productive failures of comprehension that paradoxically enable human subjects to generate genuinely new meanings.

Laplanche's framework uniquely explains both clinical phenomena and the qualitative difference between human and machine-generated discourse. His account centers on how children's incomplete comprehension of messages from caregivers creates repressed signifiers that constitute the unconscious. These mistranslations are not deficits but productive failures that generate from the perspective of LLM Model Collapse we might term "surplus variance," a mathematical property present in human discourse but absent in synthetic text.

This analysis reveals that AI models are paradoxically too successful at integrating training data. They lack the unconscious dimension created by primary repression, where enigmatic signifiers remain partially untranslated and continue to affect discourse production through slips, errors, and creative transformations. This has implications for AI development and theoretical psychology, suggesting that more sophisticated language models may require incorporating controlled imperfections that mirror the generative role of repression in human psychology: productive misunderstandings rather than improved pattern recognition.

In the so-called informational age, artificial intelligence has become a central dispositive in the organization of everyday life, crystallizing what Milton Santos described as the globalitarian regime: an asymmetric technical-scientific-informational environment that concentrates power, accelerates dispossession, and reshapes the conditions of human becoming. Far from a neutral tool, AI operates as a political-epistemic force that formats perception, narrows agency, and amplifies forms of dependency that must be theorized critically.

Drawing on the cultural-historical psychology of Vigotski and Luria, as well as on critical psychology (Holzkamp; Parker), this paper pretends to examine how AI can induce cognitive, physiological, and behavioral dependencies that reorganize the very architecture of subjectivity. These processes align with broader neoliberal rationalities that transform individuals into optimized data-subjects: predictable, governable, and increasingly detached from collective forms of meaning-making.

From a political standpoint, AI intensifies what Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism and what Morozov characterizes as the illusion of techno-solutionism, converting theory itself into a battleground. In dark times, marked by disinformation, authoritarian drift, social inequality and the erosion of public spheres, critical psychology theory becomes a place of resistance capable of unveiling how power infiltrates the micro-dynamics of sense-making. The idea is not merely to critique technology, but to theorize how subjects can reclaim agency under conditions of epistemic saturation and algorithmic governance. By articulating psychological theory with political economy and critical geography, the paper argues that theorizing remains a vital political practice.

In the current discourse on artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI, and chatbots, the boundaries between human subjects and sophisticated technology are increasingly and often intentionally blurred. The following contribution argues that the conception of the human subject and how this is historically, socially and discursively produced is central to critical contemporary AI debates.

In business narratives, computer science, and popular media, the achievement of “general artificial intelligence” is presented as almost inevitable. Accordingly, new tests and benchmarks are constantly emerging the claim to make “intelligence” measurable. These practices often draw uncritically on dualistic psychological traditions that separate subject and world, mind and materiality, cognition and practice. It is argued that these divisions make it possible to describe machines through anthropomorphic analogies and, at the same time, to conceptualize humans through machine metaphors. Terms such as “understanding,” “reasoning,” and “learning” circulate as seemingly context-free abilities of generative AI systems, rather than being understood as deeply relational, embodied, and socially situated practices. This conceptual distortion is politically and economically situated: It is closely interwoven with promises of growth, funding logics, and capitalist narratives of the future, while questions of subjectivity and sustainability are systematically treated as secondary.

This contribution advocates for a critical, dialectical research practice in current debates on AI’s capabilities. Only through conceptual transparency and reflexive research practices will it be possible to adequately investigate both the actual technical potential and the societal significance of AI.

Post-structuralist theories of power have fundamentally challenged the classical humanistic conception of the subject as a self-transparent, rational, and autonomous origin of meaning and action. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault (1982, 1991) reconceptualized subjectivity not as a pre-given essence but as an effect of historically specific power–knowledge relations. Power is therefore not simply repressive or external to the subject but productive: it constitutes subjects by shaping what can be thought, said, and done within particular regimes of facts and truth. The subject thus appears not as the foundation of social order or critique but as one of its contingent outcomes. This move toward a post-humanist, de-subjectivised understanding of power (Rose, 1999; Butler, 1997) situates human agency within broader assemblages of discourse, practice, and material relations. New Materialism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Barad, 2007) and Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005; Law, 2004) further emphasize that power emerges through heterogeneous human and non-human networks that co-constitute action and meaning. These decentered perspectives offer valuable insights but also generate dilemmas for critical social psychology. From a posthuman standpoint, agency is both expanded (to non-human entities and material environments) and reduced, as the idea of a sovereign human subject is replaced by relational, centreless agency constituted through networks of power (Foucault, 1977, 1982). If subjectivity itself is produced through power, notions of emancipation and critique become difficult to sustain: emancipation and critique of what, and for whom? (Allen, 2016). To deny human agency altogether risks rendering analyses of power either incoherent or pointless. Post-human theories therefore raise fundamental questions about the status of agency and subjectivity, particularly whether and how a first-person perspective can be accommodated within these frameworks.

Subject-scientific approaches highlight that any notion of power presupposes meaningful and effective possibilities for action from a first-person perspective (Holzkamp, 2013; Schraube, 2013; Højholt & Schraube, 2016; Nissen, 2012; Parietti, 2022; Busch-Jensen, 2025). Even if a person’s actions affect millions, it makes little sense to describe them as powerful if they neither choose nor endorse those actions. In other words, power cannot be adequately identified without attention to people’s first-person perspectives. Subject-science and post-humanist theory resonate insofar as both recognize the emergent and relational character of action: power is not a fixed possession but arises through alignments, translations, and stabilizations in networks. Yet they differ substantially, as subject-scientific approaches foreground lived, first-person experiences of power, whereas post-human theories tend to describe power from a third-person perspective of assemblages, discourses, and material relations. Reconciling these views remains a challenge that invites debate.

In dark times, when the conditions for belonging weaken and the bonds that hold communities together begin to fray, our theories of mind and culture cannot remain neutral. They must help us understand how human worlds are sustained, how they collapse, and how the subtle drift from membership into abuse becomes possible. Enactivism, particularly in its culturally attuned form, offers conceptual tools for illuminating these dynamics. Drawing on Humberto Maturana’s account of languaging, affect, and the relational grounding of human life, this presentation revisits enactive cultural psychology not simply as an explanatory framework but as a way of theorizing the vulnerabilities of social existence under conditions of strain.

Maturana’s work begins with a simple but unsettling insight: human beings do not live in a world of information, but in a world constituted through recursive, consensual coordination. Language does not transmit knowledge; it generates the conversational networks within which relational possibilities emerge. The quality of those relations determines whether we flourish in membership or become entangled in abusive, domination-based patterns that erode our humanity. With this in mind, I develop three interrelated claims.

1. Language Does Not Convey Understanding.

Maturana rejects the idea that language functions as a conduit for knowledge, truth, or skill. Instead, language structures the relational space in which learning may occur through lived experience. In dark times, when political and social crises are often framed as failures of information, this perspective invites us to look instead at the breakdown of relational domains: what falters is not the transfer of knowledge but the conditions for trust, mutual orientation, and social membership.

2. Experience Is Expressed, and Expression Is Inherently Risky.

Experience becomes available only through expression; there is no inner realm to which one has privileged access. Yet, expression is never safe. It exposes one to misunderstanding, dismissal, or punitive response—particularly in social environments shaped by fear, ressentiment, or ideological polarization. Maturana’s distinction between membership and abuse becomes especially salient here: in abusive relational domains, expressive acts are met not with coordination but with negation. Thus, self-understanding itself becomes precarious, sustained only to the extent that others respond in ways that allow expression to remain a viable practice.

3. Normativity Is Irreducible and Under Strain.

All cultural expression is normative, and our participation in cultural life depends on developing normative skills that orient us within shared practices. When the norms inherent in our practices erode or fragment, the consensual basis of our human world loosens. What Vygotsky called “higher mental functions” can be reinterpreted as the normative competencies that allow for responsible, humane coexistence—a fragile achievement that dark times place under increasing pressure.

By reframing enactive cultural psychology through Maturana’s lens, this presentation argues that theorizing in dark times requires attending not to information or cognition in isolation but to the conversational ecologies that sustain human worlds, and to the risks, failures, and possibilities embedded in our ongoing attempts to live together.

Loneliness and ressentiment are not merely individual emotional disturbances but socially and politically charged affective formations that acquire heightened relevance in what Arendt called “dark times.” In contemporary individualized and globalized societies, loneliness reflects a withdrawal of social resonance, while ressentiment represents the moralized expression of unresolved injury, humiliation and perceived powerlessness. As Kersten, Neu und Vogel (2024) argue, ressentiment arises precisely when experiences of social injury cannot be directed toward their real causes. Instead, emotional wounds become internalized and transformed through projection, value falsification, reality distortion, victimization. These mechanisms convert a personal experience of injury into a worldview of pervasive bitterness and antagonism — a transformation that not only affects subjective experience but also threatens democratic coexistence.

Loneliness functions differently yet converges with ressentiment in crucial ways. It is not simply the absence of social contact but a state of emotional disconnection intensified by digital mediation, social fragmentation and the erosion of shared lifeworlds. Kersten et al. emphasize that loneliness and ressentiment form a “correlative, though not causal” relationship (Kersten et al., 2024, p. 87): loneliness sediments feelings of exclusion and insignificance, while ressentiment can emerge as a compensatory moral response — turning deprivation into indignation and antagonistic affect. In this sense, loneliness provides the ground upon which ressentiment can crystallize, particularly when social bonds weaken and individuals lack meaningful recognition.

Contemporary psychology often treats emotions as internal states to be regulated, controlled or optimized. Yet emotions must not be reduced to internal states to be regulated. Critical psychology — especially in Holzkamp’s (1983) subject-scientific tradition — conceptualizes emotions as meaningful articulations of a subject’s inner state (Befindlichkeit) as an evaluation of the environment/social situation. Difficult feelings are not failures of self-management; they are experiential indicators of restricted possibilities for action. This perspective reframes loneliness and ressentiment as expressions of structural contradictions rather than personal deficiencies. The central question thus becomes: What does it mean to rationally investigate one’s own difficult feelings under conditions of neoliberal individualization?

The psychodynamic tradition suggests that defense mechanisms transform unbearable feelings into socially acceptable rationalizations. The dynamic unconsciousness therefore does not simply suppress feelings — it reorganizes them, aligning private suffering with socially available narratives. Ressentiment thus becomes not merely an emotional reaction but an ideological form.

Hochschild’s research on the American Right illustrates this dynamic empirically. In Strangers in Their Own Land, she describes how “empathy walls” inhibit mutual understanding and how a “deep story” of betrayal, effort and moral deservedness organizes affective experience among white working-class conservatives (2016). Her informants express loneliness as abandonment by political elites and ressentiment toward those perceived as receiving unfair advantages. Crucially, this affective constellation persists even when objective evidence contradicts these beliefs — an observation mirroring Kersten et al.’s description of value falsification and projection. Hochschild notes that the emotional logic of ressentiment can override rational analysis and becomes a political identity anchored in shared grievance.

Schäfer und Zürn (2021) describe a similar dynamic in the context of democratic regression. They argue that affective polarization, loss of trust, and the perception of cultural displacement create fertile ground for anti-democratic tendencies. Loneliness appears here as a structural condition of atomized societies; ressentiment as its political crystallization. Both are intensified by global economic inequalities, cultural anxieties and rapid social transformations. These analyses underline that loneliness and ressentiment are not merely psychological; they are political emotions shaped by transformations in the social fabric.

Applebaum (2020) likewise shows how authoritarian movements mobilize ressentiment by framing social change as existential threat, and by converting diffuse anxiety into moralized blame. Authoritarian leaders promise relief from loneliness by offering belonging within a tightly bounded collective identity, and relief from ressentiment by providing symbolic enemies. In dark times, such affective strategies can be more powerful than rational argumentation.

Against this background, the psychological question deepens: How do subjects relate to their own difficult feelings — loneliness, resentment, fear, shame — when these feelings are embedded in structures they cannot easily change? This is where Holzkamp’s concept of action potency (Handlungsfähigkeit) becomes crucial (1983). The struggle for agency under conditions of uncertainty, overload and contradictory demands expresses itself as fear of contingency and the desire to maintain control. Freud would describe the transformation of these difficult emotions into cultural productivity as sublimation, though such productivity can also reinforce a split between thinking and feeling, leaving embodied affect unaddressed. Through their integration into social accepted action, they reproduce exactly the same oppressive societal structures that affect emotional suffering.

Meta-subjectivity, in Holzkamp’s (1983) formulation, denotes the capacity to take a reflective distance from one’s immediate experience. Osterkamp (2008) further conceptualizes this shift as a movement toward a “Metaperspectivity,” (Metastandpunkt) enabling subjects to understand emotions as socially mediated rather than purely personal reactions. This resonates with Husserl’s epoché, Heidegger’s ekstasis, and Foucault’s decentering of the subject, each marking a methodological suspension that allows experience to be seen anew. Translating meta-subjectivity into practice reframing difficult emotions—shame, anger, hurt, and fear—not as deficits but as potential starting points for agency. Within critical psychology, emotions articulate a subject’s evaluative relation to their world (Holzkamp, 1983), meaning that difficult feelings reflect constrained possibilities for action rather than individual shortcomings. When explored collectively, these emotions become epistemic resources that illuminate how people experience structural limitations and openings.

Meta-subjectivity allows to move from statements like “I am angry” to the decentered formulation: “There is anger present—what does this reveal about my position in this situation?” This shift initiates what Osterkamp and Huck (2006) describe as social self-clarification (soziale Selbstverständigung): a collective clarification of situations, meanings, and interests that enables shared agency. Such reflective distancing does not diminish the reality of difficult emotions; instead, it transforms them into resources for understanding one’s embeddedness in social relations and for expanding action horizons. Meta-subjectivity therefore functions as both a psychological and political practice—opening spaces in which emotions can support rather than hinder the struggle for greater action potency.

This decentering can transform emotions from reflexive reactions into shared objects of inquiry, opening a “standpoint of trans-determination” from which new forms of agency can emerge. In participatory settings, this ecstasy can take the form of utopian imagination and collective action — not escapism, but anticipatory politics. Empowerment here is not a technocratic tool for strengthening individuals; it is a process of understanding and transforming the structural constraints on action.

In dark times, when loneliness isolates and ressentiment polarizes, gaining meta-subjectivity can guide practices cultivate the emotional and epistemic conditions for democratic life and social change.

How can decolonial psychology liberate and heal us from dark times?

Symposium presentation: Sunil Bhatia, Christopher Sonn, and Jesica Fernandez

Our symposium centers on the core question of the conference: What is the role of theory during dark times? Although theoretical psychology has traditionally aimed to understand the human condition, in times of global crisis, theory also functions as a form of political and cultural resistance. Our symposium is based on our newly published edited volume, “Decolonial Psychology: Academic and Activist Perspectives”, which includes seventeen chapters written by scholars from around the world. The book’s premise is rooted in the idea that to decolonize is to transform the discipline and to imagine “possibilities differently” (Escobar, 2020, p. x), and as Ciofalo (2021, p. 2) suggests, “making the road caminando de otra manera” (walking in a different/other way). To envision a new, transformative decolonial psychology, we must challenge the meanings of “our world” and “possibilities,” as well as our accountability in the field of psychology.

This symposium will focus on key insights that both emerging and established scholars are making to shed light on the struggles and contradictions involved in confronting political violence and cultural crises. We will draw from critical scholars based in various countries, representing both majority and minority worlds. These contributions add to the growing body of work that traces the roots and routes of the decolonial turn in psychology, highlighting the possibilities for alternative psychologies. We have organized the symposium into three parts: the first focuses on efforts to decolonize the psychology curriculum; the second explores how Indigenous and subaltern knowledges contribute to healing, resistance, and relationality; and the third emphasizes methods and applications beyond the university.

The act of understanding someone is an act of political resistance. Within times of rampant mis/disinformation, epistemic laziness is a driving factor behind social-political misunderstanding, an often-under-studied phenomenon in relation to malicious misunderstanding. As such, a theory of understanding is necessary in order to outline a framework of epistemic achievement that accompanies the active task of understanding and thus recognizing another agent’s identity. This paper presents my concept of “identity-understanding,” a neutral framework of the process of understanding another agent’s identity. Following this, I will outline the ways that our social-political environments can create a failure in that process, and how that failure often goes unrecognized, often masked as simple disinterest or ignorance. In this work, I argue that in order for us to be moral political agents, we must not only grasp what it means to understand another agent’s identity, but we must also grasp how our failure to understand another agent’s identity is a distinct ethical-epistemic failure. To act with social justice in a time when identity is in the political crosshairs is to act with this understanding of identity not only of the individual, but of the social-historical pressures that sustain across time. Using the example of gender identity, I argue that there is the possibility of a disconnect between dominant concepts of gender and non-dominant concepts that may undermine the ability for agents to be recognized as valuable, rather than vulnerable.

In dark and destabilizing political times, theory itself becomes a container—an interpretive framework that helps reduce internal chaos by offering meaning, coherence, and context. Instead of viewing current sociopolitical events as isolated, this paper examines how they fit into longstanding patterns in the American story that reflect deeper emotional and psychological dynamics within our national psyche. When we fail to conceptualize the collective as a psyche with its own unconscious structures, we default to an individualist worldview that assigns responsibility—and blame—to individuals or discrete cultural groups. This collapse into individualism mirrors the wish of the collective psyche’s defense system to remain in shadow, as fuller awareness introduces both the possibility of healing and the perceived threat of annihilating vulnerability.

This paper expands on Donald Kalsched’s theory of trauma and the archetypal self-care system to explore how collective defenses continually emerge in times of stress, conflict, and uncertainty. It argues that imagination and the arts offer a crucial counterforce to these defenses. Artistic expression often functions as a trickster energy—moving around the defensive gaze of the archetypal self-care system and revealing truths that authoritarian structures seek to suppress. Art also compels us to confront vulnerable emotional material—anger, grief, and longing—that is essential for transformation post-trauma. In dark times, symbolic life becomes not only psychologically restorative but politically necessary, opening space for collective growth and new possibilities of becoming.

Dominant narratives about gender-based violence survivors perpetuate stigma and reduce complex lived experiences to singular, marginalizing stories. When survivors' narratives are controlled by external institutions and systems, survivors lose agency over their own meaning-making and intersectional inequities—particularly those linked to gender, race, immigration, and socioeconomic status—remain unexplored or hidden. It is through claiming narrative authority over their experiences of healing, resilience, and transformation that survivors contest hierarchical knowledge systems that have historically marginalized their voices with the aim of promoting social, racial, economic, and gender justice. Understanding gender-based violence requires frameworks that dismantle conventional knowledge creation and recognize theory as the foundation of inherent political resistance. Interdisciplinary, critically reflexive, and culturally-grounded approaches empower diverse survivors by prioritizing narrative agency while acknowledging that knowledge generated from lived experience holds transformative power.

Drawing on socio-cultural theory, development first occurs in social interaction and then becomes internalized; therefore, meaning emerges not from a predetermined or fixed set of values but from people's lived engagement with their material and symbolic environments (Vygotsky, 1978). Building on sociocultural-historical theory, an integrated ecological framework (Bronfenbrenner, 1978; Heise, 1998) situates this social injustice as a multidimensional phenomenon existing in the various interactions of personal, situational and sociocultural factors (e.g., risk and protective factors vary across different settings and communities). This theoretical stance becomes inherently political: it refuses to separate psychological experience from social relations of power and insists that any human phenomenon must be studied as a process embedded in historical and social contexts. Moreover, culture is defined as an active, dynamic, and collaborative process of meaning-making in everyday life as “an adaptive process that accumulates the partial solutions to frequently encountered problems” (Cole, 1996, p.329). This approach is critical for understanding gender-based violence, which operates within a social system and manifests differently across contexts while affecting people of all backgrounds and social classes. Additionally, narrating is not merely a process of documentation and passive reproduction, but a powerful symbolic process through which individuals actively construct meaning, relate to and navigate their environments, and exert control over their circumstances (Daiute, 2014); storytelling is used "to do things in the world – to figure out what is going on, to connect with others, and sometimes to imagine how life could be" (Daiute, 2016, pg. 9). For survivors of gender-based violence these discursive tools become a means of resistance and transformation within systems of power, inequality, and injustice. Engendering agency by prioritizing the voices of those with lived experience becomes possible through ownership of their individual narratives and collective meaning-making. Adopting such frameworks is not merely methodological—it is an act of resistance against epistemic injustice. Moreover, in recognizing that how we theorize directly shapes what counts as knowledge and who counts as a knower, such critical research becomes an instrument of power to prompt change and support survivors in (re)claiming their experiences, which are often sites of historically gendered and racialized power inequalities that systematically marginalize survivors and communities.

By recognizing and challenging existing frameworks and hierarchies, the arts—particularly documentary and narrative-based practices—serve as powerful vehicles for this kind of critical investigation. Their capacity to produce alternative narratives, to highlight what has been rendered invisible, and to question existing power structures allows for an active mode of theoretical inquiry in ways that traditional academic forms often do not. Collaborative projects conceived in the form of a documentary or a storytelling workshop function as critically-engaged research practices that deepen our understanding and strengthen efforts to combat gender-based violence. To illustrate this, two examples of such work are explored in this presentation–a documentary film (Owning Our Narrative: From Victim to Victors) and a workshop series (Survivor-led Entrepreneurship: Storytelling for Business and Community Engagement). Rather than treating storytelling as a supplementary activity, these projects recognize the value of lived experience and the process through which individuals (as well as communities) engage critically with systems of power, representation, and resistance. Theory then operates not merely as an intellectual tool but as a form of political engagement in line with bell hooks’ position recognizing theory as a “location for healing” and as a “liberatory practice” (hooks, 1991, 1994). Simultaneously, a documentary produced on survivors’ own terms becomes a political and epistemological tool. Through film, photography, sound, and narrative, it constitutes a mode of inquiry that not only records but also intervenes in the social sphere by asserting survivors’ narratives against the dominant representations that often objectify, misrepresent, diminish, or silence them. This artistic practice defies who is allowed to speak, whose suffering is visible, and whose knowledge counts as expertise. Their capacity to generate alternative narratives disrupts the hegemonic frameworks that sustain gender-based violence—whether through media stereotypes, institutional denial, or juridical abstraction–and offers a collective re-envisioning of a brighter (and more hopeful) future. In times of social crisis, such practice-based research offers not only new insights into the mechanisms of violence but also tangible forms of solidarity, visibility, transformation, leadership and justice.

Socio-cultural psychology owes much to Vygotsky and Bakhtin. Both were transformed by the ambivalent liminal transition of the Russian revolution and its dark Stalinist aftermath, which saw their work supressed and interfered with. Seemingly without knowledge of each other, both developed accounts of the human being as the animal symbolicum and both placed aesthetic experience at the heart of their understanding of culture. During the mid-1920s, both wrote devastating critiques of the materialist assumptions underpinning Russian formalism and both articulated powerful new theories of art and aesthetic experience. Yet, despite the fame both achieved after their deaths, a century later the aesthetic dimension remains a marginal concern within psychology and the social sciences more generally. Indeed, the dominant view of art in today’s psychology of aesthetics is exactly what they warned it would become in the absence of their interventions, namely: formed material functioning psycho-biologically to stimulate pleasant sensations (doubtless confirming the more sinister view of the aesthetics of capitalism developed in critical theory). The premise of the proposed symposium is that today’s ‘dark times’ call for a renewed theoretical interest in aesthetic experience and a fresh consideration of the trails blazed by Vygotsky, Bakhtin and others. From the perspective we develop, art can (though need not) play a transformative role in advancing theory and coordinating practice in times of crisis. Aesthetic experience can mediate the integration of ethical and political practice with scientific theory because the historical becoming of culture, as a unity, involves the mutual interpenetration of distinct ethical, cognitive and aesthetic values. Each of these value spheres is at play in every meaningful cultural interaction we enact, and yet today they are under attack, both singly and in their mutual integration as culture.

The processes linking meaning, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity constitute a central challenge for understanding life trajectories marked by dark times, particularly experiences of entrapment or violence during childhood. This presentation explores the conditions of possibility of speech, as well as the processes of elaboration unfolding within the temporal dynamics of subjectivation and relational life.

Cultural psychology, in the tradition of Vygotsky and subsequent developments, addresses the effects of constraining environments on human development. Following Bakhtin, a path-breaking figure in the vibrant dialogical current, dialogical psychology is grounded in a conception of mind as fundamentally relational. In this presentation, this framework is mobilized to examine dialogical processes and meaning-making, as well as their disruptions under conditions of violence and entrapment, through a fine-grained analysis of discourse, its polyphonies, self-positions, and dynamics of sense.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between power and violence, this communication conceptualizes entrapment not as a form of power but as a radical rupture of the dialogical bond, and adopts a psychodynamic perspective attentive to the singularity of the subject.

This analysis is supported by an in-depth case study embedded within broader research devoted to desire, based on a corpus of more than 250 authentic therapeutic interviews in clinical sexology.

Among other findings, the analyses demonstrate that subtle discursive variations accompany shifts in self-positions and intersubjective dynamics. These findings open toward a renewed understanding of elaborative processes in traumatic contexts, where dominant clinical frameworks tend to posit a relative fixation or rigidity of psychic organization.

Unified libertarian theory (ULT) contends that libertarianism and realism are expressions of a single ethic shaped by context. At its core, ULT affirms the nonaggression principle (NAP) as the foundational moral commitment of libertarian thought. However, it recognizes that international relations lack the legal infrastructure and mutual norms that make this principle operational at home. While a domestic environment allows for law and norms-based restraint, foreign affairs operate in an anarchic environment where deterrence, not morality, secures order. ULT asserts that liberty is preserved through two means: institutions where possible, strategy where necessary. Realism becomes not a rival to libertarianism but its external application in a world without courts, contracts, or reciprocity. Power must still be bound, but by prudence and self-interest rather than statute. The state’s function remains constant: to preserve liberty, not project virtue. Internally, this is achieved through decentralized law and voluntary interaction; externally, through strategic discipline and calibrated force. ULT acknowledges that a state may be forced to act to preserve the liberty of those it serves. Action must be guided by interest, necessity, and proportionality. Coercion is justified only insofar as it defends liberty without becoming its own threat. ULT therefore rejects both the moral imperialism of idealist interventionism and the paralyzed absolutism of doctrinaire pacifism. ULT offers a doctrine for a world where good intentions are not enough. It affirms that liberty is sustained by structure—legal where it can be, strategic where it must. Additionally, ULT can be used to gain greater insight into how states think as unitary actors, relying on public choice theory, realism, and classical liberal thinkers to lay the foundation. Using ULT as a lens can provide insight into causes and outcomes of armed interstate conflicts, alliances, and treaties, while providing greater clarity on interstate and international relations in general.

This theoretical synthesis explores the notion of home as a dynamic, semiotically mediated construct by connecting a dimensional model of home with a case study on international students’ lived negotiations of belonging. The model conceptualizes home as a hypergeneralized feeling field that becomes experientially meaningful through semiotic emergence across temporal, psychosocial, spatial, cultural, and power dimensions. The power dimension, in particular, highlights how social hierarchies, institutional structures, and political conditions shape who is permitted to feel at home and under what circumstances. The case study illustrates how these interwoven dimensions unfold in practice, showing that home is not a fixed location but a dialogical and developmental process continually reshaped through rupture, transition, and imaginative reconstruction. Drawing on dialogical and developmental perspectives, it demonstrates how internal and external voices, cultural symbols, and imagined futures interweave to restore coherence and continuity after migration-induced disruptions.

By linking the theoretical hierarchy of affective-semiotic levels with the empirical narrative of symbolic reattachment, this synthesis reveals how meaning-making, emotion, and imagination together constitute home as both a psychological resource and an evolving identity field. Home thus emerges as a site of agency and negotiation within asymmetrical power relations, where individuals construct belonging through semiotic traces—food, language, memory, and cultural icons—that bridge past and present. The integration of these perspectives underscores the developmental and dialogical complexity of “home” as a lived process and invites further theoretical discussion on how semiotic mediation, identity, and power co-produce a sense of being at home.

This symposium examines the role of theory in society, not as an abstract, static, or reflective process, but as an active framework for analyzing and responding to current social, psychological, and political conditions. Theorizing, in this sense, is a collaborative, iterative process emergent from the interaction between disciplines as well as, importantly, between academia and the public. We apply different methodologies and theoretical frameworks from psychology, philosophy of science, feminist theory, and editorial design to investigate the potential of psychological theorizing in understanding and shaping gender dynamics in contemporary societies. The past decades have witnessed the transformation of mainstream dialogues on gender differences and the reconstruction of gender classifications. Recent shifts in political landscape, such as the rise of the far-right and the resurgence of traditional gender attitudes, reveal not just the fragility of social norms and ideologies, but also their mutability. Guided by empirical data, such as interviews, discourse analysis of digital content, and survey results collected from online forums, we explore different interfaces between psychological theories, current events, and public discourse on gender as potential opportunities for using psychological knowledge for change. We demonstrate how different stages and forms of theorizing can be advanced as a societally engaged practice by (1) applying novel theoretical frameworks to socially relevant but academically under-studied phenomena, (2) reconceptualizing contemporary sociopolitical issues through a psychological lens, (3) attending to how psychological theories actively intervene on and alter the social, as well as (4) exploring how parallels between personal, artistic, and academic analyses can be effectively employed to improve theories for use. (258 words)

1. Mona Klau (Department of Psychology, Psychological Methods and Clinical Psychology Research Group, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

2. Tzu Yun Chen (Department of Psychology and Counseling, National Taipei University of Education, Taiwan)

3. Luiza Yuan (Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science Research Group, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

4. Laura Segalà (Sandberg Instituut, Netherlands; Multidisciplinary designer from Barcelona, Spain, currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands)

TBA

Social isolation and loneliness are widely recognised as major factors affecting mental health. In such circumstances, forming connections in third places is essential. In Japan, cafés known as ‘community cafés’ prioritise social purposes over profit. My fieldwork focused on such cafés, which bring people together and foster a sense of belonging. Yet how do these cafés actually cultivate connections? While the owner’s role in serving coffee and meals and conversing with users is important, it is not the only one. This study aimed to clarify another crucial role. At community cafés, regular users engage in behaviours rarely observed in chain cafés. These include tending the garden, making flyers, playing the ukulele, and greeting other users. Why do they engage in such behaviours? These actions stem from respect for the owner, who operates the café for the benefit of the local community rather than personal gain. Regular users recognise this, and their respect translates into support. In short, their behaviour can be understood as 'caring' for both other users and the café itself. What effects arise from this dynamic? Through such caring behaviours, users build friendships and develop a sense of belonging. Caring for others ultimately becomes a way of caring for themselves. Community cafés thus function as spaces where users care for others and, in turn, for themselves. This is made possible by owners passionately creating and sustaining the space. The owner's foundational role is therefore to create a space where people can care for one another. The chain reaction of mutual care that emerges in community cafés offers hope for the future.

The places we inhabit in everyday life are imbued with normative properties that emerge from ongoing processes of negotiation as well as contestation. The importance of place-making as relational practice of shaping spaces we live in together is being acknowledged from a planning perspective as well as from the point of view of actors’ lived experience of the spatial properties of everyday life. Research in human geography, planning theory and urban development points to the implicit normativities of city infrastructure, architecture, and design as well as its political significance in structuring the potentialities for participation and (public) engagement. In that regard, place-making is intrinsically connected to relations of power, inequality and structures of inclusion/exclusion.

In our presentation we focus on the negative side of place-making by raising the question: What happens when agents reject implicit normativities of places. We argue that such instances imply that places no longer provide scaffolding for routines and habits agents experience as valuable dimension of their everyday life. Against the backdrop of experiences with eco-social transition projects in the city of Vienna, we discuss different modes of experiencing agents’ de-synchronization with places they live in (ranging from crises of attunement and a sense of (not) belonging to open resistance). From there we argue that having to bear places, continuously imposing normative constraints agents experience as unwarranted or outright ‘wrong’ may constitute a felt sense of injustice and may lead to strong feelings of (spatially dispersed) anger, resentment and ressentiment.

Amid ongoing transformations of welfare state institutions—marked by managerial governance and shifting normative expectations—family life emerges as a critical site for examining the intersection of social policy and everyday practice. This paper explores how care, upbringing, and participation are negotiated within families navigating institutional demands in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic and practice-research with children and parents, the analysis foregrounds the subjective meanings of structural conditions for everyday family life.

The presentation includes a Danish case study of an early childhood intervention targeting minority ethnic children and their parents. Termed the ‘mandatory learning programme’, this initiative exemplifies contemporary European policy efforts to enhance children’s future school performance and combat inequality. Through document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the study investigates how political representations of social problems are translated into everyday interventions—and how these interventions shape, and are shaped by, familial routines and relationships.

Findings reveal that while the programme aims to foster inclusion, it paradoxically risks reinforcing exclusion by placing demands that challenge parents’ ability to sustain engagement in education and employment. By theorizing the micropolitics of everyday life, the paper contributes to a nuanced understanding of how broader political and institutional dynamics materialize in daily conditions, and how familial narratives offer insight into contemporary configurations of welfare, responsibility, and social inclusion.

In India, the lifetime prevalence of mental health disorders is estimated at 13.7% of the general population, yet 70-92% of individuals with mental disorders never receive treatment. Most individuals with severe mental illness in India prefer to stay with their families. This preference has created a growing population of informal caregivers and leads to a significant caregiver burden. Additionally, there is a lack of research on the political, social, and structural barriers and opportunities of informal caregiving in India; more attention needs to be paid to this topic due to vast mental health treatment gaps and lack of support for caregivers.

The present study aims to fill this gap by exploring the challenges, cultural understanding of caregiving, and political and social determinants of healthcare that are associated with informal caregiving in India. To facilitate this understanding, the arts-based approach called digital storytelling (DST) intervention which combines digital technologies for storytelling with voices of members of underrepresented communities in research will be employed with 10-12 informal caregivers in India. Over three days of the intervention, participants will design their own digital stories through selection of images relevant to their stories, writing scripts, and adding voiceover to their stories. After 6 months of the intervention, the DST process will be evaluated using follow-up interviews. This intervention will be analyzed using grounded theory and then themes/links will be generated to create a de novo theory. Lastly, a community advisory board will be formed to provide feedback through the research process.

In 1959, Hannah Arendt received the Lessing Prize from the Free Hanseatic City of Hamburg. She traveled from New York to deliver her acceptance speech, which was given in German, titled "Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten: Rede über Lessing," on September 28, 1959. The text was published in English as "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing."

There Arendt interprets Lessing's humanity not as a moral virtue, but as a certain attitude toward society. It entails the willingness to expose oneself to what should be considered as true, even when it is uncomfortable. This attitude, she argues, is particularly vulnerable and, at the same time, outstandingly necessary in dark times.

Arendt’s speech is not a literary-historical analysis of Lessing, but rather a philosophical reflection on his enduring significance. She presents Lessing as a key representative of the Enlightenment. He embodies a superior ideal of humanity. Lessing’s person and work is discussed in broad terms, without engaging with specific elements of certain pieces of his work. However, his plays Nathan the Wise and Minna von Barnhelm would be especially well suited to deepening certain interpretations of Arendt’s approach, or to enriching a more nuanced understanding of humanity.

One aspect that remains somewhat underexplored in Arendt’s speech is the question of how humanitarian ideals and practices might be endowed with greater legitimacy and translated more effectively into action—particularly in what she terms “dark times.” The two above-mentioned plays offer valuable insights into this issue. My contribution seeks to examine these dimensions more closely. Ultimately, my reflections are intended to lend humanistic political psychology greater theoretical rigor and impact.

Crises have historically influenced the development of the international system, but recent crises differ in their scope and impact. These current crises are global and significantly influence the system's structure, creating a narrative of Dark Times characterized by uncertainty, complexity, and fear. Hannah Arendt describes the Dark Times as a “historical moment of horror,” posing challenges for political theorists to understand the role of theory amid such critical moments. It is vital to reconsider how theory helps interpret these crises that define the Dark Times. The emerging field of Comparative Political Theory (CPT) can contribute to this discussion by encouraging consideration of diverse Non-Western traditions, which have helped identify shared elements affected by Dark Times worldwide. Since the concept of Crisis is primarily Eurocentric, aligned with Western modernity’s vocabulary and concepts, applying CPT can reshape our understanding of the role of theory during these times. This approach highlights the importance of political theory in addressing crises and their effects on the international system. Through CPT, several questions emerge: what can Non-Western philosophical traditions reveal about Dark Times and crises that differ from Western narratives? How might incorporating these traditions transform crisis thinking concerning security, global challenges, and system stability?

Imagination is a double-edged sword. It is often heralded as an essential force of resistance in dark times – mobilising people in the fight against ecological collapse or colonial temporalities. Yet it can also be weaponised as an instrument of oppression and governance, as when migration officers are instructed to break down people’s dreams. If power operates in and through the imagination, then studying the battleground of the future requires asking: who gets to imagine the future, and for whom? While it is possible to trace these questions retrospectively by examining, for example, the subversive potential of art, it is more difficult to follow how power exerts itself incrementally upon people’s imaginations in close to real time, especially in increasingly restrictive contexts.

I explore how people imagine the future within a context where the imaginative horizon – that is, the realm of (im)possible imaginations – is encroaching and becoming progressively exclusionary. Based on a longitudinal analysis of online diaries written over more than two decades, combined with two rounds of patchwork ethnography and qualitative interviews, I trace how several diarists’ imaginations have developed from Trump’s announcement of his candidacy to the period following his second election victory. I show how their imaginations of the future have become bleaker, with some interludes of hope, and their sense of powerlessness has grown. As a result, they develop different strategies, such as turning towards the present – towards what remains within their control. From there, I discuss the challenges of generating and presenting theory under these conditions.

This symposium brings together theoretical, historical, and methodological perspectives on Indigenous psychologies and decolonial approaches to psychological knowledge. The contributions critically interrogate the dominance of Western epistemologies in psychology, highlighting how colonial histories, Enlightenment rationalism, and neoliberal models of knowledge production have shaped psychological theory and practice. At the same time, the symposium foregrounds alternative epistemologies grounded in relationality, land-based knowledge, collective memory, and dialogical engagement with Indigenous communities.

Through historical analysis, epistemological critique, and methodological innovation, the presenters explore how Indigenous psychologies challenge universalized psychological constructs, expand the scope of theoretical psychology, and open possibilities for epistemic pluralism. Rather than positioning Indigenous knowledge as peripheral or supplementary, the symposium examines how these perspectives fundamentally reshape psychological theory, research practices, and ethical commitments. Taken together, the presentations invite theoretical psychology to move beyond colonial epistemic dominance toward more plural, relational, and socially engaged forms of knowledge production, particularly in a historical moment marked by political, ecological, and epistemic crises.

In dark times of war, demographic crisis, and institutional decay, this paper examines the Russian conspiracy narrative of population utilization—a discourse that frames demographic collapse as deliberate depopulation. Borrowed from waste-management jargon, the term recasts citizens as surplus biological material sacrificed by hostile elites.

Research on authoritarianism usually highlights top-down propaganda or democratic resistance. This study instead traces conspiratorial narratives that confront the regime from ultra-authoritarian positions, rejecting reform while demanding harsher repression, purification, and “sovereign restoration.” I argue these stories form a hybrid repertoire of political critique that both contests and mirrors authoritarian ideology.

The corpus spans over 100 sources (2003–2024)—party speeches, para-academic texts, oppositional media—capturing competing conspiratorial framings of population utilization. Three variants emerge:

1. a left-Stalinist narrative of elite betrayal and anti-social policy;

2. a right-wing ethnonationalist version centered on migrant-driven “replacement”;

3. a traditionalist techno-critical narrative targeting urban life and digital modernity.

To explain these competing plots, the paper applies the Narrative Policy Framework (Jones & McBeth 2010; Shanahan et al. 2011, 2013, 2017). Though developed in policy studies, the NPF now travels across ideological conflicts and non-democratic settings (Edenborg 2021; Schlaufer et al. 2022), decomposing stories into characters, sequences, morals, and proposed solutions. Paired with Hajer’s “storylines,” this shows how diverse actors converge on a shared frame yet fight over its meaning.

The analysis reveals how conspiracy narratives operate as instruments of internal radicalization and competition for symbolic power inside authoritarian regimes, functioning simultaneously as critique, contestation, and mechanism of subjectivation.

While research on conspiracy theories has rapidly expanded in recent years, it remains methodologically narrow in psychology. Most studies rely on self-administered questionnaires that treat survey responses as stable indicators of belief (“x% believe in conspiracy y”), implicitly assuming that such beliefs are stable individual dispositions, detached from social and historical context. This paper challenges that assumption by approaching conspiracy beliefs within context-dependent communicative practices. Drawing on a mixed-methods study of responses to COVID-19, in which participants first completed a questionnaire measuring endorsement of specific conspiracies, followed by interviews inviting them to elaborate on their earlier responses. The comparison between these two contexts of data collect reveals striking divergences that illuminating constraints in the method. Factors shaping these divergences include (1) the shift from written to oral communication; (2) social desirability and the self-reflexive distancing of statements such as “I know this is a conspiracy theory, but…”; (3) the openness of trust-based conversation; (4) differing interpretations of Likert items as hypothetical possibilities versus personal convictions; and (5) the contrast between forced categorical choice and an expression of a range of possible belief in dialogue. Taken together, the findings problematize the conception of “the conspiracy theorist” as a single, monological type. Instead, they invite an understanding of conspiracy belief as relational, being continuously negotiated within specific communicative and societal moments.

We propose a behavioral view of authoritarianism, and argue that the everyday psychology of rules and punishment is at its core. Authoritarianism is often understood at the nation-state level, categorizing particular regimes and practices as authoritarian, or at the individual level, as a set of tendencies or worldviews. We reposition behavior as the main unit of analysis. We specify a set of behaviors made available only when people interact with the state, and use state rules and state punishment to carry out their own desires (e.g., for revenge, dominance) at the expense of the rule of law. Then, we propose that at the heart of these authoritarian behaviors is regular, everyday psychology—the psychology of norms and norm enforcement via third party punishment, albeit formalized, codified, and refracted through state procedures. States solve large scale coordination problems, largely with codified rules and official third- party punishments. Sometimes people use these procedures to fairly and legitimately uphold the rule of law, and sometimes people use them for their own ends, amounting to authoritarianism. We review how the state channels human desires for punishment and rules, and how people can use state punishment and state rules to behave in authoritarian ways; State punishments can be administered selectively and personally. Official rules can be made that keep individuals from public services, or exist only to keep some people in positions of power over others. The psychology of norms and third party punishment, which enables large-scale human cooperation, is at the heart of authoritarianism.

The symposium addresses the interrelation of language and mind from a variety of theoretical perspectives and discusses the political dimensions implied in each of these perspectives. The presentations share an understanding of language as activity and as dialogical in nature, drawing on various theoretical traditions such as on dialogism inspired by Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and other theoreticians, socio-cultural theory, as well as discursive psychology. As verbal, embodied and material activity language is seen as circulating, having a social history, and being constitutive of the mind. The individual talks will lay out their respective understanding of the relationship between language and mind and from there, discuss how political dimensions are implicit in each approach.

Murakami’s talk addresses theoretical and methodological conceptions of collective remembering from a discursive psychology perspective, broadened by sociocultural theory, positioning theory and actor-network theory, and applies this to the case of UK-Japan reconciliation practices.

Larraín’s talk presents a view of language as dialogical, historical, and performative process of social encounter organized through specific and concrete linguistic forms. It particularly lays out a theoretical view of mind as inner speech and addresses the politics of the mind by focusing on the materiality of the mind and the political dimensions of speech genres.

Bertau’s talk puts forward a holistic theory of language that addresses the living, dialogical, embodied phenomenological and material nature of language seen as activity that is unseparably intertwined with subjectivity and social, cultural, historical reality.

Overall, the symposium addresses how the mind is formed and performed through language activity, and in so doing, provides a cultural account of the individual mind that ultimately also contributes to an understanding of the political dimensions of language and mind.

Despite the recent surge in interest and research studies conducted in the field of burnout, there is still no widely accepted definition of the phenomenon. Many authors have focused on examining burnout aetiology which did not seem to provide clarity needed for better understanding of the construct. Nevertheless, burnout and work-related stress are real phenomena widely observed by different mental health professionals. To this day burnout is not defined as a mental health disorder in the dominant diagnostic classifications. Variations of the burnout diagnosis have so far been introduced in national medical systems of Sweden and The Netherlands, both high-income and developed countries. In this presentation we argue the reasoning for (not) defining burnout as a mental health disorder, drawing on diagnostic classifications and critical reviews. This question is examined from the societal context of low- to middle-income developing countries where the socioeconomic conditions impose additional strain to already overburdened workers. We argue that limited work choices and poor socioeconomic prospects heighten the risk of labor exploitation. Without recognizing burnout as a valid psychiatric diagnosis, affected workers are unable to receive adequate medical care, despite the growing body of evidence and theory in the field. We discuss whether the current neoliberal worldview hinders efforts to define and include burnout as a mental health diagnosis, therefore shaping medical and social policies in ways that prioritize economic productivity over psychosocial wellbeing. The presentation also highlights gender and social class as additional risk factors of burnout.

In dark times of global health polycrises, which are marked by pandemics, widening health inequalities, deteriorating mental health, climate breakdown, and the erosion of public care systems, psychology cannot and does not only serve as a tool to describe the human condition. Instead, it increasingly operates as a political force that shapes how health, suffering, and care are named, governed, and internalised; in short, how we become and remain (un)healthy. This paper argues that contemporary conceptualisation of health, particularly in late capitalism, cannot be understood as a neutral biological or psychological state, but must be conceptualised as a psychologically mediated and politically situated process through which individuals learn to interpret, regulate, and moralise their bodily and emotional experiences. The paper begins by defining health as a mediated psychological function, drawing on sociocultural psychology. From this perspective, health does not exist as an immediate or self-evident property of the body or mind. Instead, it emerges through processes of mediation, whereby individuals learn to recognise sensations, emotions, and states of being through culturally available signs, narratives, and institutional practices. Experiences such as pain, fatigue, anxiety, or vitality become meaningful only insofar as they are interpreted through language, diagnostic categories, educational norms, and everyday routines that teach individuals what these experiences signify and how they should be managed. As such, health functions as a higher psychological process, not a state discovered within the body itself, but a learned mode of interpretation and self-regulation that is acquired through participation in cultural practices. Building on this, the paper further draws on critical Marxist theory, postulating that these processes are not neutral, and examining why particular meanings become dominant, whose interests they serve, and how they are embedded in relations of power. To do so, the paper identifies four dominant psychological discourses through which health is produced and stabilised: health as personal responsibility, health as productivity, health as medical mandate, and health as consumerism. These discourses circulate across institutions such as schools, healthcare systems, workplaces, and digital platforms, functioning as cultural tools that organise both meaning and conduct. Through psychological mechanisms of mediation and internalisation, these discourses then shape subjectivity by translating structural pressures into individualised projects of self-management, self-regulation, resilience, and optimisation; they also link health to moral worth, e.g., being healthy becomes evidence of discipline, responsibility, and functionality. At the same time, illness or distress are implicitly coded as failures of self-management. Although these discourses often appear empowering, critical analysis reveals that they systematically shift attention away from structural, cultural, historical, and economic conditions and power relations. Dominant psychological theories and approaches also inadvertently reinforce these dynamics, particularly those grounded in individualistic models of health, rational decision-making, and behaviour choice and change. Through privileging those theories, research and practices, psychology contributes to the reproduction of widening health inequalities. The paper calls for the denaturalising of psychological concepts of health and well-being; however, it does not reject psychological knowledge or therapeutic practice, but instead asks that they be situated within the social relations that shape their meaning and use. To do so, it is critical to understand health as a relational and dialogical process rather than an individual experience; by doing so, a space for an alternative psychological theory of health grounded in solidarity, interdependence, and collective care could be opened.

In November 2025, the American Psychological Association expressed deep concerns regarding the reliance of some individuals on GenAI chatbots and wellness apps to deliver psychotherapy or psychological treatment. The APA’s health advisory emerged in the wake of a number of reported cases of “AI psychosis” and suicidality after people interacted with AI chatbots when seeking psychological support, particularly during times of crisis.

As the ISTP call for papers makes clear, these are indeed dark times. And as social scientists who are now training to be therapists (via social work and psychoanalysis, respectively), we feel more politically committed than ever to theorizing what it is that AI therapy is missing—and/or the ways in which it is, in some cases, actively deleterious to patient wellbeing. However, we are also interested in considering: is there any way that technologies of care can ever be useful? If so, how and under what circumstances—practically, theoretically, politically, and/or clinically?

By theorizing patient interactions with AI therapy bots alongside the figure of the sexual robotic companion or sexbot, we consider how and why these technologies come to stand in for both panacea and downfall. What kinds of interactions do they actually offer? How do they fall short?

We argue that by thinking specifically about the role of the other in constituting the self, it is possible to understand both the possibilities and limits of these technologies of care. In this unravelling, we utilize Glissant’s notion of the importance of opacity, Bion’s discussion of negative capability, Scarfone’s theorization (through Simondon) of autopoeisis, and broader existentialist theorizing on the possibility of self-knowledge within specific environments—or self-production within the particular environments constituted by unique Others.

In the founding texts of German/Danish critical psychology the phylogenetic development resulting in the human species is conceptualized as a historical and dialectical material process involving organism, psyche, activity, and environment. It is argued that through anthropogenesis hominins gain the ability to walk on two limbs, grip, use, and produce tools, communicate through symbols and speech, cooperate and innovate to sustain life. The brain gains in size, and the duration of ontological development extends.

In these early works the societal nature of human beings was established conceptually, which has afforded attention to sociopolitical and structural conditions in empirical analysis since. Less attention has been directed to organism and environment. However, if we accept that it is in the societal nature of humans to extend, modify, and exploit their habitat, then follows that the developmental dynamic of organism, psyche, activity, and environment has changed dramatically during anthropogenesis. Taking this changed dynamic to the ontological level as embodied subjectivity in sociomaterial worlds we may start untangling phenomena like ‘the global mental health crisis’ (WHO 2025).

Narrowing the gaze to Denmark, I start from what is known about young adults’ mental health and go on asking: what sociomaterial worlds do young adults inhabit? What developmental pathways are made available in what settings? How do these settings afford embodied subjectivities to unfold? By first exploring the characteristics of sociomaterial worlds and concrete settings, then gradually tuning in on embodied subjectivities, we may arrive at insights that do not first and foremost personalise or medicalise mental health challenges. Instead, we may point to structural reasons and solutions, shifting the main responsibility for action from the personal and the medical to the institutionalized pathways of the nation state.

One of the foundations of critical psychology is that humans are understood as both natural and societal/cultural beings, meaning that we are, by nature, equipped for and dependent upon living in societies. This means that there is no "versus" between nature and nurture and that, depending on which phenomenon we investigate, we will need to draw on natural or social sciences. A premise, like many others, that we share with, e. g., cultural-historical psychologies.

When looking at the current critical-psychological research practice, there are (and rightly so) many examples of critiques of the naturalization or biologization of social inequalities, an important direction of critique we share with many other (non-Marxist) critical psychologies. It often seems that any natural science approach in psychology is identified as counter-progressive and ideological. However, if we take the basic assumption that we are simultaneously natural and social beings seriously, this begs the question of when and how we draw on the natural sciences to understand humans.

The contributions gathered in this panel share a common excitement about aspects of the natural sciences, along with a desire to engage with them and integrate them into ongoing critical psychological work. Rather than dismissing these areas as merely positivist or mechanistic, we aim to show how embracing and revisiting them closely can open up new ways of understanding and doing critical psychology and enable more precise and productive critiques of current developments.

We propose the following three contributions to this panel session. We also welcome contributions that have been submitted as individual paper presentations and would fit within the scope of this panel.

No period in recent United States history is quite as iconic as the “long 1960s.” Extending from the mid-1950s into the 1970s, these years saw the rise of the Black Power, Women’s Liberation, and Gay Rights movements in the context of intense anti-Vietnam War activism and a vibrant counterculture. How did these social movements influence psychology, and how did psychology contribute to social change? In this talk, I describe and reflect on a current collaboration with the National Museum of Psychology in Ohio to design an exhibit that weaves together the intense sociopolitical upheaval of this period with developments in psychology. The disciplinary formations of Black psychology, feminist psychology, and lesbian and gay psychology emerged during this time to enrich, challenge, and transform psychological understandings of what it means to be human. In returning to the 1960s, we explore how the psychological and the political intersected, and imagine the role of psychology in the next social revolution.

In times of war and authoritarian rule, taking part in politics can be dangerous, censored, or morally conflicted. This paper looks at how young adults from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus make sense of civic engagement while living under or after repression. Drawing on a study with displaced young leaders from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus who participated in the cross-national educational initiative Eastern European Youth Dialogue, the analysis highlights how personal stories—told in letters, conversations, and autobiographical accounts—show strategies of survival, responsibility, and resistance amid war, displacement, and authoritarian rule. The analysis uses dynamic narrative inquiry (Daiute, 2014), which treats stories not as static reflections but as active tools people use to test ideas, position themselves, and negotiate contradictions in repressive contexts. Instead of showing indifference, withdrawal from state-controlled institutions often reflects conscious choices: a rejection of corruption, a way to stay safe, or an ethical stance against violence. Across the narratives, participants described orientations such as justice, resistance, critical patriotism, peace orientation, and relational solidarity. These perspectives illustrate how people respond to crisis by developing their own ways of understanding civic life when official channels are closed or dangerous. By presenting the voices of young adults navigating these realities, this paper argues that personal storytelling is not only a form of expression but also a way of engaging politically. In dark times, narrative becomes a tool for survival and for imagining alternatives to violence and authoritarianism.

This paper proposes the application of the transtheoretical model, a stage-matched process for effecting change, to better encourage anti-racist behaviors and methods among health care professionals in medical settings. Despite widespread organizational implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which are aimed at reducing racial health and healthcare inequities across the United States, the absence of a theoretical framework for change has made it all but impossible to standardize meaningful anti-racist practices – a point of particular concern as President Donald Trump’s administration rolls back DEI efforts and requirements alike. Translational and clinical sciences aim for a gold standard of diversity, equity and inclusion amidst the dual threats of recent policy changes and ongoing complications born of capitalism, but the lack of a clinical and evaluative model for implementation – and lasting change – persists. Psychologists must account for, and solve for, individual differences in readiness to engage in anti-racist behaviors among medical professionals. The transtheoretical model of behavior change is an analytical framework for clinical applications that can facilitate change – even transformation – among individuals working in medical organizations.

How do young refugees in exile create a sense of who they possibly can be and the lives they possibly can live when their future is unpredictable in the most basic sense?

In this presentation, I will propose a methodological design and analytical approach to investigate how young Ukrainian refugees in Norway (in 2025, comprising the largest refugee group in Norway) negotiate their developmental projects together with their peers. They do so in a political climate that seems to welcome transnational practices, but still in a situation where the host country and home country take particular and conflicting interests in them: assimilating the host country’s norms and possible lives on the one hand and preparing for lives as future protectors of the war-torn home country on the other. How do young persons create situations that foster learning about the world and the world-to-be, and who they can be in it? How do they simultaneously shape particular social realities of the world and their place in it (“worlding practices” (Haraway)? I am particularly interested in how the development of their political subjecthood can be explored as connected to their worlding practices and developmental projects.

The specific situation of young Ukrainian refugees highlights general aspects of development for young people: that the future is uncertain and indefinite (Holzkamp), and that nation-states have interests in young people as citizens-to-be (Lee). I will conclude the presentation with a discussion of how personal development can be viewed as entangled with political projects of nations, for Ukrainian refugees as well as for other young people.

It has become cliche to observe that we are living in “unprecedented times.” Existential threats—climate collapse, skyrocketing wealth inequality, genocide—are ubiquitous, and are made constantly accessible through social media, its algorithms portraying each event as more catastrophic than the last. At the same time, people are also constantly reminded that they must act normally, that the world is conducting business as usual, and that the status quo need not be changed. This contradiction—everything is falling apart, and everything is fine—creates anxiety (i.e., dissonance) that results in compensatory reinvestment in individual mundane activities, and disinvestment in collective action needed to better the world. Integrating materialist economic perspectives with theories of compensatory cognition from social, political, and existential psychology, we theorize that the subjective experience of daily life amidst a slow-motion political and societal collapse a) induces a desperate reinvestment in the individual and b) demotivates collective action. Through the lens of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1962), we also predict that, paradoxically, these effects will grow stronger as existential threats become more salient, as this individualistic turn inward represents an attempt to resolve this contradiction. Crucially, we frame existential threat and its subsequent individualistic reinvestment as a mechanism that exacerbates inequality and, more broadly, reactionary political attitudes and behaviors, by incentivizing behaviors such as resource hoarding and social climbing instead of communal behaviors such as mutual aid and direct collective political action. Through this lens, we seek to apply theory to better understand—in order to radically change—the psychological attitudes and political behaviors of everyday people amidst a bleak political reality that is increasingly rife with contradictions.

The current socio-ecological crisis requires a fundamental change of our lifestyles – a key aspect is the transition from a private car centred mobility to more sustainable ways of transport. Nevertheless, the car is still at the centre of our world. Although this is the case due to an inherent infrastructural dependency, from a psychological perspective the affective and symbolic car dependency is a core interest. How can we understand the subjects’ relation to the car and their resistance to alternative modes of transportation? Therefore, we have to note that the affective-symbolic aspects of the car are closely linked to social conditions of production and distribution.

On the one hand the car represents the promise of social advancement and symbolizes wealth. Its affective-symbolic significance is closely linked to socio-economic status and the idea of individual social achievement. On the other hand, the car represents the domination of nature. It provides an option to express unconscious feelings such as aggression and disappointment that are structurally produced within the capitalist mode of production. The car can alleviate one's own experience of precariousness and/or powerlessness, e.g. by fantazising about owning an exceptional car one day or by driving by endangering others.

In our presentation we outline these affective-symbolic aspects of the car from an affect-theoretical and psychoanalytic social psychological perspective. We illustrate this theoretical discussion using the example of in-depth hermeneutical interpretations of two advertising videos for electric vehicles.

This proposal presents a case for developing a metatheory of social justice within social psychology that activates and raises our consciousness beyond the ascribed realms of oppression and demeaning power relations. Focusing on India's sociopolitical realities, it reflects on broader theoretical frameworks that shape and transform the everyday consciousness of people. Theory, in this view, is not merely a logical arrangement of variables explaining mechanisms; it is a living, political act that redefines its own stance on neutrality and purpose. Whose agenda a theory advances is itself a moral and political question. Most theories in social psychology describe mechanisms or propose limited solutions, yet few critically engage with the conditions of oppression that structure social life. This work argues that theory-building in times of systemic violence and injustice must move beyond Western epistemologies and engage with democratic sensibilities and sensemaking. Drawing from the humanism of Erich Fromm and B. R. Ambedkar, this work is grounded in radical humanism, one that honours the agency of all beings through relationships of love, care, and mutual recognition. Such a framework reimagines theory as a force of social transformation and as an act of resistance, expanding the ethical and political horizons of social psychology.

This symposium focusses on listening and hearing in relation to issues of social justice, child protection, decolonialisation and human rights. It traces concepts, approaches and interventions that variously mobilise listening and hearing in a way that challenges dominant notions of communication, voice and hearing to create transformative dynamics. All approaches are transdisciplinary, operating across psychology, art, theatre, philosophy and the law in order to generate emancipatory practices that are analytical, performative and participatory at the same time. It is an attempt to make the dark resonate transformatively in dark times.

Paper 1: Dr Johanna Motzkau, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, The Open University, UK

Paper 2: Prof Sara Ramshaw, Professor of Law, and Director of Cultural, Social and Political Thought, University of Victoria, CA;

Paper 3: Dr Jill Stauffer, Associate Professor of Peace, Justice and Human Rights, Haverford College, USA. (tbc)

Paper 4: Dr Julia Chryssostalis, Principal Lecturer in Law, Westminster University, UK. (tbc)

“Cultural Psychodynamics” refers to several recent efforts to theorize and legitimize a psychoanalytic dimension in psychological anthropology and cultural psychology, two fields that foreground the entanglement of cultural, social, and psychological processes. This presentation focuses on central features of Groark ‘s (2019) and Mageo’s (2015) Cultural Psychodynamics (see also Hollan, 2022), and it compares and contrasts them to Kirschner’s Sociocultural Psychodynamics (2020, 2025). First, it considers all of these approaches in terms of assumptions, commitments, and goals that they share. (It also briefly differentiates them from Psychosocial Studies). Then it focuses on a tension inherent in Cultural Psychodynamics, as well as between that approach and Sociocultural Psychodynamics. This is a tension between the emphasis on cultural particularity that these approaches highlight and claim to favor, and the intimations of psychological universality that are also present in their frameworks.

Cultural Psychodynamics is a term used by several psychological anthropologists during the past 15 years. Psychoanalytic approaches have always been present in psychological anthropology, but there has also been ambivalence. This is due, in part, to concerns about how psychoanalytic theories have been applied to “other” cultures in reductionist, quasi-evolutionist, and pathologizing (or sometimes idealizing) ways. Since the 1970s, and especially in recent decades, some anthropologists (several of whom have received psychoanalytic training) have broadened and revised the nature and methodologies of psychodynamic interpretation in anthropology. These theorists assert that a psychoanalytic dimension is necessary in psychological anthropology, because the often-dominant “cultural models” and cultural phenomenology approaches lack a dynamic dimension that only a psychoanalytic perspective can provide. That dimension includes a model of the mind as comprised of forces in conflict with each other, as well as a need to attend to motives and feelings that are “not known” (typically called “unconscious,” but conceived here as being on a continuum with consciousness) by virtue of repression, disavowal, or other defenses. Distancing themselves from Freudian drive theory, and capitalizing on pervasive, post-Freudian directions in theory and practice, these theories draw heavily on object relations, relational, intersubjective, and sometimes Kleinian or Lacanian theories. An important goal of these approaches is to redress the ethnocentrism, “coloniality of knowledge,” and epistemic violence enacted or abetted by psychoanalytic perspectives and practices.

Sociocultural Psychodynamics (Kirschner, 2020, 2025) shares the same goals, and draws on some of the same sources, as Cultural Psychodynamics. It is strongly influenced by the work of the original “person-centered” anthropologists LeVine, Levy, and Hollan. But Sociocultural Psychodynamics also bears the influence by some sociological theorists such as Dennis Wrong and late-career Durkheim, and by affective neuroscientists who theorize core, universal emotions, such as Panksepp. As a psychologist, Kirschner’s immediate target is “the sociocultural turn,” including discursive and hermeneutic psychologies. These approaches are deemed incomplete for reasons similar to those voiced by psychodynamic anthropologists regarding what cultural models and phenomenological approaches lack. (Kirschner also makes related criticisms of hegemonic, empiricist cultural psychologies such as those of Grossmann, Heinrich, and Kitayama.)

After a brief summary of the assumptions and commitments shared by all of these approaches, the main focus of the talk is on a tension that is present both within Cultural Psychodynamics and between it and Sociocultural Psychodynamics. This tension exists because psychoanalytic approaches, almost by definition, assume that there are ubiquitous structural and substantive elements of psychic and social life. Yet the approaches discussed here also take seriously the view these that all psychological theories must begin with cultural particularities so as not to impose ethnocentric and colonialist theories and practices. To explore this tension, the rhetoric of both Cultural and Sociocultural Psychodynamics will be examined and contrasted. This is done in order to explore whether their apparently differing ways of negotiating this tension are primarily a matter of emphasis, or signal more substantive differences involving their ontological, epistemological, and philosophy-of-mind assumptions. This issue is also interesting because it parallels a broader set of questions regarding the tension between emancipatory theories’ commitments to universalist philosophies (e.g., Kantianism, critical theory, communicative rationality), on one hand, and calls for decolonization, indigeneity, or radical versions of the ontological turn, on the other.

The final section of the talk will consider these psychodynamic theories’ implications for critical praxis and sociopolitical engagement. Might they not suggest limitations when it comes to implementing some of our hopes for amelioration of these dark times? It will be argued that (even though they are decidedly anti-utopian) they might prove quite helpful for illuminating and addressing some aspects of our present situation(s), including polarization, resentment, the erosion of liberal-democratic institutions, and increasing inequities.

Jacques Lacan’s reformulation of the Oedipus complex shaped contemporary psychoanalysis. Using schemas, he illustrated both identity formation and its underlying structure. By analyzing mother and father as functions, Lacan identified how the subject’s “I” emerges in imaginary, and symbolic dimensions. The maternal function operates through the mirror stage, while the paternal function introduces the subject into the Symbolic order. These functions are universal, since every subject must undergo their alienating effects to become, yet they are actualized throughout lived experience. Therefore, the complexes are simultaneously universal in form and contingent in expression. This universal-contingent tension provides a template for interpreting other concepts, including ideological formations. Building on it, I propose a third sibling function, derived from Lacan’s early reflections on the intrusion complex, which mediates identity development. Siblings act as counterparts for identification but also provoke rivalry and jealousy by competing for the object ‘a’ and parental gaze. This dynamic frequently pushes the subject toward the symbolic order, where identification with the Law offers the illusion of stability. By unconsciously selecting different aspects of the Other, siblings maintain familial equilibrium and secure parental attention, revealing their mediating role. Using a structural approach in the dialectic of reading, I argue that the sibling function illuminates the formation and appeal of ideologies. Its contingent dimension can be seen in diverse sibling relations and ideological positions as specific modes of identification with the Other. Simultaneously, the persistent human need for ideology reflects a universal mediating function analogous to the sibling’s role, suggesting that ideologies may also be grounded in a universal sibling-like mediating structure.

This work reinterprets Jacques Lacan’s notion of the subject supposed to know, taking into account the dominant ideological context in the West. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, this concept is closely related to transference in analysis: the subject of analysis projects knowledge onto the analyst, presupposing that the analyst has access to the [patient’s] unconscious. This presumption is tied to an imaginary (paranoid) form of knowledge, that is, an illusory one. Relying on these ideas, and on the phenomenology of everyday life in our current political reality, we conceptually transfer this notion from the field of intersubjectivity to the intrasubjective domain, treating it as an internalized model of subjectivity. In this way, we conceptualize a specific organization of subjectivity, prominently present in our ideological context (cultural, academic, etc.): the neoliberal subject supposed to know. Developed on the basis of (hyper)individualism, especially its imperative of epistemological superiority and autonomy, this model appears as a configuration composed of specific phantasies, ideas, and narratives that support the subject’s archaic omniscience – the early developmental phantasm of the all-knowing subject. Through a process of narcissistic identification, the neoliberal knowing subject internalizes this model and consequently perceives themself as a universal expert, an all-knowing individual. We explore the implications of this hypothesized identification, particularly the possible constitution of a "politically impotent subject", where impotence is rooted in the imaginary position the neoliberal subject occupies, as opposed to the symbolic. We also discuss how political crises amplify these processes and possible paths toward emancipation.

Our symposium (entitled: Positioning Theory, Narrative, and Power) opens up and traverses the potential of Positioning as an analytic framework to explore and better understand how language functions within the dynamics of reinforcing hierarchical systems, shaping narratives of power, ideology, and agency. More specifically, our four contributions aim to illuminate the relationship between narrative and positioning on one hand, and also build on the existing trend to make use of positioning as an analytic framework for exploring broader constructions of organizational and institutional power relationships.

Bo Allesøe Christensen (Reconsidering Positioning Theory) will open the symposium by presenting some critical and constructive thoughts on positioning theory, intending to modify the notion of moral order with the notion of ‘normative contexts,’ speech (and other acts/activities) with ‘interactions,’ and to reconsider narrative in terms of ‘episodicality.’ His talk will secure the informal character of these notions, taking inspiration from Herbert Blumer.

Si Wang (Positioning Maternal Responsibility and Agency in Hierarchical Educational Contexts) will follow with her contribution, demonstrating how positioning theory can illuminate the moral and ideological dimensions of identity work in migratory contexts, showing how seemingly personal accounts of mothering are deeply entangled with broader structures of power.

Carolin Demuth (Positioning in Citizenship Talk on Sustainability Policy Making) investigates positioning in terms of citizens’ impact on sustainability policy-making. Her goal is to better understand citizens’ constructions of rights and duties within the broader framework of sustainability policies.

Michael Bamberg (“I need 11,000 votes – Give me a break” – Positioning, Conversational Implicature, and Plausible Deniability) will conclude our session by analyzing the infamous telephone interaction from January 2021 between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and explore further how Trump’s positioning (of himself, Raffensperger, and the truth) resonates with his followers.

As the latest outbreak of a global pandemic, the event of COVID-19 did not only reshape the ways in which most of us worked, socialized and structured our everyday, but it also gave rise to a particular creative movement, capturing the health crisis and its effects on our lived experiences in real time. From literature to film, theatre and other performative practices like dance or music, almost no sphere of cultural expression was left untouched by the changes and effects of the pandemic. Creatives – professionals and amateurs alike – stepped into the roles of chroniclers trying to capture the particulars of the crisis, be it individually in diaristic formats or collaboratively in blogs and diverse Decamerone-projects that surfaced.

In my talk, I give insights into the diverse landscape that is the phenomenon of COVID-art and explore its characteristic artistic archival reflexes by comparing Milo Rau’s performance trial Die Wiener Prozesse – Die Verwundete Gesellschaft (2024) and Fourteen Days (2024), a collaborative novel by the US-American Authors Guild. Both pieces are centering the idea of storytelling as a practice that at once accounts for political and societal events and also transforms them through the creative process. This tension, I argue, between collective documentation and artistic abstraction makes COVID-19-art a unique phenomenon, that allows reflections on the mimetic properties of narrative and its ability to organically and aesthetically shape the way we think, remember and experience crisis.

A global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic affects multiple levels simultaneously: global, national, community, interpersonal, and individual levels. While the interplay between different levels of narratives has been emphasised in narrative theoretisations (Bakhtin, 1984; Bruner, 1990; Hunt, 2023), the main focus in the literature has been on the interplay between individual-level narratives and societal-level master narratives, and this process’ importance for persons’ identities and selves (Bamberg & Andrews, 2004; Dunlop et al., 2021; Gergen & Gergen, 1983; Hammack, 2008; McLean & Syed, 2015; Wertsch, 1997). However, master narratives differ from those narratives that arise on different levels to provide meaning during societal ruptures. In this study, through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ecuador, I explore 20 Ecuadorian interview participants’ multilevel narrative engagement with narratives circulating on various levels during the pandemic: the global, national, community, and interpersonal levels. When preparing for future crisis management, it is important with insights from countries that were severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as Ecuador. In this study, I find that in a context where the authorities’ handling has been criticized for being marked by corruption, insufficient information, inaction, and for placing responsibility for high infection levels on local communities, and where trust in the government was low, multilevel narrative engagement becomes important for citizens’ meaning-making and compliance with measures. Participants engaged with stories such as from international sources like the WHO (global level), communication from the government (national level), stories of consequences of the virus and the implemented measures from local communities (community level), and from family and friends (interpersonal level), to make sense of how they would relate to the government's crisis mitigation measures. Multilevel narrative engagement can thus be a conceptual tool that can shed light on citizens' meaning-making in other periods of global crisis and rupture.

Fiction provides us with something that is imperative in times of political unrest: possibility. Stories, whether on the screen or on the page, provide the blueprints of potential, painting a future where tyrannies are overthrown by revolution or communities overcome centuries of oppression. Fiction can provide a framework for how we ought to be. As such, in this paper, I argue that fictional narratives present new versions of social blueprints, one that can assist in our self-understanding. On my own philosophical theory of understanding identity, I argue that in order to fully understand ourselves, we must be able to grasp the dominant social blueprints that are operating in the social imaginary and thus informing our self-understanding. These blueprints, or schemas that outline how we grasp gender, sexuality, and race identities, among others, are dominant because they are openly assumed to be normative and universal. What fiction can do, in outlining possibility, is to provide a visual or descriptive possibility of a new blueprint. When we see a character designed along some non-dominant blueprint, like women in power or queer acceptance, then we have the possibility of embracing that blueprint as a schema for our own self-understanding. In this paper, I argue that there is a social benefit in centering characters with non-dominant narratives and non-normative story arcs, especially in relation to self-understanding and pursuing new possibilities of who one can be when the limits of what we do understand seem limited and bleak.

In May 2025, a group of international scholars convened in Copenhagen to establish the International Network Psychology in Education (INPsyEd). The Network arose from a roundtable delivered at the 2024 ISTP conference held in Belgrade, Serbia. INPsyEd provides a global forum for researchers, practitioners and students to critically engage with psychological applications in educational settings. The Network is theoretically and methodologically inclusive encouraging dialogue and debate around key topics affecting educators, learners and their communities. INPsyEd aims to support psychologists and allied-education professionals grappling with complex twenty-first century challenges. Specifically, INPsyEd looks to examine obstructions and opportunities made available via the use of psychological knowledge in education. In this symposium, INPsyEd members will showcase their research highlighting the role critical approaches to theory play as a socio-political force in national and international education systems. Symposium topics include:

i) How educational psychology’s focus on curiosity can reinforce racial hierarchies and pathologize resistance, limiting anti-racism and inclusion in schools.

ii) How students navigate constrained agency and seek empowerment within restrictive schooling.

iii) How educational psychologists’ standard recommendations for structure shape subjectivities and reinforce control, revealing its political role in inclusive education.

iv) How interprofessional collaboration and conceptualisations of problems shape support practices in schools.

In this presentation, Alexandra––a mixed-Xicana MFT and Expressive Arts Therapies Trainee––uses autohistoria-teoría––an embodied method of inquiry bridging personal experiences with broader social and political landscapes––and testimonio––a healing-centered expressive arts modality––to propose an offering: Mujerista Narrative Therapy as a framework for decolonization, liberation, and healing. Through stories of becoming self-as-therapist and vignettes of nepantla moments in practice, she illuminates the acts of creative resistance that emerge through the transformative process of telling and witnessing both individual and collective histories of trauma and resilience in the time and space of the therapeutic-relationship. Alexandra draws upon knowledge, wisdoms, and practices of women of color feminisms, psycho-spiritualities, and healing-arts traditions, along with narrative, critical-liberation, and expressive arts approaches to psychotherapy to build upon pre-existing practices that dissolve epistemological boundaries and empower both clients and therapists who navigate life at the intersections of diverse worlds.

This paper invites you into the world of pediatric palliative care as experienced by children and their families, guided by the family's own logic of time – a temporality shaped by uncertainty, presence, and the proximity of death. From the positions of (health)care professionals and researchers, I explore how ethics in this field are never fixed or fully articulated, rather emergent, relational, and deeply situated within communities of care.

Pediatric palliative care is a field of sensitivity, where institutional ethical frameworks often fall short of capturing the lived complexities of families navigating life-limiting or life-threatening illnesses. I propose a temporal ethics – one that follows the rhythms of care, loss, and hope as they entangle, yet unfold in real time. With Kofoed & Staunæs’ concept of hesitancy as ethics interpreted as a free, oscillatory movement across, beyond, and within disciplines, this approach challenges dominant paradigms as procedural ethics.

Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, including pragmatism, feminist approaches to care ethics (Tronto, Gilligan, Noddings), and liminality theory (Stenner), I reflect on how research itself becomes a caring practice. Ethics is more than abstract rules – it is about affirmative meaning-making processes shaped by affective encounters and cross-cultural understandings. In this abducted temporality, where time for care and reflection is displaced by institutional demands, we must consider how to perform ethically within.

What does it mean to conduct ethically sound research in a space where hope and loss coexist – and how might a temporal ethic help us listen, hesitate, and respond in a world of institutional care, where no one seems to listen, hesitate, or respond (in time) with care?

Based on the stages of behavior change, support for the emotional transition that takes place between shifts in cognition and action requires the time and space needed to develop meaningful and intrinsic personal commitments. This space is rarely granted in medical settings, yet is required for systematic behavioral change. An overlooked stage of change within the model is when a person prepares to make the change. To achieve preparedness, the process of self-reevaluation allows a person to reckon with the dissonance that arises from learning the need for change and assists in identifying organic desires that shape the duty to act. Interventions in medical settings that cultivate an authentic will to resist racism among physicians are found to have both artistic and narrative components; yet this is underutilized by health psychologists in the medical field. This flash presentation will describe a novel therapeutic art intervention, a curated art space for learning and dissemination, for physicians who have lost their way on their journey to caring for all people. Recognizing the self and the systems that construct a reality of disparate care can assist in the adoption of anti-racist behaviors for health care providers.

In Denmark, almost all children under the age of three attend full-day nurseries – an institutional arrangement that reflects both collective trust in welfare institutions and a deep societal dependency on them. Yet this extensive institutionalization contains a paradox. While early childhood policy emphasizes learning, development, and participation, everyday life unfolds under conditions of staff shortages, administrative control, and the erosion of professional expertise. The very institutions that promise equality and care also come to produce new forms of inequality, vulnerability, and exclusion.

My PhD project explores these tensions through ethnographic studies of young children’s everyday lives in Danish nurseries. Drawing on critical psychology and practice research, I examine how children participate in settings shaped by institutional arrangements that both enable and constrain their possibilities for action and their ways of entering shared practices. Rather than understanding inequality as a background variable – typically linked to children’s socio-economic circumstances – I approach it as situated: something produced and negotiated in the micro-practices of care, attention, and organization, as well as in the children’s own engagements with one another. The study adopts an analytical child’s perspective to develop a deeper understanding of the fundamental institutional practices and the conditions of participation that shape nursery life.

In “dark times,” where early childhood care is increasingly framed by efficiency, standardization, and measurement, theorizing participation becomes a political act. Focusing on the subtle, situated forms of inequality emerging in everyday institutional life is simultaneously to ask what it means for young children to live, learn, and connect with one another in a world marked by institutional pressure. The presentation suggests that theorizing situated inequality requires remaining close to the lived, embodied practices of children and professionals.

This presentation explores how psychological theory operates within conditions of social inequality through the lens of academic self-efficacy: students’ belief in their capacity to plan, perform, and succeed in academic tasks. Within mainstream psychology, self-efficacy is often treated as an internal, value-neutral determinant of motivation and performance. Yet in times of widening social and economic inequality – dark times – the very idea of individual agency calls for renewed theoretical scrutiny.

The presentation examines how psychological theory can obscure or reveal the social structures that shape the experience of agency. When students’ ”confidence” or ”motivation” is explained as a matter of personal belief, structural conditions such as class, privilege, and access are displaced. Thus, theory risks naturalising inequality by framing systemic constraints as individual deficits.

Drawing on an ongoing pilot study among first-year psychology students at Aarhus University, the study investigates how socioeconomic background influences the development of academic self-efficacy during the transition into higher education. Preliminary analyses suggest that students with greater economic, cultural (educational) and social resources develop stronger and more stable confidence in their academic abilities, while others experience more fragile or situational forms of efficacy. By connecting these empirical insights with theoretical reflection, the presentation invites discussion on how psychological theory might resist normalising inequality and instead contribute to rethinking agency and education under unequal conditions.

This paper focuses on how alternative schooling programs influence young people's understanding of themselves in relation to their school life.

In Denmark, all lower secondary schools are now required to offer alternative, craft-based programs aimed at students who are disengaged from traditional academic pathways. These programs emphasize manual skills, motivation, and practical learning.

My study explores the intersection between politically informed initiatives and the underlying logics and ideologies that shape this alternative, craft-based educational programs in Denmark. It examines how these frameworks influence the lived experiences and meaning-making processes of young people within specific educational settings.

Using a decentered view of learning from a situated perspective, the project critically engages with issues of social inequality, class, and cultural difference, highlighting how broader structural conditions are negotiated and reproduced in everyday (school)life practices. Inspired by critical psychology and Jane Laves situated learning theory, I approach learning as a changing practice, that is influent by cultural norms, political change and struggles over what learning are for (Lave). By following young people closely, the project explores how they navigate diverse demands, participate differently across contexts, and develop self-understandings as “suited for school”.

The paper invites discussion on how social differences - particularly those related to class and culture - contribute to experiences of marginalization and alienation. It also raises questions about how educational spaces can foster belonging in times of institutional and societal trans-formation, and how responsibilities for supporting vulnerable children are distributed within educational systems.

Legends of Hybrid Brooklyn investigates how young adults (ages 22 to 40) who grew up in the American suburbs understand and narrate their lives as newcomers to Brooklyn, a borough that has become both emblem and battleground of urban change in the 21st century. While Brooklyn has long been imagined as a site of possibility and cultural vibrancy, it is also a place where the forces of displacement, inequality, and political tension unfold with particular clarity. This project asks how newcomers construct meaning around their moves, their neighborhoods, and their everyday experiences, and how these narratives, which I call legends, mediate the moral and emotional terrain of gentrification. Drawing from Michel de Certeau’s understanding of everyday practices as acts of meaning-making, legends are interpreted as strategies through which people reconcile their sense of self with their place in an unequal city.

This project addresses a major opportunity in gentrification scholarship. While researchers have analyzed the supply side of gentrification, including developers, government policy, and capital flows, and have extensively documented displacement among long-time residents, far less is known about the cultural and moral frameworks of the newcomers themselves. Suburban-raised individuals who began moving to Brooklyn in large numbers after the Great Recession often describe their moves as a rejection of the conformity, segregation, and moral blandness they associate with suburban life, framing relocation as a symbolic break from a version of America they see as failing. Yet their search for alternatives draws them into neighborhoods long shaped by racialized inequality, and their stories reveal the tensions between aspiration and consequence, between the desire to escape the past and the reality of shaping someone else’s future. These tensions challenge common demand-side assumptions that newcomers simply arrive seeking authenticity or grit, assumptions that flatten a group whose actions carry significant consequences. By examining newcomers’ own accounts, the project highlights how gentrification is sustained not only by material transformations but by narrative habits, inherited sensibilities, and the everyday reasoning through which inequality becomes emotionally manageable.

This approach reflects the context of our times. Contemporary life is marked by political instability, widening inequality, ecological uncertainty, and rapid technological change. Under such conditions, people seek ways to make sense of their lives, and the meaning-making they do is itself a form of theory. The newcomers in this study are engaged, consciously or not, in efforts to understand their place in a world that feels unstable. Their stories express anxieties about complicity, hope for alternative futures, and attempts to reconcile personal ethics with structural realities. By listening to how they narrate these tensions, the project contributes to a tradition of theory-building that recognizes everyday interpretation as a window into how people navigate the pressures of modern life.

These interpretive practices also have measurable political effects. Demographic analyses of the 2025 New York City mayoral election suggest that the migration of this group, particularly into historically Black neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn, contributed to the election of an avowed socialist candidate in a city that has usually preferred leadership closer to the center. The cultural orientations, political desires, and ethical self-understandings of the group in question have begun to influence the city’s direction. Understanding their narratives, therefore, helps explain not only neighborhood-level change but the shifting political landscape of one of the country’s most important urban centers.

The project situates these dynamics within what is described as “digital hybridity,” a condition in which online and offline life blur. Newcomers’ stories unfold not only in the spaces where they live but across social media, where identity, emotion, and urban place merge. Instagram posts, TikTok videos, and location-based apps shape where people go, what they consider valuable, and how they imagine community. These platforms encourage the circulation of particular images of Brooklyn and amplify certain ways of speaking about neighborhood life. Digital hybridity is not simply an additional layer placed on top of physical space but a force that shapes how newcomers perceive and inhabit the city. Understanding contemporary gentrification therefore requires understanding how digital traces, aesthetic choices, and algorithmic visibility contribute to the cultural and emotional experience of urban life.

Methodologically, the study uses in-depth narrative interviews, digital ethnography, and autoethnographic reflection. The interviews are designed to elicit personal stories about moving, settling, and living in Brooklyn, inviting participants to articulate the moral and emotional frameworks that guide their everyday reasoning. Digital ethnography tracks how these narratives operate across platforms and how social media contributes to the construction of neighborhood identity. Autoethnography provides an essential reflexive dimension, allowing me to draw on my own positionality as a member of this population and to examine the shared assumptions, blind spots, and narrative habits that might otherwise remain obscured.

Narrative and thematic analyses trace recurring spatial, moral, and aesthetic tropes across interviews and digital materials. The project pays close attention to the language participants use and the symbolic structures that shape their senses of self and belonging. In analysis and writing, I combine ethnographic interpretation with discourse-analytic approaches to understand how legends form through repeated narrative patterns and culturally patterned ways of speaking about urban life.

The theoretical scaffolding of this project builds on a set of thinkers who illuminate different dimensions of contemporary experience. Michel de Certeau offers a lens for understanding everyday tactics as forms of quiet resistance or adaptation, revealing how participants navigate the complexities of urban life. Pierre Bourdieu provides a framework for understanding how suburban habitus, formed through early experiences of space and social organization, shapes dispositions toward the city. Taina Bucher’s work on algorithmic mediation helps explain how digital platforms influence what newcomers see, value, and expect, often before they arrive. bell hooks exposes the emotional and moral legacies of white, middle-class suburban life and how these legacies shape newcomers’ desires and anxieties. Stuart Hall’s account of representation clarifies how personal narratives embed power, revealing how the stories people tell about themselves are tied to broader histories of race, class, and inequality.

Together, these theoretical resources help explain how newcomers craft legends that make their presence in Brooklyn feel meaningful, ethical, and coherent. Legends are not mere stories but the frameworks through which people interpret the city and their role within it. They shape how privilege is rationalized, how complicity is softened, and how inequality is understood or ignored. They also reveal the emotional pressures that accompany contemporary urban life, from the desire for community to the fear of moral failure. By analyzing these legends, the project offers insight into how gentrification is sustained not only by economic forces but by cultural and emotional processes.

Legends of Hybrid Brooklyn argues that understanding gentrification requires understanding the people who participate in it and the stories they use to justify their presence. In a moment of political uncertainty, economic strain, and cultural fragmentation, these stories matter. They influence neighborhood change, reshape political coalitions, and reveal how people navigate the moral contradictions of living in an unequal society. This project contributes to the pursuit of justice and collective wellbeing by showing how meaning-making, in both digital and physical life, organizes the ethical imagination of the city and the world beyond.

This pitch proposes reframing consciousness studies through a critical-phenomenological lens, grounded in my research on the lived experience of intersex migrants in the United States. A recent symposium on consciousness studies (Frontiers Forum, 2025) highlighted an ongoing absence of theories that meaningfully connect consciousness with moral experience, suffering, social context, and the embodied conditions of life. Parallel debates (Houdart, 2025) suggest that consciousness theory may offer an alternative way of understanding political experience, particularly within LGBTQI contexts.

Drawing on findings from my PhD research, I conceptualize consciousness as an ongoing, affective, embodied, and situational activity of sense-making, processual, relational, and contextual (Thompson, 2007; Zahavi, 2005/2014). Within this view, identity is not an ontological starting point, but a flexible, contingent “sedimentation” of experience shaped by institutional encounters and normative expectations. Identity emerges from conscious life and, throughout life, constantly influences perceptual orientation, yet remains an outcome of relational and affective processes rather than a fixed structure (Saketopoulou, 2023).

Intersex migrants’ narratives demonstrate how consciousness operates through bodily attunement, temporal orientation, and meaning making, even when identity categories are undergoing internal and/or external transformation. Consciousness and lived experience remain present, while political and institutional systems may constrain subjectivity by suppressing or misrecognizing identity.

I invite discussion on how centering consciousness offers an account of human experience and how theoretical psychology might better understand embodiment, vulnerability, and lived meaning in “dark times.”

This presentation introduces Fluid Reality as a theoretical lens that emerged from a visual study of bilingual (Arab–Hebrew) kindergartens in Israel/Palestine. The concept arose from close observation of the visual environments of these classrooms: the drawings, photographs, and wall displays that revealed how the space itself narrates stories of identity, memory, and conflict. The distinction between symmetrical and fluid visual practices, observed across different kindergartens, became the ground from which the concept of Fluid Reality evolved.

Building on Rose’s (2007) and Banks’s (1995) approaches to visual research, the visual image becomes a site of theorizing, where aesthetic and pedagogical gestures construct meaning, identity, and ideology. The kindergarten wall thus becomes a theoretical surface—an intersection of art, narrative, and politics.

Fluid Reality challenges what I term Symmetrical Reality; the habitual, seemingly “balanced” way of organizing the world through oppositions and categories. Drawing on Sleeter’s (2024) critical multicultural framework, which exposes and resists structural inequalities, the fluid extends this critique by moving beyond symmetrical representation toward relational, open-ended ways of knowing.

In this sense, pedagogy is an act of political imagination and resistance (Giroux, 1992; Greene, 2008). The fluid reframes theory itself as a practice of refusal, a gentle but radical interruption of the binaries that dominate dark times: us/them, truth/falsehood, occupier/occupied.

The Fluid as Theory thus imagines knowledge and pedagogy as dynamic, permeable, and alive, suggesting that ambiguity, softness, and aesthetic openness—often dismissed as neutrality or non-positionality—can become powerful forms of critical and aesthetic thought, and of political hope.

The recent advent of widely accessible generative AI image models has been met with reactions anticipating a seismic paradigm shift in how art is produced and consumed, opening new quandaries about labor and value for artists. What this paper proposes is a shift in understanding toward the psychological dimension of generative AI as fruitful ground for aesthetic innovation. Drawing from Sigmund Freud’s 1925 essay “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad,” I read generative AI as an extension of and mirror to unconscious processes, generating symptoms in the forms of distortion, glitch, and recursion found across the internet at large. Generated from compressed and distorted training data, AI images resemble dreamwork performed by the internet itself. Analyzing images made by myself and other artists using the same medium, I outline the contours of digital desire and how they coalesce into a collective uncanny. What emerges is a visual language of the algorithmic Real—where glitch and distortion mark the points at which the Symbolic order of code breaks down. In dark times, these images serve as both symptom and diagnosis of a culture whose unconscious has become technological.

This article presents a theoretical and methodological approach towards a greater understanding of the digital everyday lives of children through their own perspectives. The analysis sheds light on aspects of digitalised childhood by applying critical psychology and cultural-historical theory to interview excerpts with children.

The article suggests the theoretical concept of screen ambivalence as a possible way to understand children’s conflictual experiences in specific digital engagements. It is proposed that engaging in curious dialogue with children as knowledgeable agents in their own digital lives provides valuable insight for researchers, professionals and parents alike. Concurrently, it is argued that the commercial functionality of screen technologies must be critically investigated as a developmental condition for children today.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift from face-to-face to online qualitative research, reshaping social interaction and meaning-making. Digital tools are often seen as neutral, yet from a new materialist perspective, they actively participate in producing knowledge and power dynamics.

This presentation proposes a materiality-sensitive methodology grounded in Karen Barad's agential realism and Alfred Lorenzer's depth-hermeneutic method. Drawing on Barad’s concept of intra-action, the online interview setting is an entangled phenomenon where humans and non-humans—participants, technologies, spatial-temporal conditions, etc.—co-constitute meanings, boundaries, and identities. Thereby, Barad's notion of ethical response-ability guides attention to what comes to matter or is excluded, emphasizing justice as entangled with material-discursive practices. Lorenzer's method complements this by uncovering latent, affective layers beyond language, focusing on embodied, material interactions and memory-traces that shape power relations.

As a work in progress from the "Competence Management of Older Workers in Digitized Learning Environments" project, affiliated with the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), this contribution reflects on the political implications of qualitative research. It challenges ageist stereotypes about old(er) workers in the context of digital workplace learning by viewing them as emergent, negotiated effects of intra-actions, and reclaims theory as a form of political engagement—emphasizing qualitative research as a site of resistance and transformation in "dark times".

The presentation invites feedback on advancing materiality-sensitive methodologies to critically explore the role of entangled digitality in co-producing knowledge, power relations, and potentially exclusionary (ageist) stereotypes within digitally mediated (work and research) contexts.

The subject matter of this paper concerns, on the one hand, the potentials and promises, and on the other hand, the limitations or even illusions of the narrative turn in psychology. Joining the critique of narrative reductionism (Atkinson, 1997; Crossley, 2003; Eakin, 1999; Freeman, 2003), the contextualization of the narrative turn proposed here transcends the realm of narratives themselves and includes social ontology as its indispensable referent, since narratives are one of the ontological conditions of social life. It will be argued that the internal validation of narratives (Baerger & Mc Adams, 1999) must be complemented by social validation, that is, validation in terms of social change.

As one of the latest “turns” in the history of psychology, declared in 1980s -1990s, the narrative turn emerged as a critique of previous paradigms in psychology and as a self-confident promise to overcome the previous shortcomings and to finally develop a comprehensive psychology of human experience (Bruner, 1986; Schiff, 2017). However, contemporary narrative psychologists increasingly recognize tensions within narrative approaches (Smith & Sparkes, 2006), some of which are recurrent issues in the history of psychology.

It is argued here that even in its narrative turn, psychology remains mostly blind to inherent, but not always conscious, evaluative dimensions of human experience – dimensions that its founding, but substantially misinterpreted, father Wilhelm Wundt (1883/1921) recognized as the defining features of the subject matter of psychology. Where references to the ethical aspects of narrative approach are made nowadays, they rarely reach the human socio-cultural ontology, remaining instead within narratives themselves (their consistency) or confined to methodological considerations.

It seems psychology needs yet another turn to grasp human experience and to engage more deeply with human worlds.

Learning is often treated as the acquisition of codified knowledge, the mastery of disciplinary concepts, their application to problem-solving tasks, and the demonstration of competence according to predefined criteria. Even where there is recognition that learning must encompass more than this, it is frequently described at a very general level as overcoming uncertainty and crisis and adapting to rapidly shifting institutional and economic demands. This talk challenges that framing by approaching learning from the standpoint of the subject (Holzkamp, forthcoming English translation). Rather than treating uncertainty and crisis as disruptions of learning, I argue that experienced discrepancy is a constitutive condition of learning itself—one that confronts learners with agentive predicaments and forces a reorientation of their relation to knowledge, institutions, and their own life projects.

By foregrounding subjective reasons, power relations, and lived experience, I rethink theorizing itself as a learning process, propelled by uncertainty, contradiction, and the need to make one’s own standpoint intelligible. The talk concludes by reflecting on the implications of a subject-scientific theory of learning for higher education policy and pedagogy, particularly in precarious times, where the question is less how learners adapt to crisis than how learning can become a means of reclaiming agency within it.

The psych-disciplines present themselves as universal, yet their knowledge production and practices are predominantly shaped by urban contexts. Rural populations rarely appear as research subjects or service recipients, except in moments of crisis. This urban bias frames rural communities as outliers, reinforcing their marginalization. This presentation explores how systemic and cultural biases within the psych-disciplines contribute to this exclusion and its profound effects, while considering pathways to better integrate rural realities into the core concerns of these disciplines.

Many rural areas in Germany are facing rising rental vacancy rates, population ageing, and economic uncertainties. These developments weaken social cohesion and democratic resilience, which result in growing support of right-wing populist parties such as ‚Alternative for Germany (AfD)‘. These dynamics, an example of ‚dark times‘ in which the infrastructures of democracy (freedom of speech, civil engagement and so on) have become fragile, call for an immediate act of reimagining collectivism and community mobilization.

One example and response to these challenges can be observed in the small town Kalbe (Milde), in Saxony-Anhalt, a state in the former East Germany. In 2013 Citizens and artists jointly developed the concept of a ‚Künstlerstadt‘ (artists' town) to revitalize the region through artistic participative interventions. Based on the work of artist Joseph Beuys from the 1960s, they refer to the narrative of ‚Social Sculpture’, in which creative practice becomes a vehicle for self-efficacy, community resilience and sustainable change (Köbele 2017). In this sense the ‚Künstlerstadt‘ becomes a promising case to examine the nexus between art, narratives, and transformation.

My proposed work-in-progress-presentation aims to develop a theoretical understanding of the creative practice applying the Grounded Theory Methodology on interviews and documents related to the ‚Künstlerstadt‘. Engaging with the works of John Dewey and Claire Bishop, I discuss how Kalbe’s creative practice differs from other (urban-related) concepts of community-based art and give insights into the role of aesthetic experience reimagining the infrastructures of democracy such as civic engagement, community mobilisation, and political decision-making in rural contexts.

References

Bishop, Claire (2012): Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New York: Verso.

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books.

Köbele, C. (2017). Künstlerstadt Kalbe. Eine Stadt erfindet sich neu. In: Schneider, W., Kegler, B. & Koß, D. (eds.) Vital Village. Development of Rural Areas as a Challenge for Cultural Policy. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 111-116.

Ruppel, P.S., Mey, G. (2015). Grounded Theory Methodology—Narrativity Revisited. In: Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 49, pp. 174–186.

The year 2027 will mark the 250th anniversary of the New York State Constitution of 1777, a foundational document drafted during the Revolutionary War that helped shape the U.S. Constitution. This presentation proposes a critical and creative engagement with such texts through the lens of documentary poetry, a genre that blends archival materials with poetic intervention to interrogate historical narratives.

Using the New York State Constitution of 1777 as a case study, I will present an alternative poetic draft that juxtaposes colonial legal language with Indigenous Lenape cosmology, historical figures such as Chief White Eyes, and speculative imagery drawn from folklore. This reimagined document (available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B1s8QhrVDf6Znb8_0tKKwJB9h2rehc_V/view?usp=sharing) invites reflection on how foundational texts encode both the logic of settler colonialism and the silencing of Indigenous sovereignty.

Through this presentation, I aim to:

• Introduce documentary poetry as a method for engaging with archival and historical materials, referencing works by Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Reznikoff, and M. NourbeSe Philip.

• Demonstrate how poetic intervention can expose ideological tensions and propose alternative narratives.

• Use the alternative draft as a live example of how artists can creatively rework historical documents to reflect multiple epistemologies and voices.

The session will conclude with an invitation to collaborate on a broader interdisciplinary initiative to reimagine foundational texts. A potential follow-up includes the creation of a collective archive of alternative drafts, poetic interventions, and visual narratives that challenge dominant historical frameworks and propose new visions of justice, belonging, and resistance.

Neoliberal discourses of emancipation promise individual freedom, including in the realm of sexuality. Yet this freedom increasingly reveals itself as a paradox of emancipation, in which apparent autonomy remains bound to market mechanisms and longstanding power relations, including sexual readiness. Particularly in the context of sex work, ambivalences, politicizations of sexuality, and polarizations emerge: while one perspective highlights women’s empowerment, agency, and economic independence through sex work, other stances emphasize precarity and exploitation in a market that commodifies female bodies under the label of liberalization and emancipation.

OnlyFans exemplifies the fusion of platform capitalism and parasocial intimacy, where performers do not merely offer sexual content but build and monetize relational needs through parasocial relationship dynamics, grounding a billion-dollar industry. Beyond narratives of OnlyFans as either a site of liberalization or a space of exploitation, there remains a lack of empirical insight into performers' self-presentations, depicted self-concepts, and narratives. On Instagram, OnlyFans performers aim to build audiences they hope to transfer to their subscription platform profiles by creating general content such as comedy, travel, lifestyle, beauty advice, and fitness, as well as content that explicitly reflects on their status in society, personal motivation, experiences, and profession. For this contribution, 8 Instagram profiles of OnlyFans performers (>1 million followers) are analyzed using hermeneutic analysis, aiming to understand the mechanisms of parasocial intimacy and the role of feminist narratives in contemporary forms of online sexwork.

The findings are contextualized in relation to mechanisms of parasocial relationships, neoliberal modes of (self-)subjectivation, and the state of relational values that make parasocial intimacy so effective. Finally, the findings are discussed in light of the paradox of emancipation and the possible effects of spreading novel symbolic narratives about sex work in the mainstream (e.g., winning in neoliberalism and above men), as well as the meanings of related ideas of empowerment, feminism, and liberation.

The present study intends to provide an elaborate literature review and discussion about preliminary data on adult entertainment. As a highly diversified realm of public exposure of the body, there has been historical interest in the political regulation of such activities that psychology has not adequately conceptualized beyond an assumption of marginalization or medicalization.

In particular, my focus is on strip clubs and the public production of pleasure.

The presence of exotic dancers and a variety of spaces where there is a specific expectation about how to be spectators and how to be performers, has had a profound impact over major urban environments across history in terms of the incidence of different kinds of crimes in the areas surrounding these clubs. What is left under explored is the persistent growth of such places in cities like Atlanta, Georgia, where they made a huge contribution to the city’s economic expansion.

My ongoing research project aims to investigate the fist-person account of what is pleasure in life and what is pleasure in the workplace for strip-club dancers. More specifically, I am interested in the perception of what is considered productive and unproductive in strip performances in order to see how performers inhabit the border between leisure time and work time.

In this sense, my main goal is not to detect possible past traumatic experiences with later choices of becoming an exotic dancer, even if I will discus basic demographic information in relation to gender, social class, age, sexuality, ethnicity.

This presentation will be focused on some of these aspects together with a parallel analysis of what constitutes pleasure, leisure time, productive time, and attitudes toward sexuality, on the part of attendees to strip clubs.

This work proposes a comprehensive methodological framework for qualitative research that redefines methodology as the dynamic, integrative core of psychological science. Instead of treating methods as procedural tools for empirical validation, it conceptualizes methodology as a cognitive, affective, and social system of meaning-making that binds phenomena, theory, assumptions, and method into a continuous developmental cycle. The framework extends Valsiner’s methodological cycle into five interrelated spheres: (I) cognitively constructed methodology, (II) socially negotiated method, (III) affectively resonating methodologist, (IV) temporally revealing subject, and (V) psychologically integrating research. Each sphere represents a distinct but interconnected dimension of scientific inquiry within an open system of cultural and psycho-dynamic negotiation.

The cognitively constructed methodology provides the epistemological architecture that anchors phenomenological knowledge psychologically while allowing for adaptive, non-dogmatic application. The socially negotiated method reframes research as a participatory and ethical dialogue, rejecting rigid standardization in favor of creative adaptation and reciprocal meaning construction catalyzed by an axiomatic approach. Within the affective dimension, the researcher emerges as a resonating instrument—an embodied participant whose intuition, countertransference, and individualized attunement serve as legitimate epistemic tools. The temporally revealing subject stands at the center of this process, disclosing their psychological reality as an evolving, time-bound negotiation between the affective self, epistemic security, and the unconscious. Finally, psychologically integrating research unites phenomenology and metapsychology into a coherent, recursive process of iterative interpretation and theoretical synthesis.

By situating methodology as a living system that integrates cognition, emotion, temporality, and inter-subjectivity, this approach restores psychology’s capacity for sustainable meaning-making. It transforms the production of knowledge from a mechanistic exercise into a dialogical, affective, and temporal act of social co-construction. The result is a vision of psychological inquiry as both scientifically rigorous and existentially resonant—a genuinely human science grounded in the interplay between methodological structure and phenomenological life. This vision has been hyper-condensed into a theoretical model integrating the core elements into an dynamic flow within and in-between spheres.

Creative research methods offer novel ways to generate and communicate knowledge that transcend conventional, linguistically based research methods. Innovative qualitative approaches are crucial for developing original theoretical insights. While creative research methods are commonly employed for data collection and, less frequently, for data analysis, they are rarely utilized for theory building. Currently, there are no qualitative methodologies in psychology that systematically outline how to use visual methods to generate theory creatively. In this paper, I propose Figuration Theory as a creative research method that draws on Caroline Levine’s analysis of forms, in conjunction with narrative, metaphor, visual drawing and movement, as a conceptual engine capable of producing innovative theoretical insights. In this methodology, theory is not just illustrated through visual form; it is also generated by it. This paper illustrates the practical application of the proposed methodology through a case study. Guidelines are also provided on how to apply this method in practice, along with its potential applications across various disciplines and contexts. This work offers a valuable conceptual and methodological resource for artists, practitioners, and scholars of narrative psychology and qualitative research methods, both in South Africa and in diverse global contexts.

Taking inspiration from Irigaray’s call to “remember blood”, this paper will reflect on the challenges of developing theoretical concepts that can hold the messy materiality of human experience. This issue will be explored primarily via an archival analysis of two Women’s Studies courses which were developed at the Open University, UK in 1983 and 1992 respectively. These were distance learning courses, meaning all the teaching materials were written or recorded, offering an unusually crystallised picture of how feminist theory was being taught in these two decades. Comparing the two courses offers a historical snapshot of the ‘turn to language’ widely commented upon as occurring in Anglophone social science in the 1990s, where issues of representation became centralised above material concerns. The process of dematerialisation between the two courses will be tracked, exploring what was lost and gained between the two versions of feminist theory presented in these courses, and what arguments were used to justify changes. Irigaray’s concept of “blood” – bodies, life, death, maternal power – will be used to explore a pull away from messy materiality in feminist theory, arguing that this pull is seen more widely in the social sciences as well. Broader lessons about theory making will be explored in relation to our present historical moment, including the perils of defensive theory making.

Mountains have been often places of colonial fracture and capitalist extractivism as well as of refuge and resistance. In times of necropolitics (Mbembe), the relations with them are frequently marked by death and destruction. This research looks for ways to ethically re-relating with the mountains and acknowledging their interactions with us, particularly as migrant bodies-territories. The project considers indigenous epistemologies of territory as a shared place in ontological relation with all related beings and a feeling-thinking understanding of the world. These concepts are expanded through the Aymara ch’ixi positionality, the ambivalent concurrence of fractured cultures, according to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, that presents how beings are and are not simultaneously. These ideas and the resistance of the mountains’ inhabitants bring possibilities of existence in the apparently empty spaces between the mountains. The methodology develops a weaving in the wind of diverse mountain-beings precisely in those spaces. Through exercises of listening to our silences and strategies of poetical resistance, a chain of relational artworks is created that helps to relate to the mountains. These artworks were created in collaboration with several partners in four different phases (stations) in Germany, Mexico, and Colombia, aimed at understanding mountains as traveling the spirals of space-time. This understanding is based upon indigenous conceptualizations of time and belonging with the whole world as territory.

In relation to our research project about the memories of Al-Andalus and the narratives that youth with a Morrocan background in Spain construct about this shared past, we seek to theorize about travelling memories. In our cultural psychological view on memory, this means articulating the relation between individual (particularly, autobiographical) memory and collective memory, as a situated constructive process mediated by narratives. In this vein, in asking how changes in memory occur, we consider not only top-down transformations shaped by social frames of memory, but also bottom-up shifts emerging from individual experiences that extend beyond these frames. We will also reflect on and develop the notion of transcultural memory. This concept from the field of memory studies aims at capturing the dynamics of memory across perceived cultural borders, recognizing that both the narrative means for remembering and the remembering agents are not confined to one single nation, narrative and identity. What, or rather who, is, or rather is not, transcultural? To what degree is transcultural memory, articulating several narratives and perspectives, an activity allowing for a multiplication or transformation of our views on the past and, by extension, the present and future? Two tensions are important to take into account in answering this question: between socio-politically dominant narratives and alternative narratives, and between implicit versus explicit memories. Even though a great variety of alternative narratives is produced, they do not seem to have the same impact as master narratives, indeed they do not hold the same power. Moreover, dominant narratives, like national histories and their schematic narrative templates, operate on an implicit level. Only when made explicit they can be critically reflected upon. Whereas alternative narratives often arise in the explicit attempt to make other possible experiences visible and this does not guarantee their incorporation as implicit frames for looking at the past. How can generating alternative narratives that cross boundaries impact and change collective memories that are dominated by the very narratives establishing these boundaries? We think that addressing travelling memories can significantly contribute to theorizing as an act of sociopolitical transformation. Interviewing transcultural memory agents, our project might just shed some light on the ways in which this can be done.

Research project “Más allá de la narrativa maestra española: Memorias colectivas dominantes y alternativas entre jóvenes transculturales,” with reference number SI4/PJI/2024-00157, is funded by the Comunidad de Madrid through the agreement to foment and promote research and outreach at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

In this paper, I will be exploring the Korean American experience of cultural categorization using a phenomenological theoretical lens following Benet-Martínez's Bicultural Identity Integration framework and Kipling Williams’ Need Threat Theory. Rather than fitting neatly into predefined categories of "first-generation immigrant" or "second-and-later-generation American," many Korean Americans navigate persistent cultural ambiguity that shapes their sense of self and belonging. I will focus on the stage where individuals first recognize they don't fit expected cultural categories, facets that make linguistic absence particularly harmful. The lack of terminology for "in-between" experiences transforms systemic categorization failures into self-blame, influencing one’s identity formation through experiences of otherness and disconnection from both mainstream and co-ethnic communities. I also plan to explore how embracing ambiguity rather than eliminating it through more sub-categories might reframe cultural identity beyond binary categorizations, offering new pathways for acceptance, understanding and solidarity. These lived narratives of ambiguity are acts of resistance, challenging dominant psychological theories made by Western, monocultural psychologists that assume stable, clear cut cultural categories.

This paper matters in the world because there is a lack of exploration, research, and vocabulary for complex multicultural experiences that resist categorization compared to established frameworks that assume clear cultural boundaries and expectations. Simplifying cultural archetypes when it is actually complex can be not only inaccurate but dangerous. In our current political climate, rigid categorization fragments minority communities precisely when solidarity is most needed for resistance against xenophobic and racist movements. This area of identity complexity, categorical perception, and ethnic minority in-group conflict needs to be further discussed and researched to improve both individual wellbeing and collective advocacy capacity within and across minority communities. This offers opportunities for clinicians to recognize how categorical cultural thinking may inadvertently perpetuate harm through identity questioning and denial. Clinicians can use this to develop therapeutic frameworks that validate ambiguous cultural experiences rather than forcing resolution into predetermined categories.

The present symposium seeks to explore and analyze the implications of new materialism in psychology. As an established epistemology unfolded over the last three decades, new materialism has been re-articulating the subject-object research question as well as fundamental aspects related to human and non human phenomena. Very important in this line has been the renovated emphasis over embodiment and materiality in more nuanced, non dialectic, and agentic ways. The critical proposal of new materialism has been to challenge both socio-constructionist focus on discourse, language, ideology, as well as essentialism in its account of interiority and truth.

What can new materialism add to psychology, then? To what extent can materiality speak to psychological processes such as subjectivity, affect, relationships, meaning-making? These are some crucial questions the four speakers in this symposium will be addressing in their presentations.

Some will use embodiment and materiality to make sense of racialization, clothing, and psycho-biological phenomena (Litchmore, Energici, Traversa). Others will focus on research practices and ethics in psychology, exploring implications of new materialism in terms of generalization vs. agential realism (Beck).

The symposium will include a discussant (Thomas Teo) who will point to major issues emerging from the four contributors as well as to challenges with the potential to advance psychological knowledge. There will be appropriate time to engage with the Q&A session with the audience.

Lastly, this symposium will deal with the ISTP 2026 conference theme around theorizing in dark times by considering political what is not deemed as agentic, literate, and social: bodies as always (im)material bodies.

Politically dark times arise when the public realm is undermined “by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet” (Arendt 1995, vii). How does it occur that political practices, even though they are experienced as democratic, can unintentionally nourish authoritarianism? Following this question, the contribution accesses social philosophy through an ethnography of contemporary dance education. Utilizing an approach of aesthetic practices (Hetzel 2021) combined with political theory (Arendt 1998) the ethnography concretizes political action within an art form and transfers the findings to a broader societal and political context.

The ethnographic methodology combines a practice theory informed approach developed in dance studies (Hardt 2023) and life-world-analytical ethnography based in sociological phenomenology (Hitzler and Honer 2015). Based on long-term ethnographic field work focussing dance improvisation in my own amateur and professional dance education I am analyzing differences between the performativity of practices (e.g. authority) and their experience (e.g. supportive, participatory). These contrasting results are being theoretically saturated with theories of practices (Schatzki 2002), phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty 1966), sociology of the body (Gugutzer 2015) and Hannah Arendts political theory (Arendt 1998 and 1992).

The results show how experiences and performativity of practices within dance education can drift apart (1). Transferred to social philosophy it becomes understandable why and how experiences of political action are not always consistent with the their (bodily) performativity (2), providing a theoretical foundation for a self-critical evaluation of current political practices (3).

References

Arendt, Hannah 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah 1995. Men in Dark Times. New York und London: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Arendt, Hannah and Ronald Beiner 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gugutzer, Robert 2015. Soziologie des Körpers. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

Hardt, Yvonne 2023. Tanz und kulturelle Bildung erforschen - Eine Einführung. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

Hetzel, Andreas 2021. „Gehen als ästhetische Praxis“. In: Medienkultur als kritische Gesellschaftsanalyse – Festschrift für Rainer Winter, ed. Matthias Wieser und Elena Pilipets. Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag.

Hitzler, Ronald und Anne Honer 2015. „Life-World-Analytical Ethnography: A Phenomenology-Based Research Approach“. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 44(5): 544–62.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1966. Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.

Schatzki, Theodore R. 2002. The Site of the Social – a philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

This paper explores the potential of Bakhtinian dialogism explored through the medium of embodied artistic practice. Dialogism conceives subjectivity as polyphonic, constituted by multiple interacting voices. However, the focus of research has primarily been within verbal or textual contexts, with limited exploration in other formats. The NOTUS project (2024–2025) addressed this gap by examining how dialogical processes unfold in movement, creation, and shared reflection. Developed as an art–science–education collaboration between psychologists from the University of Neuchâtel, the contemporary dance company “La Méthode” and a Swiss High-School, the Notus Project unfolded through successive, interdependent phases: the co-creation of a choreographic piece for two dancers inspired by Bakhtin’s ideas of polyphony, bivocality, and dialogical becoming; and a series of participatory workshops with sixteen-year-old high-school students who attended the performance. These workshops, led jointly by the researchers and the artists, combined movement, writing, and collective discussion, allowing students to experience dialogism as a lived and embodied relation rather than a theoretical notion. In this paper, we focus on what occurs when dialogism is approached in and through action. We analyze how the artistic creation generated “dialogical artefacts”, like texts, gestures, and metaphors mediating between scientific and aesthetic logics, and how students, in turn, interpreted and re-enacted dialogical principles in their own bodily and verbal productions. This analysis proposes a reinterpretation of dialogism as a theory of discourse and an embodied epistemology, where meaning, biography and identity emerge through reciprocal movement between bodies, voices and perspectives, at the intersection of scientific and artistic logics.

In this paper, I present the ongoing art-research documentary project SPOOL. SPOOL evolves across two entangled levels. On the one hand, it is a film that explores the intersection of the temporalities of everyday life with Parkinson’s disease and the temporalities of basic stem cell research into the brain. As such, SPOOL is a practice of public science communication. Communication of stem cell research is often aimed at teaching ‘the public’ what stem cells are, mirroring a broader movement in science communication practices, in which social scientists and artists are enlisted to translate technoscientific developments (Calvert, 2024). SPOOL aims, instead, to develop alternative narratives of chronic illness experiences and scientific advances, contributing to dissemination events that foster open, empathic conversations about the challenges and hopes of living with chronic conditions while awaiting new treatments. On the other hand, SPOOL is embedded within a qualitative research project and brings together people living with Parkinson’s disease, dance instructors, and natural and social scientists. In this sense, SPOOL becomes a research methodology itself—becoming a “dialogic site” for gathering people who might not otherwise meet, to explore temporalities of Parkinson’s.

Whether considered as science communication, research practice, or both, filmmaking in SPOOL can be understood as enacting certain worlds and politics (Verstappen & Davies, 2024). SPOOL’s practice invites, therefore, reflective critical analysis of the values and ideals that underpin its dissemination and research dimensions. I explore how SPOOL can be theorized as an art-research practice centered around local, experimental collaborations (Estalella & Criado, 2018). I do so in part to explore how concepts from critical psychological theories and science and technology studies (STS) can be brought into dialogue to theorize collaborative practices that explore and represent science in public venues.

Bibliography

Calvert, J. (2024). A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14594.001.0001

Estalella, A., & Criado, T. S. (Eds.). (2018). Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices (1st ed.). Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvw04cwb

Verstappen, S., & Davies, S. R. (2024). Ethnographic film as world‐making: Connecting visual anthropology with Science and Technology Studies. Visual Anthropology Review, var.12338. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12338

AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, are introducing a new form of dialogue to learning and education. Students are increasingly conversing with AI devices to develop their learning and understanding. While this offers new learning opportunities, it also poses risks, such as exacerbating inequalities, intensifying instrumental modes of learning, and fostering one-sided and reduced ways of understanding. This symposium will examine how students learn with generative AI, and what this new form of dialogue means for the activity of learning. The focus will be on preceding learning: how students formulate questions, interpret responses, and construct meaning through dialogue with chatbots. We will also explore how students understand and engage with chatbot responses as a novel form of digitally generated text in their learning activities. Furthermore, we will explore how an AI-driven “dialogue” risks narrowing student agency versus activist dialogical learning spaces that expand it. Building on participatory, subjectivity- and world-centered conceptions of learning, the symposium will contribute to rethinking learning and education in the context of AI by analyzing ways to engage with AI critically and constructively in the practice of learning in higher education, as well as how AI can connect with a transformative developmental pedagogy instead of reinforcing instrumental modes of learning.

In an era of digital polarization, radical online spaces have become key arenas where ideology, identity, and belonging intersect. Despite the growing acknowledgment of gender in radicalization research, it remains absent from the core models and theories that explain radicalization. Without a gender-conscious approach, existing frameworks risk overlooking how masculinities, femininities, and gendered power structures shape extremist recruitment, group cohesion, and ideological framing.

To address the lack of gender integration in radicalization theory, this study advances two main goals. Empirically, it investigates how gendered narratives are mobilized to construct communities within far-right and Islamist online spaces, based on six contrasting Telegram case studies that vary across ideological (far-right vs. Islamist), gendered (male- vs. female-centered), and religious dimensions. Theoretically, it contributes to radicalization research by extending uncertainty-identity theory (UIT) with a gender perspective, demonstrating how gendered meaning-making operates as a mechanism of uncertainty reduction and collective cohesion.

Through qualitative analysis of administrator posts, the research identifies narrative strategies that mobilize gendered ideals of strength, purity, and moral order to delineate group boundaries and reinforce collective belonging. Across groups, these narratives resolve gender-related uncertainty through appeals to clarity, obedience, or nostalgia, sustaining belonging grounded in shared ideology and reduced identity uncertainty.

By extending UIT with a gendered perspective, this work demonstrates that the theory provides a useful framework for examining how radical groups construct communities that offer stability amid gender-related uncertainty. The study also shows how these meaning-making processes become politically charged in times of social instability. Thus, the paper contributes to theoretical psychology across disciplines by linking the social-psychological concept of identity uncertainty to the cultural and political dynamics of radicalization in contemporary online environments.

This project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. Project: 101073440 — VORTEX — HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-0

In this paper, we present the findings of a qualitative research project that examines how psychotherapists reflect on their own gender identity. In doing so, we depict reasons for a research focus on cis genderism. We propose an understanding of studying cis identities as a paradigm comparable to Men’s Studies and Critical Whiteness Studies: focusing and analyzing the dominant norm, its conditions, and psychosocial functions. This perspective is not only productive in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy but is also apt in the study of current social formations in which trans-hostility, homophobia, and anti-feminism are relevant.

The study focuses on how the biographical development of therapists’ gender identities and sexualities affect their work with queer and trans* patients in Germany. Psychotherapists’ biographical narratives and professional relationship experiences were collected through narrative interviews, which we analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and the psychoanalytic method of in-depth hermeneutics. This enabled us to reconstruct not only manifest attitudes, but also latent meanings, embodied relational experiences, fantasies, and defense mechanisms in the context of gender identity.

Perpetrators of mass harm and life-risking rescuers often use the identical narrative to explain their actions: “I had no choice.” This paper explores this striking paradox, analyzing the subjective, phenomenological, and theoretical meanings of "no choice" in these morally antithetical contexts. Drawing on testimonies from Holocaust-era perpetrators and rescuers, and contemporary Israeli cases, the analysis shows that discourses of “no choice” are not merely excuses; they reflect distinct forms of subjectivity. The paper moves beyond social psychological explanations of conformity or ideology by positing the human moral core as central to identity. It examines this claim via free will, values, and moral identity, questioning what it reveals about human agency and the role of moral identity.

Building on Émile Durkheim’s concept of homo duplex, this paper advances a homo triplex model of human motivation. This model distinguishes between three conflicting layers: the individual will, the collective (group) will, and the moral ideal. The perpetrator's "no choice" is theorized as a surrender of individual agency to the collective, a merging with group power that dissolves moral responsibility. In contrast, the rescuer's "no choice" is revealed as a narrative of profound self-knowledge, where personal identity is indivisible from a core moral ideal. For the rescuer, acting otherwise is not a possibility because their freedom is their values.

In dark times, the concept of "choice" becomes a critical site of theoretical and political struggle. This paper argues that a “no choice” narrative reveals its political entanglement—as submission to ideology or resistance via an inviolable ideal. It reframes the free will debate, moving it from abstract metaphysics to a question of political and moral identification, with implications for education.

In times marked by social, ecological, and political crises, the notion of care has become both urgent and contested—and many argue that we are experiencing a “care crisis.” This symposium explores conceptualizations of care that foreground culturally embedded, collective practices and resistance to neoliberal models.

Drawing on a transformative activist stance, cultural-developmental theory, critical psychology, feminist perspectives, and social practice approaches, we aim to rethink care beyond individualized responsibility—toward collective, relational, and political dimensions.

Our dialogue spans three interconnected axes:

• Cultures of care: How everyday, culturally situated practices form the relational infrastructure of development and learning, challenging universal assumptions.

• Care and emotions: Examining the link between care and emotions offers a critical perspective on the growing emphasis on emotion and self-regulation as solutions to educational challenges. We explore emotions as carriers of knowledge that inform critical analysis and inspire social change.

• Politics of care: How power, policy, and institutional forces shape care in times of crisis, and how transformative pedagogies can resist reductive, individualistic framings.

We invite discussions on conceptualizing care beyond narrow psychological constructs—embracing dynamic cultural frameworks, critical reflexivity, and participatory, transformative research methods. Together, we explore how conceptualizing care collectively and politically can foster resistance, solidarity, and social justice in research and educational practice.

Through dialogue across disciplines, we seek to advance theorizing that not only interprets care but also transforms how we practice it in research and education

This paper challenges the assumption – explicit in the conference call and pervasive in critical psychology – that theory operates as a form of political engagement. Different critical strands of psychological theory often present theoretical work as inherently political. I argue, however, that such claims frequently overestimate the transformative capacities of theory and obscure the institutional conditions under which it is produced and circulated. I examine how theoretical claims are shaped by the positionality of their academic producers, the constrained audiences they address, and the disciplinary histories that condition their political reach. Theory produced within academia is structurally limited as a political tool: its political potential depends not on its conceptual content but on its embedding within institutional, pedagogical, administrative, or activist practices. Within neoliberal universities, however, theory circulates largely as a symbolic gesture – a moral vocabulary for scholars rather than a driver of political transformation – since academic labor is shaped by performance metrics, precarious contracts, and distinct institutional cultures. This raises two key questions: from what position can theorists claim political agency, and who is the subject of theory under such conditions? A related question concerns the audience of theory, since universities function as echo chambers in which most theoretical writing addresses only other academics in closed circuits of journals, conferences, and university programs. Critical theory thus remains largely insulated from the social fields it purports to critique. Moreover, psychology’s disciplinary history (Danziger, Morawski, Rose) shows that its political impact has traditionally emerged through its entanglement with governance, administration, and technologies of control rather than through its theory or conceptual critique. Finally, I argue for the temporal asymmetry between theory and political action. Following Hegel’s dictum that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, I propose that theory is typically reactive rather than catalytic: it arrives after social and political ruptures, offering retrospective interpretation rather than antecedent intervention. This dynamic is illustrated by a recent wave of spontaneous and decentralized student and civil mobilization in Serbia, which unfolded without theoretical articulation or academic guidance and only later demanded scholarly explanation. The example underscores the limited political agency of theoretical psychology and highlights the gap between theory’s political aspirations and its actual effects.

Why people support political-economic ideologies that contradict collective socio-economic interests associated with their position in society, is a long-standing conundrum. System justification theory explains this paradox “false consciousness” through a palliative function of ideology, serving individuals to regulate negative affect and maintain coherent worldviews by reducing dissonant cognitions and appeasing epistemic, existential, and relational motives. Drawing on this literature, this study examines psychological functions of neoliberal ideology among socio-economically disadvantaged persons. Semi-structured interviews with nine individuals in precarious life situations and long-term unemployment in Austria and Germany were examined using thematic content analysis and hermeneutic interpretation. Respondents endorsed neoliberal logics of individualism, competition, and instrumentality by verbalizing meritocratic explanations for poverty and success, opposition against redistributing wealth, internalized inferiority, and economic utility as indicating human worth. Structural analyses showed how these beliefs served psychological purposes by reducing cognitive dissonance, justifying the status quo, and appealing to epistemic needs for simplicity, structure, order, and predictability of the social environment. Emerging themes were xenophobic stereotypes and group-based enmity. Perceived existential threats of economic crisis were projected onto immigrants, scapegoated for lacking self-reliance, illegitimately appropriating resources, and insufficiently contributing to the host economy. Results demonstrate how neoliberal ideology captures epistemic and existential motives to reproduce social inequalities and tensions in the belief systems of those deprived of status and resources. Amalgamation of free-market ideology with proto-fascist themes explains the widespread rise of right-wing populism in advanced neoliberal societies, leading to a crisis of democracy reminiscent of other dark times in human history.

Theory is often invoked as a moral or political gesture - a means of resistance, enlightenment, or critique, especially in dark times. Yet such invocations often rest on the assumption that theory stands outside the very social conditions it seeks to explain. This talk proposes a different view: theory itself is an operation of observation within the social system of science. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (Luhmann, 2020a, 2020b), it argues that psychological theories do not merely describe human reality but construct it through their own distinctions, such as normal/pathological, rational/irrational, or resilient/vulnerable. These distinctions are communicative acts through which psychology organizes its visibility - and its blindness.

Against the backdrop of the current theory crisis in psychology (Eronen & Bringmann, 2021; Oberauer & Lewandowsky, 2019), the problem lies not in a lack of models but in a blindness to the very forms of observation through which psychological knowledge is produced. This blindness is not a deficit but the necessary shadow of observation itself – the darkness theory constructs in order to see. It becomes visible in contemporary narrative discourses, where stories themselves function as psychological and social categories that distribute meaning, responsibility, and truth. When we speak of “true” or “false” narratives - about resilience, climate, or war - psychology itself participates in the political production of truth. In dark times, observing this darkness may be the most political act theory can perform.

References

Eronen, M. I. & Bringmann, L. F. (2021). The Theory Crisis in Psychology: How to Move Forward. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(4), 779–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620970586

Luhmann, N. (2020a). Theory of Society, Volume 1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804786478

Luhmann, N. (2020b). Theory of Society, Volume 2. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804787277-fm

Oberauer, K. & Lewandowsky, S. (2019). Addressing the theory crisis in psychology. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(5), 1596–1618. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01645-2

The objective of this paper is to present Political Epistemology as a field that encompasses the works of the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Even though the term Political Epistemology includes quite diverse schools of thought, such as historical-dialectic philosophy or Foucaultian archaeology and genealogy, the focus here is to discuss this singular approach and its important repercussions in the field of psychology. To this end, initially we will see how Political Epistemology understands that the invention of modern sciences took place through a rare conjugation of certain powers or potentialities which are able to actualize it. The powers appoint an operator, which is the singular way how human and non-human beings produce testimonies. This is followed by the appropriation of the meaning of this operator in a more generalized interpretation and, finally, we have the potency of this device in connecting interests. The creation of these powers also brings into being as counterparts operations that try to produce scientific knowledge through a methodological recipe ou an a priori concept. Without the risk of the operator, these are considered artifactual productions of science. The latter part of the paper examines how Stengers evaluates the methods of scientific operation of certain well-known psychological schools of thought, such as behaviorism, constructivism, and psychoanalysis.

Lack is not a psychic defect to be repaired but the condition through which subjectivity, speech, and desire persist when the impossible intrudes. In clinical work with people facing bereavement, suicide, sexual violence, war, community and gun violence, child abuse, forced migration, and self-injury, trauma routinely outlives therapeutic promises of cure. When trauma is regarded as healable, patients and clinicians are drawn into a restless hunt for the “right” remedy—another modality, another provider, another level of care, a new art therapy directive or medium, a different medication—only to meet the persistence of what does not resolve.

This paper theorizes that impasse through Lacanian psychoanalysis and Mari Ruti’s existential Lacanian ethics. Lacan situates trauma as an encounter with the Real: an excess over the edge of language that cannot be fully symbolized and therefore returns as remainder. The imperative to “heal” risks reinstalling a fantasy of wholeness that disavows structural lack and constricts desire. Following Ruti, I treat lack not as a deficit to eradicate but as the ground of ethical becoming and freedom within constraint.

Treating the aesthetic act in art therapy as an existential confrontation with trauma’s incurability, I argue that creative responses are necessarily partial: they cannot fully name the pain, fill psychic voids, or transform what exceeds meaning. Their partiality is generative, sustaining desire and opening a space where meanings and possibilities emerge unpredictably. Living with trauma becomes possible through an ongoing, deferred process rather than a final resolution.

In contemporary societies, refugees increasingly belong to those deemed undesirable, whose dehumanisation and disenfranchisement appear legitimate within political discourses that foreground deterrence. Against this backdrop, my activist, performative, and participatory research with refugees addresses how intersubjective articulation, recognition, and understanding can be conceptualised and enacted under conditions marked by structural violence and epistemic injustice (Brunner 2020). This endeavour is crucial, as the articulation of suffering often unfolds beyond therapeutic spaces, which remain insufficient or inaccessible, and beyond asylum hearings, which grant recognition only within narrowly defined legal frameworks.

Following suggestions from my research partners, we refrain from relying solely on interviews and instead engage in multimodal and artistic modes of articulation. Through drawing, collective music-making, and performative readings based on literary testimonies of former prison inmates, we explore the possibilities and limits of creating spaces of articulation and resistance vis-à-vis ‘total institutions’ (Goffman 1973), autocratic regimes in Iran and Syria, and experiences of racism in Germany. My research partners provide crucial insights into life under authoritarian rule—what suffering they endured, what forms of resistance they developed, and what sustains them in exile.

By theorising articulation (Jung 2009) as an intersubjective, multimodal, and multimedial process, my research conceptualises “spaces of articulation” as dynamic, relational encounters where suffering and resistance can be negotiated. Such theorising asks how articulation can be understood not merely as an act of verbal expression, but as a situated practice of knowledge production that challenges dominant narratives and opens transformative horizons for translocal solidarity and learning.

This single case study seeks to demonstrate how artists and cultural producers are applying notions of affect through art exhibitions as a tool for antiracist interventions. It provides an example of an affective exhibition seeking to move a community through grief and towards a processing of difficult emotions. Art moves people’s interior selves, the parts we feel deeply and without initial understanding, through movement, color, sound, the body, and materials (Cole & Knowles, 2008). Art tells the narrative that stirs emotions, becoming the stepping off point to mobilize (Speed Museum of Art, 2022). Affect can propel us toward potentials (Massumi, 1995), and art activates the imagination to design futures free of police and gun violence.

Art and affect inspired me to curate how I saw racism moving from centuries’ old histories through our present circumstance, life after an insurrection, the leader of the insurrection is our sitting president, and advancements won regarding police reform and education equity have been erased, but the future is wide open and full of potential.

Art can be used to draw out expressions of interior liminal spaces (Finley, 2008). These expressions, such as butterflies from nerves, goosebumps, or a reflexive movement, communicate embodied ways of knowing by listening to affective responses through arts-based methodologies. Exhibitions hold potential for affective forces to move through the narrative and to incorporate affective resonances between bodies and objects, bodies and the environment, and bodies meeting other bodies. It is becoming more common to see exhibitions curated by and featuring Black and Indigenous art (https://hyperallergic.com/).

One exhibition, Promise Witness Remembrance (Speed Museum of Art, 2022), curated by Allison Glenn in 2021, at the Speed Museum of Art, acted as a reflection of the value of Breonna Taylor’s life. As an act of retribution, the exhibition was a space where people could gather, bringing bodies together in mourning to feel and heal. Promise Witness Remembrance provided time, space, and representation, especially for Black peoples, who have had their cultures stolen and placed on display in western Museums (Krmpotich & Peers, 2013). It was followed, two years later using the new contemporary curator, with an exhibition titled Amy Sherald’s Portrait of Breonna Taylor: In the Garden, as a request from her family (https://www.speedmuseum.org/) and to fulfill the museum’s obligation to the family. Affect may have been the connective thread of these exhibitions, moved by a moment or an opportunity for her family to remember who Breonna Taylor was, while also creating space for the people of Louisville to reflect. I wonder if or how the first exhibition influenced the second and if they were both meant to serve as spaces for processing difficult emotions. These affective resonances between artwork, family, and institutions and state-sanctioned violence served as means of remembrance.

Research Questions

● How does affect theory help us understand the impact of exhibition spaces?

○ How might art curators understand exhibitions as affective spaces?

● How are art institutions affected by the community, and how do they affect their community in turn?

○ How does an art exhibition that engages with race and racism affect its host institution?

Using heuristic inquiry, which has the capacity to address the embodied sensations brought on by affect, my hope was that each interview subject’s contribution would contribute to a whole picture that showed whether or not affect emphasized any of the exhibition’s antiracist implications (Sha, 2017). Heuristics connected the depths of what I embodied with the depths of the exhibition I researched (Moustakas, 1990). In the case of this research, I carried the way art moves through the body and how the body reacts when difficult emotions pass through it. When tuning into affect, such disruptions can inspire productive, creative multimedia responses (Zembylas, 2022), but affect is not inquiry. The movement and flow of affect were the pulse that moved through the body and art as the object that catalyzed affect. “Affects, then, move between and through bodies and things that they come in contact with, providing ‘object-targets’, namely, ‘States, institutions [e.g. schools]” (p. 25) Zembylas wrote about the anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11, when hegemonic forces conspired to promote hate. A technology of power, Muslim people became the object-targets of the use of affect and discomfort. If they are to be rendered as a violent tool, might the feeling states between an art object and its audience be used as a technology of support? In other words, considering affect as the tool, institutions would make time for meaning making to be built through collaborative contribution. that necessary time for processing and shifting the themes that emerge and the imagery used to curate through the emotional ranges of grief, loss, love, and resilience, surfaces when planning an art exhibition.

The embodied, connective relationship between affect and object led me to wonder about heuristics and its relationship with connection; inquiry is the lifeline that moved through my body and the art exhibition I studied, and it started with seeing the cover of the exhibition catalog for Promise Witness Remembrance. This is what Sela-Smith refers to as the “I-who-feels” (Sela-Smith, 2002, p. 58) More specifically, she states, “When someone feels an internal draw and hears the call from the deepest recesses of the self, it is almost impossible not to notice. This may be something that is being consciously or unconsciously experienced as incomplete that needs to be completed” (p. 64) Sela-Smith brought the process of heuristic inquiry back to the self by reminding the researcher that the questions, once realized, surface everywhere. “The challenge is fulfilled through examples, narrative descriptions, dialogues, stories, poems, artwork, journals, and diaries, autobiographical logs, and other personal documents” (Moustakas, 1990, p. 310). I purchased the catalog from the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston.

The catalog’s sky teal and purple cover showed the Amy Sherald portrait of Breonna Taylor looking back at me (Speed Museum of Art, 2022). The book’s cover was the initial hook, but as I scrolled through the pages, I saw examples of antiracist curatorial practices and wanted to understand what collaboration across departments looked like and how an issue as sensitive as police violence could be addressed in a museum in a city where a murder at the hands of police had recently occurred. The themes of gun and police violence will always be challenging to sit with, but through heuristic inquiry, the art connected me to my intuitive self, my body felt that the art supported processes of moving through difficult encounters.

For this study, heuristics made room for the nuance of the unfelt senses, such as intuition, déjà vu, and premonitions that the art elicited (Moustakas, 1990; Springgay, 2022). Writings by Sultan (2019), Douglass & Moustakas (1985), and Moustakas’s seminal work (1990) on heuristics guided the data interpretation, while Sela-Smith’s (2002) clear explanations of the six stages of the heuristic process supported Sultan and pushed through Moustakas to keep the focus of the self in the interpretation. As Sultan emphasized in italics (2019), “the primary purpose behind heuristic data analysis is to understand, with a vision to cocreate new knowledge, make meaning, and foster individual and collective transformation” (p. 146). Cocreating meaning is what happens within collaborative teams.

Collaboration, in which all voices are heard and considered, is an act of cocreating meaning. Massumi referred to the energy of affect as an expression that moves through bodies and objects (2002), temporarily swirling around the affected site, generating energy and causing the past to collide with the present (1995). When this energetic force collides with difference, the force is filled with possibility (Deleuze, 1968, 1994). In this paper I refer to this affective collision as an encounter. The interview questions sought to understand the energetic flow during the planning and execution of Promise Witness Remembrance and how, if at all, the exhibition impacted antiracist practices in the museum. Heuristic inquiry then helped me connect how Promise Witness Remembrance and In the Garden were related in themes and execution. Most importantly, I wondered if the experience of working with the Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor in these exhibitions shifted how people and institutions respond to racial differences.

The exhibition centered around the portrait Breonna Taylor painted by Amy Sherald, after she was commissioned by the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, to be used for the cover of Vanity Fair’s September 2020 issue, about six months after Taylor was murdered by police in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. This convergence of the portrait appearing in the magazine motivated a staffer at The Speed Museum, the oldest museum in Louisville, to suggest displaying The Portrait at the museum. She knew this was an opportunity for people from Taylor’s hometown to bear witness to the portrait. Conversations around organizing evolved from this place, as did the planning for the Promise Witness Remembrance. An energy swirls around this portrait. It helped open up discourse and became a force of resurrecting and reckoning with a city and nation’s legacy of gun and police violence.

Issues of inequality are often understood in relation to socio-economic background factors, typically relating to questions of social heritage, family of origin, or even poor upbringing. Such background factors are supposedly a cause of certain features or shortcomings in individuals' ability to manage everyday life.

However, a broad range of literature identifies that inequality is not the natural result of particular processes, but on the other hand something that is actively produced and constructed in certain “machineries”, including social institutions in society (Tyler, 2020).

A common aim of this symposium is to challenge the understanding of causal relations by shifting the research focus to the institutional conditions in which processes of inequality are situated and co-produced in people’s everyday life.

The concept of 'situated inequality' was originally developed in the context of studying children experiencing difficulties in school and is rooted in the theoretical traditions of social practice theory and critical psychology (Højholt, 2016; Røn-Larsen & Højholt, 2025). The concept emphasizes the connection between citizens' varying possibilities of participation in societal contexts – such as education and employment – and the professional and institutional conditions that enable professionals to fulfil their task of ensuring citizens' access to relevant services and interventions. It encourages us to understand and analyze processes of inequality as simultaneously linked to specific social practices, social interactions, collaborative processes, and to the personal experiences, commitments, and everyday lives of citizens (including children, young people, and adults) within and across social practices in different institutional settings of the Danish welfare state.

In the symposium we aim to further develop these conceptual ambitions, drawing on three research projects into social practices and everyday life related to issues of: Education, User Involvement in Mental Health, and Unemployment – each drawing on different theoretical inspirations and frameworks – but sharing the aim of developing new understandings of situated inequality.

We Were Never Meant to Be Held theorizes unholdability as a structural condition of Black Girl/Femme life within U.S. schooling. This paper explores how schools function as afterlives of slavery for Black Girls/Femmes; institutions that claim to care, reproduce captivity and harm. Drawing on Christina Sharpe’s The Wake and the Hold, Hortense Spillers’ “unprotected female flesh”, and Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, the paper develops an emergent Black queer feminist theoretical framework that reads grief as method, revealing why care cannot exist within current conditions of anti-Blackness.

Structured as a triptych inspired by Alice Childress’s play, Wine in the Wilderness, the paper moves through three interwoven narratives —misnamed, misrecognized, and criminalized —to reveal how Black girls/femmes are rendered ontologically illegible and institutionally disposable, and how progressive frameworks become anti-Black grammars of containment. Through counterstory and autoethnography, the text performs theory as art, refusing tidy arcs of resilience and instead insisting on witnessing grief as knowledge-producing.

By centering grief as a generative epistemological practice, this work is a move toward what I call pedagogies of unholdability: teaching and policy logics that misread pain as defiance. The paper concludes with the Maroon Theatre Project, as a fugitive practice of wake work, demonstrating art’s capacity to theorize care, refusal, and world-making in dark times. We Were Never Meant to Be Held is where theory becomes witness, where grief becomes pedagogy, and where Black Girl/Femme life demands new grammars of care.

The literature provides evidence that high autonomy is associated with better mental health. In contrast, low autonomy, excessive demands, and unclear institutional expectations can contribute to stress, burnout, and a decline in quality of life. In the current university context, various transformations characteristic of academic capitalism are being experienced (Jessop, 2017; Schulze-Cleven & Olson, 2017; Morley, 2024), which imply a misalignment with expectations of autonomy within their community (Hjortskov, 2020). To address the adverse effects of these changes, care policies have been implemented to prevent and/or improve the community's mental health (Mason & Megoran, 2021). These measures often adopt therapeutic language that focuses on individuals and renders institutions invisible (Ecclestone & Hayes, 2019). When suffering is interpreted in clinical language that individualises it, the paradoxical effect of positioning subjects as beings who suffer emerges, further weakening their autonomy. In this sense, this aspect of care policies becomes part of the problem rather than the solution.

This presentation develops a conceptual constellation to study suffering from a perspective that expands the theoretical repertoire on subjective suffering. We assume that institutional logics can hinder or promote autonomy, and that the proposed constellation is a resource for identifying obstacles and implementing measures to develop autonomy effectively. We argue that care policies, particularly in universities, require other languages to identify institutional failures and find opportunities for innovation.

To bring about the shift from the individual to the institutional, we consider that subjective suffering requires political negotiation for its processing. We propose a conceptual constellation that articulates autonomy, vulnerability, and recognition to design care measures that integrate political negotiation processes. The constellation is constructed with the concepts of autonomy by Rainer Forst (2005, 2018), recognition by Axel Honneth (2009), and vulnerability by Estelle Ferrarese (2016a, 2016b), authors who share the tradition of Frankfurt critical theory. From this conceptual constellation, the political processing of suffering is viable to the extent that it is understood: i) autonomy as multidimensional (moral, ethical, political, legal, and social); ii) the reciprocal recognition of all participants involved in the process; iii) vulnerability as a result of participation in the processes of exposing and naming our precariousness that demands attention.

Consequently, in this presentation, we articulate the concepts of politicised vulnerability, autonomy, and recognition in a constellation whose critical force enables care measures to broaden their repertoire to address suffering, integrating into their design and implementation the political processing of the discomfort experienced by academic communities.

References:

Ecclestone, K., Ecclestone, K., & Hayes, D. (2019). The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203870563

Ferrarese, E. (2016a). Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo The World As It Is? Critical Horizons, 17(2), 149–159.

Ferrarese, E. (2016b). The Vulnerable and the Political: On the Seeming Impossibility of Thinking Vulnerability and the Political Together and Its Consequences. Critical Horizons, 17(2), 224–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2016.1153892

Forst, R. (2018). Committed critical theory: Some thoughts on Stephen White: A Democratic Bearing. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 44(2), 126–130. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453717752776

Forst, R. (2005). Political liberty: Integrating five conceptions of autonomy. In J. Christman, J. Anderson (Eds.), Autonomy and the challenges to liberalism: New essays (pp. 127–149). Cambridge University Press.

Hjortskov, M. (2020). Interpreting expectations: Normative and predictive expectations from the citizens’ viewpoint. Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, 3(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.30636/jbpa.31.72

Honneth, A. (2009). Crítica del agravio moral: patologías de la sociedad contemporánea. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Jessop, B. (2017). Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities. Higher Education, 73(6), 853–870.

Mason, O., & Megoran, Nick. (2021). Precarity and dehumanisation in higher education. Learning and Teaching, 14(1), 35–59. https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2021.140103

Morley, C. (2024). The systemic neoliberal colonisation of higher education: A critical analysis of the obliteration of academic practice. The Australian Educational Researcher, 51, 571–586. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00613-z

Schulze-Cleven, T. y Olson, J. R. (2017). Worlds of higher education transformed: toward varieties of academic capitalism. Higher Education, 73(6), 813–831.

The resurgence of psychedelic research explicitly targets treating mental health conditions largely through psychedelics-assisted psychotherapy. Current theories about mechanisms of change in psychedelics-assisted psychotherapy focus on mystical experiences as the main driver of symptom improvement. During these mystical experiences, participants report an enhanced sense of salience, connectedness, and meaning. Simultaneously, a growing psychedelic culture is also cultivating the use of psychedelics as medicine for relieving symptoms of anxiety and depression and promoting cognitive functions. We argue that an integral part of the excitement around the resurgence in psychedelics is in response to a meaning and alienation crisis that correlates with rising rates of anxiety and depression. Framing the absence of meaning as neonihilism, a contemporary correlate to the 19th-century phenomenon with unique features present in a neoliberal cultural context, we explore whether psychedelics combined with group therapy can provide answers to modern experiences of meaninglessness. Based on this exploration, we suggest concrete next steps both in the theory and practice of psychedelic psychotherapy toward what we are calling neonihilistic psychedelic group psychotherapy.

The quote “l’enfer, c’est les autres” can be attributed to a character (Garcin) in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit. However, the symposium is not about various interpretations of this idea but about using it as a starting point for theorizing and reflecting on the dialectics of relationality in current times. Prompted by the suicide of 11-year-old Jocelynn Rojo Carranza in Texas, who was taunted by her classmates about the immigration status of her family, fearing that her parents would be taken away, “hell is other people” is not theorized with regard to sociopaths or abusers, but in relation to average people, everyday neighbours, community members, even well-intentioned citizens who display a socio-subjectivity that reflects a culture in “dark times,” as well as to ourselves. The symposium reconstructs, deconstructs, and constructs a possibly negative turn of “common-sense” relationality. Conceptual and practical consequences when theorizing relationality from this perspective are discussed; issues of social justice are connected with intersectional reflections; personal experiences of this dialectic are presented; connections with critical thinkers are articulated; and the role of psychology in challenging or maintaining hell are elaborated. The banality of hell, initiated by people in the conduct of everyday life, and when looking in the mirror, is discussed.

In recent years, we have witnessed a growing polarization of political and ideological positions in public debate. The debate has moved from face-to-face forums to the digital environment. From a historical-cultural perspective (Wersch, 1998), we understand that the mediating tools used in social communication in this context, such as social networks and various digital media, with their characteristics, limitations, and possibilities, could be conditioning expression and, therefore, the internalization of discourses and affective-symbolic logics that tend toward extremism and the radicalization of messages (Marantz, 2020).

On the other hand, those of us who participate in these scenarios maintain a perception of freedom. We consider ourselves radically autonomous, while unknowingly cooperating with our own domination or surveillance. Hypnocracy (Xun, 2025) is based precisely on this paradox: the more intensely we experience the feeling of choice, the more deeply rooted the criteria by which we are classified, evaluated, and/or normalized become. Predictive algorithms, security protocols, and risk management systems do not need to prohibit; it is enough to filter, order, and hierarchize our possibilities for action and present them as agency-driven and spontaneous options, as proposed by Foucault's (2007) notion of biopolitics and governmentality, because we believe that we are witnessing a new phase: it is no longer just a matter of managing populations, but of governing from within the subject's own self-relation, that is, the way in which they think of themselves as free agents.

In this context, radical discourses, such as anti-feminist and anti-immigration discourses (Elis & Bhatia), and even those that imply a subhumanization of “others” (immigrants, minorities, women, etc.) (Teo, 2020), are consumed and recreated in monochromatic digital environments that reinforce confirmation biases and, therefore, the polarization of citizens' attitudes.

This dark political and social landscape has led us to inquire, within the framework of projects in which different scenarios of activity and social groups interact, those conditions that could build bridges between subjectivities that would otherwise remain isolated and, at present, opposed. From our practice in emancipatory projects in disadvantaged communities in contexts of cultural diversity, in which we have participated for 30 years, we have observed the emergence of hybrid scenarios of activity and hybrid psychological agents, which we will present as transformative possibilities (Macías-Gómez-Estern, 2020; 2021; Macías-Gómez-Estern et al., 2025).

These scenarios and agents have emerged throughout the process of face-to-face participation in activities with low levels of formalization, often mediated by artistic languages (e.g., music), and have generated systems that are resilient to crises and emancipatory transformations in the different groups and individuals participating (Martínez-Lozano et al; 2023; Lalueza et. al, 2024; Macías-Gómez-Estern & Lalueza, 2024). In this presentation, we will share our ongoing reflections on these ideas.

Our contribution is therefore situated at the intersection of political philosophy and critical psychology, and questions those other possible figures of the subject that can operate as counter-devices against the new regimes of power.

References:

Ellis, B. D., & Bhatia, S. (2019). Cultural psychology for a new era of citizenship politics. Culture & Psychology, 25(2), 220-240.

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978.

Lalueza, J.L.; Martínez-Lozano, V. & Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2024). University-community partnerships as “hybrid contexts of activity”: learnings from two projects with Roma children in Spain. En M.W. Mahmood, M. Faulstich Orellana & J. Cano (eds). University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal, pp. 265-282. Springer Nature.

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2020). "Hybrid psychology agent": Overcoming the about/for dichotomy from praxis, Theory & Psychology, 30 (3), 430-435. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354320923726

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2021). Critical Psychology for community emancipation: insights from socio-educative praxis in hybrid setting. In Machin, R. (Ed.) The new waves in Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Empirical and theoretical tendencies and Challenges. Palgrave-McMillan (pp.25-54).

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. & Lalueza, J.L. (2024). Navigating I-positionings in higher education Service Learning as hybrid scenarios: a case study, Language, Culture and Social Interaction, 45, 100805.

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B., Martínez-Lozano, V., & Lalueza, J.L (2025). Re-envisioning collaborative university-community engagement through a critical ethnographic lens: transformative hybrid scenarios. Ethnography and Education, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2025.2565009

Marantz, A. (2020). Antisocial: Online extremists, techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation. Penguin.

Seco-Martinez, J.M. (2025) La democracia Despierta. Frente al capitalismo de vigilancia. Aconcagua

Teo, T. (2020). Subhumanism: The re‐emergence of an affective‐symbolic ontology in the migration debate and beyond. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(2), 132-148.

Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Harvard University Press.

Xun, J. (2025). Ipnocrazia. Trump, Muske l’architettura della realtà. Edizioni Tlon.

In contemporary Japan, the erosion of foundational connections—such as community, family, and company—that once supported people's lives has led to an increase in complex life challenges that cannot be addressed by traditional "targeted support." Consequently, the existence of people caught in the "gaps between systems" is becoming increasingly visible (Abe, 2007). We need the creation of open "spaces" within communities that transcend institutional frameworks limiting assistance recipients, spaces where anyone can drop in.

With this awareness, this presentation focuses on a space (X) where residents voluntarily gather to engage in creative improvement activities. Specifically, I examine the "Character Design Competition" project, which is planned to raise social awareness about children in need of support. Through this, activities that connect adults through enjoyment and hobbies have the potential to lead to unprecedented forms of child support is argued. For example, one of the project's initiators, who had always enjoyed ANIME and MANGA, pointed out that anime and manga have the potential to draw attention to children who need support. In the "Character Design Competition" project, participants' individual images of children become enriched. Many ideas that were initially unplanned emerged one after another (including manga, merchandise, and collaborations with YouTubers). Several members of "X" realized that the same project being undertaken within administrative services needs greater accountability but lacks authenticity on this issue. Such an activity can be seen as a form of “Art-based research” (Leavy, 2015) that enables people to engage with subjects in a fun way. Rather than planned support activities, the participants' connections forged through shared enjoyment paradoxically broadened their interest in children who need support.

Reference

Abe, A. (2007). Genndai nihon no syakaiteki haijo no genjou [Present condition of social exclusion of present age in Japan]. In H. Fukuhara (Ed.), Syakaiteki haijo/housetsu to syakai seisaku [Social exclusion/inclusion, and social policy] (pp. 129–152).Kyoto: Horitsu Bunka-Sha.

Leavy, P. (2015). Method Meets Art (2nd ed): Arts-Based Research Practice. Guilford Press.

Past research has found individuals’ willingness to engage with political activism to be linked with a variety of factors. These include personal experiences with discrimination or disenfranchisement, access to social and financial resources, and personality traits. The present study focuses on perspectives on activism and activist identity within queer/LGBTQI* individuals and examines the ways in which political engagement is approached within this population. Queer individuals are all directly or indirectly confronted with politicisation and discrimination, but may show highly varied experiences of identity, social positioning, access to resources, and political opinion.

We investigate the role of the above factors within a sample of 100 LGBTQI* individuals through a mixed questionnaire and narrative qualitative interviews.

As part of this study design and to represent this complex tension field, this project employs a custom sentence completion method derived from K. Kullasepps DDTC (Kullasepp, 2008) method to explore individuals inner conflicts, role negotiations and overall meaning construction surrounding activism and queer community. Through this qualitative methodology, new theoretical avenues are opened. They may not only be built on to better understand activism and political engagement within complex social and identity networks, but also may provide a base to offer tailored practical support agency and access to political work for members of politicised communities.

Kullasepp, K. (2008). Dialogical becoming. Professional identity formation of

psychology students. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Tallinn University, Estonia.

Historical pressure expressed as war, social conflict, and political violence overwhelms not only political structures and material life but also the symbolic systems through which people interpret experience. Amidst armed struggle, social conflict and the fragmentation of civic and political space, humans often confront an excess of stimuli and experience emotional pressures, far more than can be discharged through everyday action alone. At such moments, Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky observed in his 1925 text Art and Life: “Art provides a necessary outlet for unrealized energies, helping the organism maintain equilibrium.” Hence, symbolic expression often becomes a psychological necessity during conflict, enabling individuals and communities to transform overwhelming emotion into symbolic form.

Building on this foundation, the symposium adopts Jerome Bruner’s (1986) dual narrative landscapes—the landscape of action (events, ruptures, historical pressures) and the landscape of consciousness (affect, interpretation, symbolic understanding)—as its methodological frame. When language cannot metabolize rupture, artistic production often becomes the medium through which fragments of life are held together long enough for reflection to begin. Cultural-historical research shows that instability can activate new symbolic capacities and novel creative practices (Daiute 2010; Daiute & Lucić 2010; Lucić 2016).

Across three distinct contexts, this symposium demonstrates how wartime and postwar artworks and the theory they produce operate in concordance within Bruner’s two landscapes: narrating what happens while reorganizing how it is understood, felt, and endured. Taken together, the papers show that art created during times of crisis is not passive documentation but an active symbolic technology of psychological survival, political struggle and witnessing, and meaning-making.

My presentation reevaluates the history of psychoanalysis by challenging the Eurocentric narrative that the unconscious was ‘discovered’ in 19th-century Vienna. By integrating Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism with Freudo-Lacanian theory, I posit the unconscious as a nonlocal truth—an interminable haunting that bridges Ancient Egyptian psychospiritual practices with the modern clinic. The theoretical framework utilizes Benjamin’s concepts to dismantle linear historicism, treating Egyptian history instead as an unconscious field of symptoms. This lens transforms key historical moments into a constellation of active symptoms and messianic ruptures against the Egyptian state’s repetition compulsions. I argue that the unconscious was not reinvented by Freud, who utilized Ancient Egyptian structural scaffolding to map the psyche. Furthermore, the paper traces how mid-20th-century Egyptian intellectuals integrated Freudian thought into a pre-existing landscape of Islamic philosophy and Sufi psychology. By framing the unconscious as a pluriversal structure, the paper ultimately seeks an intellectual redemption that rescues the Egyptian unconscious from being a mere mimetic version of its European counterpart.

For Jacques Lacan, the 'sinthome'—a meaningless psychic reinforcement shaped in contingent relation to one's idiosyncratic experience of enjoyment [jouissance]—can, in certain instances, be identified with in a way that allows an Artist to sidestep the Name-of-the-Father (a castrating invitation into language) on behalf of a self-naming capacity. Such identification is reserved for the most radical creators (such as James Joyce) who are able to externalize and manipulate the sinthome's non-signifying jouissant materiality—what Lacan terms 'lalangue' (abstract, excessive, homophonic, and non-representable pre-linguistic substrate)—in the production of art that is alienating in its meaninglessness and infamous in its indigestibility. In doing so, sinthomatic art allows the Artist to break with the usual mechanics of the signifier (with its racialized, colonial, and patriarchal baggage) and to instate themselves as the progenitor of their own symbolic universe (hence the era of 'Joyceans' following from the publication of ‘Finnegans Wake').

This paper will comment on the possibility of engaging in creative play with 'lalangue' in a way that refuses the urge to liberal-individual self-nomination. Should radical, sinthomatic artistic practice—as antagonism against existing linguistic/representational systems—necessitate only the Artist's liberation (beyond symbolic rule), while everyone else is left to discover their own idiosyncratic means of coping with oppression and loss? Or is it possible to theorize a creative praxis of 'lalangue' that could—in inspiring not hyper-individual experiences of infamy but collective encounters with shared precarity within a phallogocentric order—dethrone once and for all the often violent enforcement of boundaries between signification and its others?

Policing has always put safety first. What marks today’s “dark times” is that, despite this enduring orientation, a growing sense of unsafety is felt within the police—and this perception increasingly spills over into society, shaping public expectations, legitimacy discourses, and everyday encounters with authority.

This paper develops a systems-theoretical account of this paradoxical dynamic: the Officer-Safety Paradox. Drawing on form theory and the concept of operational closure, “officer safety” is analyzed as a reflexive operation that seeks to guarantee the continuation of policing by securing the conditions of its own possibility. Within the distinction safe/unsafe, every attempt to produce safety necessarily reproduces the difference that makes safety meaningful—thus continuously generating new observations of danger.

From this perspective, danger is not an external threat but an internal semantic function that stabilizes the form of policing under conditions of uncertainty. The well-known “danger narrative” of contemporary policing (Eisenberg, 2023; Sierra-Arévalo, 2024; Staller et al., 2023) appears not as deviation or pathology but as the operative expression of this structural paradox.

Theorizing does not aim to eliminate paradox but to make it visible without collapsing operations. A “paradox-first” mode of theorizing transforms danger into insight: it turns the impossibility of complete safety into a condition for reflexivity. In doing so, it reframes officer safety—not as the prevention of danger, but as an invitation to observe how systems reproduce their own conditions of insecurity.

Eisenberg, A. K. (2023). Policing the Danger Narrative. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 113(3), 473–540.

Sierra-Arévalo, M. (2024). The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing. Columbia University Press.

Staller, M. S., Koerner, S., & Zaiser, B. (2023). Danger, Fighting, and Badassness: A Social Systems Perspective on Narratives and Codes in Police Conflict Management. In M. S. Staller, S. Koerner, & B. Zaiser (Eds.), Police Conflict Management, Volume I, Challenges and Opportunities in the 21st Century (pp. 35–59). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41096-3_3

There exists a post-woke world where physical contact is becoming the exception and digital intimacy our only posthuman recourse. This paper will constitute a return to Freud for the 21st

century contrasting it with Lacan’s return in the 20th. Assisted by Baudrillard’s use of the hyperreal to understand simulation, this paper will contrast modern nudism with the OnlyFans online platform to discuss where the erotic still persists, and whilst one can be seen as liberation simulated with repression of desire, OnlyFans is the obscene simulated where the new erotic lives.

OnlyFans is a platform for age-verified commodified selves; a predetermined fetishized intimacy discussing nakedness as taboo but a Vegan-dependent interactive fiction of the flesh. This paper will propose that a return to intimacy is not gained through a simulated nudism but rather through an increased fetishization of the digital erotic. A closeness of para-social acceptance.

A lifecycle of intimacy, is followed by boredom, break up or death, fetishized objects then shall form dark nostalgia, searched and coveted objects as evidence of a past, coveted ashes, bookmarked books, or unfinished crosswords – the everlasting echo-fetish.

A discussion of Freud’s Totem and Taboo will be templated in the elucidation of the contrasting taboo of nakedness on the beach, with the totemic meal of online erotic indulgence which will become our new original sin, a return in more ways than one.

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.

The proposed symposium focuses on the special potential that participatory research holds for theorizing, especially in “dark times” and times of crises. The participants part from a shared understanding of knowledge production as a collective and political practice. Their respective research projects consider the psychological, social, and structural dimensions of the contexts in question and draw from a range of different theoretical and methodological approaches, such as feminist epistemologies, philosophy, educational sciences, and arts-based methods.

The three papers in the symposium will raise the following questions: How can structural conditions and overlapping crises be taken into account in the process of theorizing? How do alternative formats or materials allow to render visible aspects that are often obscured or dissected? Which understandings of empowerment, transformation or action inform the participatory research of the respective projects, and which challenges and pitfalls do they entail for research practice and theory?

Discussant Sara Paloni will engage with all three presentations before we open up a general discussion.

This paper explores the intersection of art and historiography to offer a critical rethinking of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine/Israel. It focuses on the formative years of the British Mandate (1918–1948) to examine how leisure and recreation spaces such as cinemas, concert halls, theaters, cafés, and dance venues, functioned as shared intercommunal sites for the consumption of popular art. As the paper shows, these urban venues attracted both ordinary Arabs and Jews who collectively engaged with films, music, dance and theater performances, facilitating cultural exchange and mutual influences that challenge conventional historiographical theories about their relations in this period. The historiography of Palestine/Israel and Arab-Jewish relations has long been dominated by the “Dual Society” paradigm, which depicts the two communities as entirely separate, self-contained, and monolithic entities, with violence as their only meaningful point of contact. This major interpretive framework has shaped not only academic scholarship but also public and political understandings of the conflict as historically predetermined and inevitable. However, recent historiographical approaches, most notably the “Relational History” framework, questioned this binary model by uncovering diverse interrelations, mutual influences, and complex web of social and cultural interactions between Jewish and Arab societies across different historical periods. Building on this perspective, the paper argues that the sphere of popular art reveals an underexplored dimension of everyday intercommunal relations. It shows how the two societies constantly interacted, cooperated, shaped and and transformed each other’s cultural systems. By bringing together art and historiography, the paper demonstrates how theory itself can operate as a political force. Rethinking history through relational lens becomes an act of intellectual resistance to deterministic narratives of violence and separation. In this sense, the study underscores the power of art to illuminate entangled histories and to generate alternative theoretical and political imaginaries by offering, even in dark times, ways of envisioning shared human experience beyond the confines of nationalist discourse.

What does it mean to think, act, and create within a world composed not of discrete, binary entities and identities but of systems that are interdependent, reciprocal, and nested? In the face of ecological chaos, social fragmentation, and technological acceleration—all of which demand new modes of responsiveness and accountability, at a new pace—this is an increasingly urgent question. My arts-based doctoral research approaches systems thinking relationally, as both a conceptual methodology and a creative practice: I combine media art, sculpture, diagrams, and performance, using techniques of expanded cinema and the Light and Space Movement to explore neurodivergent and non-colonial ontologies.

Proposal:

Presentation: A system may be understood, per Donella Meadows, as a set of elements that are interconnected such that their interactions generate distinctive patterns of behavior over time, revealing responses that are characteristic of the system itself. My research draws upon systems thinking, Enactive Cognition—viewing humans as processes nested within other processes—and Participatory Sense-Making—which emphasizes the co-regulation and dynamic flows between agents in relation. My experiments engage a fundamental question underlying my practice: Can artworks be made using node-based media and feedback at the human scale to reveal the structures and operations of feedback at other-than-human scales?

As a PhD candidate at RPI, my work is shifting from representing systems dynamics to engaging them. From a systems thinking perspective, my goal is to set conditions for processes that unfold through feedback, iteration, and relational responsiveness. My decades-long practice of using techniques of expanded cinema and the Light and Space Movement—combining moving image, glass, diagrams, and sunlight in works—explores neurodivergent and non-colonial ontologies. I have begun using node-based and generative media (Houdini, Touch Designer) to create murmurations and particle generators as means of visualizing, for example, how the dynamics that emerge between people in dialogue can take on autonomous form. Building upon that work, I will soon be using Touch Designer to experiment with live and recorded feedback—light, sound, EEG, gesture—translating these signals into performative video-sculptures. In this sense, Touch Designer serves not just as a tool but as a collaborator: a responsive system through which I can explore patterns of reciprocity, attention, and resonance. At ISTP, I will discuss and present recent experiments with generative systems, bio- and video-feedback systems, and videosculpture to enact divergent ways of sensing, processing, and exchanging information, i.e., ways of knowing.

Installation:

Extending and supporting this presentation, I propose a looping video installation of recent short works (see below). These may be projected in a darkened space (equipment: projector, speakers, wall or projection screen) or played on a monitor (equipment: sufficiently large monitor, speakers, media player). These works are 1) The Cloud Model, 2) video excerpts of the 2025 International Symposium for Assistive Technologies in Music and Art (ISATMA*25) in which The Cloud Model features, and 3) the film/expanded cinema/manifesto from which The Cloud Model emerges, Stitching the Future with Clues. (Please see Vimeo captions: under user “Oilly Oowen” click “…more”)

1. The Cloud Model: https://vimeo.com/1055014843

2. ISATMA 2025 (excerpt): https://vimeo.com/1089255506

3. Stitching the Future with Clues (excerpt): https://vimeo.com/647940094

Artist Bio:

Allison Leigh Holt is a neurodivergent, anti-disciplinary artist, a Fulbright scholar (Indonesia), and the first person in their household to graduate high school. A current Lucas Arts Fellow at Montalvo Art Center, they have held residencies at EMPAC, Djerassi, the Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (Indonesia), Bullseye Glass Company, and the Experimental Television Center; and resident researcher roles at Sanggar Perbakayun, the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science and Technology, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Notable exhibitions include Eye Filmmuseum (The Netherlands), The Ford Foundation Gallery, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMPFA, Stanford University, SFMOMA, The Exploratorium, Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (solo, Indonesia), The North Dakota Museum of Art (solo), and San Francisco Cinematheque. They have lectured at Stanford Arts Institute’s Imagining the Universe: Cosmology in Art and Science; FEMeeting: Women in Art|Science|Technology (Canada); RIXC Art-Science Festival (Riga, Latvia); After Agency (Mickiewicz University, Poland); Video Vortex (Indonesia); the 20th Annual Science of Consciousness Conference; the American Anthropological Association Conference; and the Yogyakarta International New Media Festival. At the University of North Dakota Writers Conference, Holt was in dialogue with science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and theoretical physicist Brian Greene; and has served on the Mind & Life Summer Research Institute faculty.

Holt’s commissions include The Ford Foundation Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission, the David Bermant Foundation, the Zero1 Biennial, Pro Arts Gallery, and UC Santa Barbara’s Denise Montell Molecular Science Laboratory, where they are also included in the collection. They have taught at San Francisco State University, Massachusetts College of Art, and developed Neurodivergent Media, an experimental media pedagogy for autistics. Their writing features in journals like Panorama, Public, Leonardo, and Yale’s Theater Magazine. Holt studied at The Evergreen State College (BA), Massachusetts College of Art (MFA), and now, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Ph.D. candidate).

Art as a Medium of Theoretical Self- and World-Critique in Dark Times

A Morphological Analysis of Goya’s “Black Paintings” and Their Contemporary Relevance

Research Question:

How can art - understood in terms of Psychological Morphology - serve as a medium of theoretical self-knowledge and world-understanding in dark times of political and symbolic crisis?

Thesis:

Goya’s Black Paintings can be read as paradigmatic aesthetic articulations of the paradoxes of an entire cultural epoch. Paradoxes that still shape our present and whose intensification becomes increasingly evident today. Created during a period of political and societal upheaval, these paintings mark the beginning of modern art and continue to provide an aesthetic access to the structural problems of contemporary world-construction. Through art-based experiential work with these images, such paradoxes can be revealed and made experientially graspable.

Theoretical Context

Wilhelm Salber’s Morphological Psychology is largely unknown internationally, yet in Germany it has been successfully applied as a qualitative methodological approach in market, media, and cultural research. Nonetheless, Morphological Psychology offers a rich perspective on everyday culture, art, and media and resonates with contemporary art and cultural psychologies, such as those stemming from the Frankfurt School or Lacanian theory.

In Morphology, the psyche is not conceived as a fixed cognitive apparatus nor as a biological computer program, but as an ongoing self-treatment of reality, which itself has an art-analog character and expresses itself through cultural and artistic forms (Salber’s psychaesthetics). Morphological Psychology draws on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (natural-scientific) morphology and positions itself as a further development of Gestalt psychology (Köhler, Koffka, Wertheimer) as well as of depth psychology in the tradition of Sigmund Freud.

From Goethe, Morphology adopts the idea of intuitive, object-adequate thinking: scientific theories are regarded as aesthetic media of the self-presentation of their objects. From Gestalt psychology, Morphology retains the insight that psychic life continues the process of forming figures (Gestalten) of reality; combined with Freud’s thesis of the unconscious overdetermination of such formations, it overcomes the classical Gestalt focus on “gute Gestalt” in favor of imperfect, constantly transforming formations, thus returning to Goethe’s understanding of morphology as a theory of transformation.

Parallel to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Wilhelm Salber developed a cultural psychology that interprets cultural epochs as provisional attempts to solve—or treat—fundamentally unsolvable paradoxes. Morphological art psychology, in turn, emphasizes that artworks provide an opportunity to encounter these paradoxes—structural tensions inherent in all cultural constructions—in an aesthetic object, offering modes of further development and transformation. Modern art in particular fulfills the task of rendering a culture’s self-treatments transparent while simultaneously challenging them, setting in motion interpretive processes analogous to psychoanalytic dream-work.

Object of Analysis – Goya’s Black Paintings

Through concrete image analyses, I aim to show how Goya’s art makes the paradoxes of modernity—paradoxes that especially concern us in today’s dark times—experientially accessible.

Wilhelm Salber regarded Goya’s famous Pinturas Negras as modern art avant la lettre and considered Goya himself to mark the transition from classical to modern painting. Goya was not only an artist but also an acute observer of his time. In his Black Paintings emerges a new type of art that seems to undermine classical ideals of beauty. Mythological motifs from art history are taken up, decontextualized, and rendered in a manner that anticipates the perceptual shock of modern art. Engaging with these works allows one to experience the fractures and gaps inherent in our culture—as well as our ways of dealing with them.

According to Salber’s cultural psychology, modernity is the epoch in which people become aware that their perspectives on reality are themselves permeated by paradoxes—an insight manifest not only in art and culture but also across the natural and human sciences. Salber referred to such paradoxical structures as Undinge (“non-things,” impossibilities, structural contradictions). Philosophically, this becomes evident in German Idealism, which arose contemporaneously with Goya’s modern art and to which progressive political theories, such as Žižek’s, still refer.

Based on qualitative interviews in which I explored long-term experiential engagement with the Black Paintings, I was able to show that these images continue to function as media of self-experience: they confront viewers with the impossibilities—Salber’s Undinge—embedded in their constructions of reality, thereby enabling a widened scope for action and reflection.

Art thus has the capacity to reflect the paradoxes of our constructions of reality—including political realities. Artworks offer intuitive, image-based theories and simultaneously operate as unconscious “symptoms” that process and express the Undinge—the gaps and ruptures in the symbolic order in the Lacanian sense. Speaking about these gaps—initiated through art—can help us reposition ourselves toward cultural and political orders in new and transformative ways.

References

Fitzek, H., & Salber, W. (1996). Gestaltpsychologie: Geschichte und Praxis. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Grünewald, S. (2013). Die erschöpfte Gesellschaft: Warum Deutschland neu träumen muss. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Licht, F. (2001). Goya: Die Geburt der Moderne. München: Hirmer Verlag.

Salber, W. (1999). Kunst – Psychologie – Behandlung (3rd ed.). Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. (Original work published 1977)

Salber, W. (1993). Seelenrevolution: Komische Geschichte des Seelischen und der Psychologie. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag.

Salber, W. (1994). Undinge: Goyas Schwarze Bilder. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.

Žižek, S. (1998). Die Nacht der Welt: Psychoanalyse und Deutscher Idealismus. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag.

Zwingmann, B. (2019). Begegnung mit dem Ungeheuren: Selbsterfahrungsprozesse mit Goyas Schwarzen Bildern. Berlin: HPB University Press.

In this symposium we advance a discussion of the politics of post discourses and the potentialities of what we might call theoretical discard when experience and material conditions have served as the substrate for theory development. We collectively question whether or not certain forms of care or a new kind of ethics should be employed in order to appropriately move on from (or memorialize) certain forms of theory. If so, should these certain forms or new kinds, in practice, mirror the methods currently acceptable for leaving behind psychological (or social) theories that are no longer intellectually generative (Wray, 2016). With an eye toward forms of practice, we also consider ethical discard or recomposition toward anticolonial, liberatory ends. In the midst of feminist theorizations of haunting and the black body (Powell, 2014), ghostly matters (Gordon, 1997), and advancements in discard studies (Liboiron & Lepawsky, 2022), we consider the implications for theoretical discard under conditions of restraint and duress at the margins, during revolting times, broadly conceived, and at the end of the world. How might we imagine departure otherwise and, in so doing, instrumentalize burial, ritual, nutrient cycling, and care toward a reimagining of theorization (and theory itself) as a process with a beginning and an end?

This paper will present analysis and reflections from an ongoing PhD-study asking what can be learned about learning and development, when explored from young children’s (0–3-year-olds) perspectives in their everyday lives in and across their families and nurseries.

In Denmark and transnationally there has been a growing focus on the importance of early learning. In Danish ECEC-policies the importance of language, children’s communities and perspectives is foregrounded as significant areas of young children’s learning. Pedagogical practice is prompted to arrange learning environments accordingly. Learning though tends to be conceptualized as teaching, highlighting adult-child interactions and both childrens perspectives and communities as means to achieve and optimising learning outcomes. Rather than understood or theorized from the young children’s perspectives, engagements and activities with each other and their material surroundings.This presentation explores how young children take up the social and material arrangements they live their life in, in unpredictable ways. By analysing the children’s attentions and embodied orientations in the sociomaterial arrangements they participate in, the analysis points to ways young children pursuit subjectively meaningful engagements with each other and with objects, both here-and-now and how these engagements develop as over time, related to the children’s personal standpoints and interest. Insisting on exploring learning and development from young childrens perspectives and their engagements as both meaningful and transformative, challenges dominant political ideas on how to arrange and promote ‘good learning environments’ for young children.

The empirical data stems from 1,5-year ethnographic field study, following 6 children in their everyday lives in nursery and with their families. It consists of participatory observations, Sound recordings, photos and in-situ interviews with adults and older children (siblings).The theoretical point of departure is taken in psychology from the standpoint of the subject, with inspirations from both cultural historical psychology and Ingold’s phenomenological anthropology.

This paper explores the role of social psychological theory in understanding family life amid societal transformation. It argues that the social psychology of everyday life offers a politically engaged, interdisciplinary framework that foregrounds the lived experiences of individuals within broader social structures. Drawing on C. Wright Mills, the paper positions theory not as detached observation but as a means of engaging with the “troubles” of family life—troubles that are always also societal issues.

The historical development of family studies is reviewed to show how dominant traditions have struggled to theoretically connect the troubles and issues of family life. In response, the paper discusses the concept of “family practices”, and its relevance for a social psychological approach to family life, emphasizing that families are enacted through everyday interactions shaped by cultural ideals, and socio-material conditions.

The concept of everyday life is not merely a backdrop for the study of psychological phenomenon, but lenses through which ongoing processes of societalisation (vergesellschaftung) is explored, informed by Simmils original idea, that persons are never part of a societal order without also to be found in opposition to that very same order.

In dark times, theory must not retreat into abstraction. Instead, it must illuminate how psychological concepts are entangled with lived realities, offering tools to understand—and potentially transform—the conditions of human life.

As digital technologies increasingly shape everyday life, parasocial interaction and relationships have become central to many people's lives. From social media to subscription platforms like OnlyFans, from dating apps to AI companions, the social self is reorganized into asymmetrical, half- and one-sided formats that offer immediate convenience at the cost of shifting principles of social mechanisms and social organizing. While causality has yet to be shown, at the same time, increasing individualization, loneliness, and experiences of an alienated state of living in disconnection from the body and the world are already traceable.

Based on a multi-method research program, including interviews, surveys, experimental and observational studies, and digital ethnographies, the study presents an integrative concept of the shaping of the parasocial self, depicting how parasocial mechanisms are integrated into everyday life to fulfil social needs, address emotions, regulate, and construct identity. Parasocial forms of interaction are shown to offer immediate gratification and convenience, yet reveal ambivalences: from dating app fatigue and AI-induced emotional investment to relational dissonance in partnerships and affective dependency on mediated others.

The findings are presented as an integrative conceptualization of parasociality, and the graduated becoming of the parasocial self as a constitutive condition of subjectivity in neoliberal digital societies, serving effective push- and pullfactors. The concept of the parasocial self is discussed in terms of mechanisms and meanings, epistemic hierarchies, and broader modifications of sociality, depicting how subjects are both a product and a producer of parasociality, caught between agency and subjugation to algorithmic control.

Lev S. Vygotsky claimed in the 1920´s, on his writings on aesthetic education, that “the imposition on esthetics of yet other goals and problems that are likewise foreign to it” could be considered a harmful psychological confusion (Vygotky, 1926). The aim of this symposium is precisely to accept this challenge – to cultivate Art´s autonomous existence and importance; but at the same time, not to treat Aeshtetics as a separate domain from others such as Psychology or Social Sciences in general. Presentations in this symposium will make an attempt to approach that alledged autonomy, through empirical examples such as cultural performances and political protests in Brazil, but also by theoretical exercises in which the status of Art is pushed to a limit – a limit where other knowledges and practices might also meet.

Nina Gutin, Ph.D., will invite attendees to explore the complexities and philosophical dimensions of suicide, and to challenge conventional perspectives on its understanding, assessment and treatment. Drawing from her extensive clinical work and personal perspectives, she will explore how language, historical and societal attitudes around suicide may shape the experiences of those with suicidal experiences as well as those who aim to support and treat them.

Dr. Gutin will begin by referencing thinkers like Camus, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare, whose perspectives suggest that contemplating suicide can be an integral, perhaps even beneficial aspect of the human condition. She will contrast this with conventional and clinical discourse around suicide, often framed in terms of the “Biomedical Model” and individual pathology, and will detail how this contemporary discourse often contains implicit moral judgment and stigma directed towards those with suicidal experiences. Additionally, she will highlight how the “one size fits all” focus on individual pathology overlooks significant social and contextual factors such as trauma, discrimination, economic and other inequities which have been shown to drive and shape suicidal experiences.

Dr. Gutin will address the well-documented biases and discomfort many clinicians bear towards suicidal patients, the overreliance on assessment checklists (which have very poor predictive reliability) and conventional liability-based treatments, particularly involuntary hospitalization. In combination, these are paradoxically likely to exacerbate the distress of suicidal individuals, increase their sense of hopelessness and alienation, reduce trust of the mental health system and ultimately increases their risk of suicide!

Advocating for a broader understanding of suicidal experiences, Dr. Gutin will call for shifts in treatment approaches that align with what individuals with lived experiences of suicide find helpful: compassionate, non-judgmental support that respects their experiences, autonomy and dignity.

Times of political crisis take a toll on human minds and, especially, mental health. During and after the global pandemic, young people in particular experienced impaired well-being and various mental health issues. Even before the pandemic, eco-related anxieties were affecting young people, adding to their mental load and raising questions about how to support their capacity to act.

However, little research addresses young people's views on themselves in their everyday lives in such an open way that their own perspectives and perceived obstacles are revealed, rather than framing problems and challenges from an adult standpoint. Consequently, our understanding of how they currently view their lives and how the multiple crises are reflected in this view is limited.

In our study with children’s drawings, we asked primary school children in Northern Germany in 2025 to create drawings in response to the prompt “This is my life”.

Using reconstructive picture analysis, we aim to reconstruct the inherent socio-cultural narratives and power relations that children draw on when creating their drawings, including prevailing discourses on childhood and the Western self. On an explicit level, little in the drawings recalls the dark times in which they were created. On an implicit level, however, it is precisely the omission of problems and challenges that raises questions, which we will discuss to explore potential avenues for supporting children’s well-being and agency.

The concept of relational uncertainty continues to receive cross-disciplinary attention with scholarship usually relying on traditional psychological theory to inform developments. In this regard, theories range from assumptions involving internalised cognition to dualistic person-in-the-world (e.g., constructivist) accounts to explain actions taking place. This presentation offers a different theoretical approach to understanding relational uncertainty, one enabled by resonant pluralism. To elaborate, the discussion situates these ideas in a project undertaken in government-run schools in Melbourne, Australia. The research team were contracted by the State Department of Education to develop a suite of resources for school leaders and teachers to assist their engagement with students of African heritage. In the process of developing the resources, school-based focus groups were conducted separately with adults and children. From those conversations, it was apparent an affective atmosphere regularly shrouded teacher-student relationships arising from experiences of cultural or racial uncertainty. In many instances teachers reported that uncertainty would initially immobilise their ability to engage with students and then, having had a moment to consider their response, they would choose to do nothing rather than act in a manner which might be perceived to be offensive or inappropriate. As an alternative to the psychologism that dominates everyday relational accounts, the prospect of resonant pluralism is introduced. It is argued that in having optional entry points to understanding relational action, uncertainty may potentially shift from being an enigmatic obstacle to a medium for inclusion.

The concept of moral injury has gained rapid traction over the past decade, especially in the context of protracted and asymmetric warfare. Framed as harm that wounds the conscience rather than the psyche, moral injury sits at the intersection of psychology and ethics while exposing deep tensions between them.

This paper advances a double argument. First, it critiques the therapeutic turn in moral injury discourse: the growing impulse to “treat” guilt, shame, and conscience risks collapsing morality into psychology. When wrongful harm has occurred, centering the perpetrator’s distress may be ethically illegitimate and even therapeutically counterproductive. In an era of heightened self-focus, guilt can too readily be reframed as a symptom rather than a demand for responsibility, repair, and moral agency. Second, the paper argues that outright rejection of therapeutic intervention is equally untenable: soldiers are often barely adults who did not choose the wars they were sent to fight, and unresolved moral anguish substantially heightens risk for despair and suicide.

Moral injury thus reveals a paradox akin to that embedded in the much older and long-contested “Just war theory” which sets criteria for the right to go to war and the right conduct in war. Moral injury and Just war theory are both conceptually strained, yet without them we lose essential tools for thinking ethically about warfare. By critically examining moral injury discourse and emerging clinical practices, this paper explores how theory might mediate between ethics, psychotherapy, and politics. I outline an approach that neither fully medicalizes conscience nor fully moralizes suffering, grounding moral repair in exploring moral identity, and enhancing free will and accountability going forward, repenting and making amends, using theological and ethical concepts as well as a third and more recent part of Just war theory - Ending a war (Jus post bellum) - while taking seriously the professional and national duty to address the unbearable moral pain of soldiers.

Western academic clinical psychology functions as the primary gateway through which knowledge about psychological suffering becomes legitimized globally. This paper argues that the standards of evidence-based treatment, particularly the criterion of “best available research evidence”, operates not as a neutral scholarly instrument but as a political mechanism that imposes theoretical assumptions onto other frameworks of knowledge. In doing so, it enacts an epistemic colonization that overwrites existing knowledge systems with Western foundations, while simultaneously restricting the emergence and legitimization of new or alternative clinical paradigms. Beneath this seemingly objective standard lies a dense network of theoretical assumptions: epistemological commitments to empiricism, methodological reliance on statistical and experimental hierarchies, and philosophical allegiance to the medical model and materialist conceptions of distress. These assumptions filter out entire forms of clinical theory, rendering alternative frameworks unintelligible or illegitimate. This study will show how these assumptions are embedded in the standard of “best available research,” undermining its pretense of neutrality. We then demonstrate how each imposed assumption has prevented specific current existing paradigms from entering the field, while pressuring others to alter their theoretical foundations to fit in, stripping them of the very novelty that constitutes their value. Finally, we show how this dynamic contributes to the West’s broader global colonization by positioning itself as the sole source of legitimate clinical knowledge, leaving others dependent on its standards and without viable pathways to present their own knowledge on a global stage.

There is a long tradition of viewing psychotherapy with a certain degree of suspicion. Within the relatively cloistered field of psychotherapy ethics, key concerns have tended to cluster around the risk of boundary violations and the need to maintain a considered neutrality on the part of clinicians. But of course psychotherapy also has a life outside the consulting room, so to speak, and broader worries have persisted regarding the societal role of the psychological disciplines (often inspired by the work of Foucault). In this talk, we take up several related strands of concern, exploring the increased importance of social critique as a necessary tool to better understand contemporary clinical realities and the ways in which foundational theories of psychotherapy themselves function within specific social and political contexts. This starts with recognition that ethical analyses have gradually shifted towards the tracking of implicit moral and social values active within the clinical encounter. Indeed, even formalized interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) – including versions adapted for digital platforms – raise the spectre of indirect influence. We also want to suggest that these worries demand another layer of critique, one that examines the explanatory rationale supporting any particular school of psychotherapy. Each and every type of therapy carries with it theoretical assumptions not just about how it works, the particular 'mechanism of change,' but also what conception of well-being and human flourishing is best aspired to. This calls for sustained social and political analysis of both theory and practice.

Psychology as a science of human beings tends to define its perspective of study in anthropocentric terms. Looking at human perception, self, consciousness, mind, action, behavior, development, it takes an egocentric and ethnocentric point of view. Anthropocene psychology - alongside environmental humanities, ecosystems theory, decolonial psychologies, feminist ethics of more-than-human caring, to name a few - rather invites to practice an ecocentric psychological science that understands humans as one of the many parts of the Planet’s ecosystem. This shift of perspective implies that human psychic phenomena are considered in a system of interdependencies with the rest of the Planet’s life. For instance, psychic health cannot exist in a sick environment, well-being cannot exist in a context of environmental injustice.

In two coordinated symposia, we explore what does this imply for psychological theorizing. The 1st symposium presents the general theoretical foundations of the project of ecocentric psychology. The 2nd symposium presents the theoretical development in different contexts and fields of psychology. Is anthropocentric psychology equipped to understand the different crises that humankind is facing? How can we develop knowledge that can meaningfully respond to the ecological crisis of our times, toward a more just human everyday living-together with the Planet’s other beings and becomings? How does this quest of promoting more-than-human planetary solidarities sit with the quest of working toward social justice, acting in the interest of societally marginalized human beings, which many psychological researchers subscribe to? How can psychological research care for the human being in more ecocentric ways?

This study explores the informal workplace learning of newcomer baristas in New York City’s third wave coffee industry as a political and psychological site where narratives of power, ideology, and agency are continuously negotiated. Drawing on narrative inquiry and correspondence analysis, it examines how psychological constructs such as adaptability, motivation, and belonging function as ideological instruments that both enable and constrain workers’ agency. Narratives from twelve newcomer baristas and twelve café owners across single shops, local chains, and global brands reveal overlapping work values, including customer orientation and hard work, but also newcomer-specific values such as proactive attitude and cultural adaptation.

While café owners frame their enterprises through cosmopolitan and sustainable discourses of “global connection,” they frequently depoliticize the transnational labor sustaining this image. Newcomers’ narratives, by contrast, foreground the emotional and cultural labor of integration, revealing informal learning as a process of navigating systemic inequalities rather than merely acquiring skills. These findings situate informal learning within broader socio-political and postcolonial dynamics, showing how global service industries reproduce neoliberal ideals of self-reliance and cultural “fit,” while also offering spaces of micro-resistance and re-signification.

By theorizing informal workplace learning as a narrative practice shaped by ideology and power, this study contributes to critical theoretical psychology, emphasizing that the making of the “competent worker” is inseparable from the making of the compliant (or resistant) subject in globalized labor economies.

Enforced disappearances constitute an extreme form of state violence that radically disrupts family bonds, mourning processes, and the symbolic conditions of intergenerational transmission (Keilson, 1992; Lira, 2010). In the Chilean context, the persistence of absence and the incompleteness of truth have positioned families, particularly the sons and daughters of disappeared persons, as central actors in the production of memory and in claims for reparation (Jelin, 2002; Piper, 2015). Grounded in critical psychology and Latin American political psychology, this paper draws on the tradition inaugurated by Ignacio Martín-Baró (1998) and aims to analyze how family narratives configure memory practices that operate simultaneously as subjective, relational, and political processes.

Using a qualitative approach ("Groundesd Tehory", Strauss & Corbin, 2002), this study examines in-depth interviews conducted with sons and daughters of victims of enforced disappearance during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990). The findings show that the family emerges as a privileged space for meaning-making, where memory not only preserves the bond with the disappeared person but also articulates demands for truth, justice, and reparation. Intergenerational narratives reveal tensions between silence, memory mandates, and processes of re-signification, giving rise to forms of reparation that exceed institutional frameworks and are embedded in everyday, relational, and symbolic practices (Lira & Weinstein, 2000).

This paper proposes understanding these narratives as psychosocial-political practices that resist the closure of the past and challenge linear conceptions of reparation in contexts of state violence.

The question of what professionalism and professionalisation is has been explored in numerous studies without consenting on what constitutes ‘a good teacher’ (Korthagen 2004, Goodson and Hargreaves 1996). The relationship between profession and person is generally overlooked in the literature on professions, which often become examined in societal perspectives and as collective issues (Hjort and Weber 2004).

Drawing on literature about professionalism (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer 2012), person-related (McAdams and Pals 2006), narrative (Bruner 1990) and critical cultural (Hundeide 2005, Dreier 2009) psychology, this study explores how teaching professionals and their professional becoming through teacher education and schoolwork may be understood in diverse and more personal ways. The critical/narrative theoretical approach will place professionalisation and personal narratives in contexts, where persons are perceived as participants in social practice structures that construct narratives as meaningful wholes in complex realities.

Analysing and socioculturally comparing (Melhuus 2002) the narratives of two teachers through a realistic and nuanced concept of the person that includes multiple layers and perspectives from an integrative science of personality (McAdams and Pals 2006), make it possible to view teacher professionalism as something that is also borne by the personal, leading to a more precise and thus novel understanding of what teacher professionalism is.

Bruner, J. 1990. Acts of meaning. Harvard University Press.

Dreier, O. 1999. Personal Trajectories of Participation across Contexts of Social Practice. Outlines:5-32.

Hundeide, K. 2005. Socio-Cultural Tracks of Development. Cultural Psychology, 11(2):241-261.

McAdams, D.P. and Pals, J.L. 2006. A New Big Five. American Psychologist, 61(3):204-217.

Field trips and tours involve moving-through and in an environment and are ways of acting in and knowing the environment. Thus, field trips can be considered a “moving methodology and epistemology” that involves an embodied and embedded approach that engages with the world. Field trips are an integral part of scholarship and pedagogy. The City University of New York considers the city an extension of the classroom, a leaning laboratory, and an opportunity for experiential learning.  

Consistent with the conference theme this symposium will explore the topic of “Intersections of theory, art, narrative, and politics” via the art of field tripping. The art of field tripping includes the selecting of sites and places within sites, as well as the paths that connect the places. These sites, places and paths can be constructed into narrative. Politics are implicit in field trips as sites are physical manifestations of politics that speak for themselves. Politics are implicit in the ways guides curate and in the responses of tour participants. Finally, this symposium invites participants to participate in one of the optional conference tours offered by the symposium presenters to put theory into practice and experience and reflect on the tours and the art of field tripping. The themed tours include the major focal areas of the Environmental Psychology specialization at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and led by members of program with different disciplinary backgrounds:

Everyday Experiences (The Joys and Miseries of Walking and Public Transit in NYC)

Neighborhood and Community Activism (Gowanus, East Harlem)

Each focal area links to overarching interests in Environmental Psychology of Health and Well-being, Social and Environmental Justice, and Sustainability.

A reflexive view on the discipline of psychology implies that the discipline’s models and theories not only describe or predict but also shape human subjectivities and actions. In today’s situation, where human activities drive an immense loss of biodiversity and natural areas, it is thus crucial to challenge the ways psychology theorize humans’ relations to nature and other species. Within ecopsychology, a key assumption is that humans are alienated from nature, leading to both individual suffering and environmental destruction. Similarly, preventive psychology’s models typically include natural conditions such as access to green spaces and clean air and water. Thus, both ecopsychology and preventive psychology illustrate how nature is indeed integrated into psychological models of human development and quality of life. However, building on the critical assumption that theories shape our subjectivities, it is still necessary to investigate how the more dominant mainstream theories may be developed to re-theorize our relations with nature and other species. In this paper, I argue that Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory is a good candidate for such a theory. The aim is to illustrate how this theory may be developed by integrating geosystems across the theory’s microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems, and macrosystems. For such re-theorizing to be successful in shaping subjectivities where humans are less alienated from nature and nature is understood as something more than a provider of ecosystem services, I argue that the scientific language of disciplinary psychology is insufficient. Instead, the transformative potential of re-theorizing will be more successful if it is inspired by how relations between humans, nature, and other species are explored through the language of contemporary poetry.

This presentation contrasts the counseling discipline's philosophical roots, which fundamentally originate from the work of Carl Rogers, with the pathology-focused paradigms prevalent in allied psy-disciplines. The counseling framework shifts the focus from "disorder" to the individual's inherent capability, driven by the Actualizing Tendency—an innate force toward growth.

This philosophy yields two key outcomes: a strength-based approach, mobilizing client resources rather than pathologizing distress, and a commitment to wellness. While practical necessities like insurance reimbursement often force compliance with the DSM hegemony, counseling's core ideal provides a vital counterbalance. It critiques the trend of over-pathologizing complex human experiences (e.g., framing sorrow as clinical depression), championing instead a de-pathologized view of human existence and defending the natural range of emotional responses.

Affective History is a method I developed over many years. It denotes the tracing of the embodied relations and affects which allow us to understand a path to the present, not as disciplining or discursive practices but the tiny affects through which the present is formed. Not so much intergenerational transmission as deeply felt histories that can be gleaned from listening and systematic engagement with entangled narratives.

I have added to this method in many research projects, but for the present paper I consider aspects of class differences in the present conjuncture by tracing the affective histories of participants in a longitudinal study of British women divided by class, first seen as 4 year olds born in 1972/3 and most recently as 52/3 year old women interviewed in 2025. I am asking how we might utilise affective history to understand the historical production of the felt affects that are significant in the production of the deeply divided present. Using case studies, I consider aspects of family and community complexities through which class divides morph through the generations In relation of changing politics and policies in which patterns of intergenerational inequality and inherited wealth resist most liberal and neoliberal attempts to erode class differences.

In this double-symposium we discuss theories relevant for understanding how to produce transformative change across levels of praxis. We trace the history from Gramsci’s conceptualization of (counter) hegemony, to the theoretical conceptualization of counter hegemonic struggles (Jean Lave) across disciplines and in relation to different practice fields. Across papers, we discuss the question of transformative change applying dialectic relational theorization of (dis)alienation (Lefebvre), production of social space (liminal, differential, and (un)safe spaces), and in relation to questions of how to co-produce collective transformative agency of relevance for the development of practice.

We discuss how to engage different participants and bridge across (marginal) positions, including difference in class, culture and educational backgrounds in research and cocreation of (re-)presentations? How do we contribute to theory-development about (aesthetic) communication (Nissen) without risk of reproducing dilemmas of academic alienation / (re-)producing distance to practitioners and young people, participating from marginal positions?

One paper discusses theories of transformative pedagogics (from Freire to bell hooks), others discuss relevance of different conceptualizations and ways to co-create transformative change as well as conceptualizations of collective transformative agency (Stetsenko). How do we (re-)present (Stenner) transformative change – and sensitive issues such as young people’s experiences of injustice and struggles everyday live practice? Papers (re-)presents different art-based co-productions, co-created with children and young people. The co-creations include poems and songs about feelings about Gaza and racism, video-creations (re-)presenting art-based social work and practice research, and we discuss ethics of care, possibilities and dilemmas of recognition through art-based (re-)presentations.

In theorizing in dark times, how do images help us see—or obscure—what counts as a body, a subject, or a life? This presentation draws from research supported by the Stanley B. Burns, MD, Fellowship for the Study of Medical Photographic History at Yale University, examining 19th-century photographic techniques (daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes) and their entanglement with the evolution of medical epistemology. These early technologies, which materialized the human body through an emerging clinical gaze, offer an entry point into the political stakes of visual theory.

Framing medical imaging as both scientific record and aesthetic performance, the author argues that early medical photography did not merely document illness—it helped define the visual codes by which the body became knowable, governable, and eventually, computable. By tracing the ontological transformation of images—from singular material objects to data-driven, algorithmic entities—this paper explores how visual representation is always already a form of political theory.

Bringing this historical archive into dialogue with contemporary questions around algorithmic vision and surveillance medicine, I ask: What does it mean to theorize images in dark times, when seeing itself is shaped by infrastructures of control? How do arts of seeing—and unseeing—form part of our resistance or complicity? This talk invites reflection on the role of visual theory as both critique and creation, mapping how image-making practices negotiate power, narrative, and embodied knowledge.

Craft psychology has gained traction in recent years. Studies focus on mental health and well-being (Bukhave et al., 2025; Kirketerp, 2024), tapping into a neoliberal agenda that individualizes mental health and views coping as the sufferer’s responsibility, while reducing craft to a ”technical fix”. Although community aspects of craft in learning settings are also part of the agenda (Kirketerp, 2024) it is an add-on which further taps into the decontextualized neoliberal wellness agenda. In this paper I suggest an approach to craft that focuses on the potential for resistance and change inherent, but widely unnoticed in craft. Historically, especially textile craft, is the unheeded art of the oppressed: women, marginalized ethnic groups, and the working class – more often than not intersecting (Leone, 2021). However, historical examples from e.g. the French revolution and the resistance movement of WWII, show that, not only can knitting hold encoded messages, but it can also be the center of strong communities of resistance. A recent example is the Crochet Coral Reef, a collective effort, started by Christine and Margaret Wertheim, and cited by Haraway (2017) as a powerful comment on climate change.

Drawing on anthropology and new materialism, I wish to expand craft psychology beyond the mere solitary, recreational, and coping imaginaries that seem to stick, even in the celebration of craft. With concepts such as Haraway’s String Figures (2016), Manning’s Minor Gestures (2020), and Ingold’s Skill (2021), I wish to address how we may understand craft as a more-than-human multiple endeavor with vast potential for resistance and change.

References:

Bukhave, E. B., Creek, J., Linstad, A. K., & Frandsen, T. F. (2025). The effects of crafts‐based interventions on mental health and well‐being: A systematic review. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, 72(1), e70001-n/a. https://doi.org/10.1111/1440-1630.70001

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Ingold, T. (2021). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New edition.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003196662

Minor Gesture (pp. 64–85). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822374411-005

Kirketerp, A. (2024). Craft psychology : how crafting promotes health (1. editing). Mailand.

Leone, L. (Ed.). (2021). Craft in art therapy : diverse approaches to the transformative power of craft materials and methods (1st ed.). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Manning, E. (2020). Weather Patterns: or How Minor Gestures Entertain the Environment. In The Minor Gesture (pp. 64–85). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822374411-005

In times characterized by political instability, crisis, and social fragmentation, theory takes on a renewed urgency. It emerges as a form of political engagement: an act that challenges dominant narratives and power relations and opens up the possibility of alternative futures. In this context, our contribution offers an epistemological and methodological reflection on walking as a qualitative research practice, explored in combination with food and consumption practices conceived as everyday, material, and symbolic devices.

Walking with participants through foodscapes is not just a data collection strategy. It constitutes a political gesture that upsets traditional hierarchies of knowledge and promotes a dialogical and situated way of theorizing. At the same time, food—understood as a language of everyday life and means of identity construction—provides access to cultural, individual, and relational dimensions that are often silent. Together, walking and food create an embodied and participatory scene that allows for critical engagement with issues of belonging, exclusion, and recognition.

More than a means of accessing lived experience, this methodological interaction foregrounds food and walking as ordinary but universal practices, bridging the gap between scientific research and everyday life. Highlighting the limitations, ethical and reflective implications of such an approach, we argue that walking through foodscapes can be seen as a practice for making theory but at the same time political, an epistemic practice that resists reduction of complexity, nurtures spaces of justice and equity, and contributes to a psychology “of and for the world”.

How should we theoretically understand patient voices in psychiatry? Patient voices in psychiatry refer to the inclusion of patients’ lived experiences, perspectives, and narratives in the understanding, research, and shaping of psychiatric care. This presentation focuses on the writings of psychiatric patients, including letters, diaries, and pamphlets (Nielsen et al., 2025). In recent years, there has been growing interest in patient voices within psychiatry; however, the field remains divided between particularism and institutional functionalism. Particularism examines individual patient voices in isolation, while institutional functionalism interprets them as parts of broader institutional practices (Bacopoulos-Viau et al., 2016; Condrau, 2007). The presentation draws on a research project analyzing more than 250 letters and several pamphlets written by psychiatric patients at Jydske Asyl, the first asylum in Denmark, between 1851 and 1920. The material demonstrates how the writings of psychiatric patients have evolved over time, developing shared themes and concerns. Adopting a historical perspective, the presentation argues that connecting voices from the asylum period to present-day patient voices reveals both continuities and ruptures in how patients describe their experiences (Rancière, 1995). Theoretically, the project employs a practice-oriented framework (Lave, 1991), suggesting that patient voices constitute a historical practice that has gradually challenged the hegemonic, doctor-centered view of psychiatry. This process has opened new epistemological spaces in which psychiatric patients can develop new modes of expression and new ways of engaging with psychiatric care (Rose, 2019).

In the context of dark times defined by acceleration and compulsive optimization, this article problematizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a dogmatic temporal regime. It posits a structural conflict between two logics: back-propagation, formalized by Werbos (1974) and Rumelhart et al. (1986), and front-propagation, characteristic of the human psyche. While the algorithm operates via a reinforcement learning loop that adjusts the future to minimize error relative to an accumulated past (Skinner, 1938; Goodfellow et al., 2016), human experience requires the irreversibility of time and durée for meaning construction (Bergson, 1910; Valsiner, 2014).

The discussion unpacks this antagonism by analyzing the microgenesis of the pause. It is argued that algorithmic urgency fuses the domains of As-Is and As-If, eroding the boundary tensegrity of the Self necessary for ethical imagination (Tateo, 2016; Vaihinger, 1924). Unlike the stochastic variation of generative networks, which achieve similarity without transcending the original model (Goodfellow et al., 2014), human persistent imitation generates genuine novelty through future-oriented affective hypergeneralization (Baldwin, 1892; Valsiner, 2007). The paper concludes by proposing theorizing as temporal resistance: recovering the thickness of the present through zones of semiotic buffering is the ontological condition to sustain political agency.

In this presentation, I will attempt to theorize and conceptually explore two psychological processes related to change in human consciousness, the on-set of sleep and waking up from it. To this end, I will employ both cultural-historical activity theory (Leont’ev 1978) and cultural psychology (e.g, Valsiner 2014) as my main theoretical frameworks. Specifically, I suggest that both falling asleep and waking up could be understood as spontaneous but also deviced liminal experiences (Stenner 2017, 2021), (un)organized temporary suspensions of the limits between consciousness and sleep and movement between these states as a world of its own. Importantly, in this world the direction of the passage possibly impacts the potentiality of the experience and which, in turn, can also disrupt the passage altogether. I will enrich my exploration with philosophical readings of sleep (Morgan Wortham 2013), especially Nancy’s The Fall of Sleep (2009).

In my presentation I will use observational and interview data to illuminate and challenge my conceptual explorations. These data come from a microethnography of the sleep practices of two Finnish kindergarten groups I recently conducted. The presentation contributes to my overall goal of trying to understand various cultures of sleep in early childhood and to employ the educational sciences to invent and develop novel practices for better sleep in the age of the Anthropocene.

References

Nancy, J-L. (2009). The Fall of Sleep. Fordham University Press

Leont’ev, A. N. (1978). Activity, consciousness, and personality. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall.

Morgan Wortham, S. (2013). The Poetics of Sleep From Aristotle to Nancy. Bloomsbury

Stenner, P. (2017). Liminality and experience: A transdisciplinarity approach to the psychosocial. Palgrave.

Stenner, P. (2021). Theorising Liminality between Art and Life: The Liminal Sources of Cultural Experience. In B. Wagoner & T. Zittound (Eds.) Experience on the Edge. Theorizing Liminality. pp. 3 - 42. Springer.

Valsiner, J. (2014). An Invitation to Cultural Psychology. SAGE.

Psychology as a science of human beings tends to define its perspective of study in anthropocentric terms. Looking at human perception, self, consciousness, mind, action, behavior, development, it takes an egocentric and ethnocentric point of view. Anthropocene psychology - alongside environmental humanities, ecosystems theory, decolonial psychologies, feminist ethics of more-than-human caring, to name a few - rather invites to practice an ecocentric psychological science that understands humans as one of the many parts of the Planet’s ecosystem. This shift of perspective implies that human psychic phenomena are considered in a system of interdependencies with the rest of the Planet’s life. For instance, psychic health cannot exist in a sick environment, well-being cannot exist in a context of environmental injustice.

In two coordinated symposia, we explore what does this imply for psychological theorizing. The 1st symposium presents the general theoretical foundations of the project of ecocentric psychology. The 2nd symposium presents the theoretical development in different contexts and fields of psychology. Is anthropocentric psychology equipped to understand the different crises that humankind is facing? How can we develop knowledge that can meaningfully respond to the ecological crisis of our times, toward a more just human everyday living-together with the Planet’s other beings and becomings? How does this quest of promoting more-than-human planetary solidarities sit with the quest of working toward social justice, acting in the interest of societally marginalized human beings, which many psychological researchers subscribe to? How can psychological research care for the human being in more ecocentric ways?

In times marked by fragmentation and crisis, theoretical psychology faces an urgent task: to rethink its relationship with mortality. This paper proposes “theorizing mortality as resistance” (a mode of thought that confronts death anxiety not as a private neurosis, but a as a political and ethical frontier. Drawing from existential and humanistic traditions (Becker, Yalom, Arendt, Butler), this work argues that awareness of finitude can serve as a radical form of consciousness, unsettling the cultural mechanisms that deny vulnerability and sustain domination.

Modernity’s obsession with progress and permanence has produced a psychological alienation from death, yielding collective defenses (distraction, consumption, and technological transcendence) that suppress our shared fragility. By contrast, to think with death is to recover the capacity for humility, compassion, and ethical imagination. This paper situates theoretical reflection as a moral act: a practice of staying awake to impermanence in a world that encourages numbness.

Through analysis of narrative, art, and philosophical discourse, the presentation contends that mortality awareness can generate new forms of solidarity and meaning-making. In this sense, theory becomes vigil (an ongoing commitment to preserving humanity amidst decay. To theorize mortality, then, is to resist despair by not denying darkness, but by learning to swell within it, creating the conditions for ethical renewal and collective hope.

Since the 1960s, progressive social movements have increasingly embraced “prefigurative” politics. As a strategy, prefiguration entails modes of organization in which people seek to reshape society by cultivating the kinds of persons they aspire to become and informing their relationships with themselves, their peers, and their environment with seeds of the sought-after future they are committed to creating. From the early 2000s on, prefigurative politics has gained popularity, putting personal politics on stage and demanding the theorization of how humans engage with what does not yet exist. However, critical scholarship on political subjectivity inadvertently assumes that past economic deprivation, structural inequalities, unconscious drives, and repressed desires exert a fatalistic and deterministic impact on people's capacity to project and enact alternatives. Scholars do so through etiological perspectives tailored to scrutinize the chain of past events that have governed the current form of human subjectivity and imagination, often in historical or mythological terms. Unfortunately, teleological approaches, which highlight intentions, purposes, and desired outcomes, have not yet received proper attention in the study of people's experiences in politics. This paper invites scholars to explore the political and theoretical benefits of theorizing the human condition not only as a product of its societal past but also as an active product of collective foresight. I argue that combining the two perspectives will help researchers escape the pessimistic ethos haunting various forms of critical scholarship by allowing theorists to focus on excavating the past as much as on mapping the future.

In moments of deep political crisis, imagination becomes a battlefield. The futures we envision—whether hopeful or dystopian—can heal our democracies or hasten their erosion. This presentation asks: When does political imagination act as a cure, and when does it turn into poison?

Drawing on political imagination—the ways groups envision their socio-political reality, its boundaries, limits, and possibilities (Taylor, 2004)—I explore its power both to preserve rigid social orders and to create alternative ones (Castoriadis, 1987). In times of crisis, this capacity is amplified: imagined futures can expand democratic possibilities or produce destructive visions that erode them (Castoriadis, 2012; Fry & Tlostanova, 2020).

My doctoral research examines these dynamics through the Jewish–Arab encounter in Be’er Sheva, focusing on Jewish and Arab community members linked to the bilingual schools founded by the Hagar Association. Based on in-depth interviews with educators, community staff, association leaders, and influential parents, the study addresses both their engagement with Hagar and their broader social and political experiences in a context defined by segregation, inequality, and ongoing war.

By analyzing these experiences through the framework of political imagination, the talk will map conditions under which the Jewish–Arab encounter acts as cure or poison—when it fosters imagining democratic futures, and when it forecloses them or fuels the imagining of anti-democratic ones. It will invite the audience to consider how theory can serve not merely as description, nor to interpret the present and past, but as an active force in shaping political futures.

Who gets to theorise? How and when do they do it? What happens to theoretical knowing when it leaves the academy? How does theorizing-in-practice circulate back into the ivory tower? The proposed roundtable brings together cultural workers and researchers-in-practice working with children and young people in a variety of international arts and educational contexts who will speak to these questions and share their experiences of theorizing in dark times. Arguably, times have always been ‘dark’ for those working outside the academy especially where the arts meet community work, where funding is precarious and at the whim of political winds, where operating on a shoestring is the norm and attrition is high. Yet, community arts—whether art, film, photography, theatre, poetry or writing—continue to be practised, to generate new methodologies, and to establish new ways of doing, thinking and feeling about the world, that why not, new theory. Many approaches to generating knowledge valued in the critical social sciences for their emancipatory and transformative potential—liberatory psychology, Theater of the Oppressed, Photovoice, and others—emerge from praxis at the intersections of arts, community, and education. The roundtable challenges the boundaries between theory and practice in the taken-for-granted practices of the academy and explores other forms of collaborative meaning-making in worlds beyond campuses. Members of the roundtable are drawn from an emerging community of practice concerned with connecting often lone cultural workers and researchers-in-practice working with children and young people in community arts internationally. During the roundtable we propose to reflect on what theory means to us in our respective contexts, how it informs our practice, what new insights and stories theory enables and which it constrains, and which other ways of knowing (biographies, intuitions, dreams, hopes, faith) we draw on to keep on keeping on.

In this double-symposium we discuss theories relevant for understanding how to produce transformative change across levels of praxis. We trace the history from Gramsci’s conceptualization of (counter) hegemony, to the theoretical conceptualization of counter hegemonic struggles (Jean Lave) across disciplines and in relation to different practice fields. Across papers, we discuss the question of transformative change applying dialectic relational theorization of (dis)alienation (Lefebvre), production of social space (liminal, differential, and (un)safe spaces), and in relation to questions of how to co-produce collective transformative agency of relevance for the development of practice.

We discuss how to engage different participants and bridge across (marginal) positions, including difference in class, culture and educational backgrounds in research and cocreation of (re-)presentations? How do we contribute to theory-development about (aesthetic) communication (Nissen) without risk of reproducing dilemmas of academic alienation / (re-)producing distance to practitioners and young people, participating from marginal positions?

One paper discusses theories of transformative pedagogics (from Freire to bell hooks), others discuss relevance of different conceptualizations and ways to co-create transformative change as well as conceptualizations of collective transformative agency (Stetsenko). How do we (re-)present (Stenner) transformative change – and sensitive issues such as young people’s experiences of injustice and struggles everyday live practice? Papers (re-)presents different art-based co-productions, co-created with children and young people. The co-creations include poems and songs about feelings about Gaza and racism, video-creations (re-)presenting art-based social work and practice research, and we discuss ethics of care, possibilities and dilemmas of recognition through art-based (re-)presentations.