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# The interspecies empathy: an object of an engaged and ecocentric theory coping with ecological crisis

Marion Picard, Laure Kloetzer

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Marion Picard, Laure Kloetzer. The interspecies empathy: an object of an engaged and ecocentric theory coping with ecological crisis. 20th Conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology, May 2024, Belgrade (Serbia), Serbia. 2024. hal-04985280

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20th Conference of the International
Society for Theoretical Psychology

THEORY AS ENGAGEMENT

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Book of Abstracts

20-24 May, 2024

Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade
## EDITORS

Biljana Stanković
University of Belgrade

Tania Zittoun
University of Neuchâtel

Tijana Nikitović
University of Belgrade

Tijana Nikitović
University of Belgrade

Kieran O'Doherty
University of Guelph

Ernst Schraube
Roskilde University

Biljana Stanković
University of Belgrade

Thomas Teo
York University

## REVIEWERS

Michael Arfken
University of Prince Edward Island

Ditte Alexandra Winther-Lindqvist
Aarhus University

Aleksander Baucal
University of Belgrade

Tania Zittoun
University of Neuchâtel

Marie-Cecile Bertau
University of West Georgia

Jim Cresswell
Ambrose University

Martin Dege
Pratt Institute

Basia Ellis
California State University

Hana Hawlina
University of Ljubljana, University of Neuchâtel

Antonia Larrain
Alberto Hurtado University

Kyoko Murakami
University of Westminster

## LAYOUT & COVER DESIGN

Jovan Radovanović

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ISTP
2024

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1838
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Belgrade

unine
UNIVERSITÉ DE
NEUCHÂTEL

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LOCAL ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Biljana Stanković
Co-Chair, University of Belgrade

Tijana Nikitović
Co-Chair, University of Belgrade

Aleksandar Baucal
University of Belgrade

Ana Đorđević
University of Belgrade

Sanja Grbić
University of Belgrade

Isidora Popović
University of Belgrade

Sonja Janičić
University of Belgrade

Teodora Vuletić
University of Belgrade

Selena Vračar
University of Belgrade

Natalija Ignjatović
University of Belgrade

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Tania Zittoun
Co-Chair, University of Neuchâtel

Ernst Schraube
Roskilde University

Antonia Larrain
Alberto Hurtado University

Hana Hawlina
University of Neuchâtel

Biljana Stanković
Co-Chair, University of Belgrade

Aleksandar Baucal
University of Belgrade

Tijana Nikitović
University of Belgrade

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ISTP
2024

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1838

Faculty of Philosophy
University of Belgrade

unine

UNIVERSITÉ DE
NEUCHÂTEL

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ISTP
# TABLE OF CONTENTS

<table><tr><td>KEYNOTE LECTURES</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>SYMPOSIA</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>ROUND TABLES</td><td>98</td></tr><tr><td>THEMATIC SESSIONS</td><td>104</td></tr><tr><td>CONFERENCE PROGRAMME</td><td>229</td></tr><tr><td>CORRESPONDING AUTHORS' CONTACT INFORMATION</td><td>238</td></tr></table>
# FOREWORD

The conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology has been held biennially for 40 years. The ISTP conference serves as an international forum for theoretical, metatheoretical and philosophical discussions in psychology. This is the first time that the event has been held in Southeastern Europe, making it an exceptional opportunity to welcome colleagues from the region who are interested in exploring theoretical issues in psychology. This year's conference in Belgrade is of particular importance as it is the first in-person meeting of the Society since the pandemic.

This year's theme is "Theory as Engagement". The call for engaged theorising has a long history - however it seems as timely and needed today as ever, especially in psychology. We suggest that theorising, albeit fundamental, shall not be held aside from or even opposed to the real world. Theorising is inclusive, it requires dedication and time, and it is always a dialogical endeavour. Theory is therefore an inevitable tool for engaging in the world and contributing to individuals and communities navigate complex environments and possible futures. The beauty of theorising is that it transcends national, historical, social and linguistic barriers while simultaneously serving as a tool for their critical examination, provided it is respectful, honest, transparent, dialogical, and reflexive. Especially under the current socio-political circumstances, that are marked by tensions and polarisation, theorising is more than ever an ethical demand.

This timely and important topic generated a significant interest from colleagues belonging to different theoretical and critical traditions in psychology and beyond. We received more than 250 contributions and had a challenging and inspiring task when putting together this year's program. As a final result, we present to you in this book 4 plenary lectures by distinguished scholars, 17 symposia, 4 roundtables and 34 thematic sessions on a range of topics in theoretical and critical psychology.

On behalf of the Programme and Organising Committees of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology conference, we would like to extend a warm welcome to scholars from more than thirty countries around the world. We hope that this conference will serve as a catalyst for insightful discussions and exchanges, and that you will have a memorable time in Belgrade!

Organisers of the 20th Conference of ISTP

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KEYNOTE
LECTURES

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**Pragmatism: Humble theory for an uncertain world**

Alex Gillespie

Oslo New University

Psychology's dominant positivist epistemology has resulted in the replication crisis, fractured findings that are artefacts of the methods used, and irrelevance in the face of contemporary challenges. Pragmatism, an epistemology created by psychologists but largely ignored by psychologists, offers an alternative. Pragmatism puts human activity, and especially the experience of uncertainty, at the centre of knowledge. It replaces the idea of theory as a mirror of nature with the idea of humans navigating the vagaries of the future equipped only with their experience of the past. It leans into uncertainty and tasks psychologists with empowering people to make their own futures. Yet, with such a world-making focus comes inescapable ethical responsibilities for what we choose to research.
**Educational and learning sciences:
Theory and research in the midst of motion**

Sanne Akkerman
Utrecht University

There are many accelerating developments in the world that sincerely worry us. Education seems to be the right place for upgrowing youth to make new sense of all that happens and matters in motion, to see new possibilities and ways to act where needed. Yet, education too seems to be a practice that has fallen prey to outside control and productivity. Sadly, educational and learning sciences make things worse by producing ahistorical and dehumanizing theories and research. I want to propose how social sciences can reengage again with the world it studies and it is already part of, through an uncomfortable, but necessary process of what I have been referring to as ontological synchronisation.

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Theory in action

Rastko Močnik

University of Ljubljana

To involve theory in social action entails the translation of theory into ideology as a social tie. However, epistemologists like Bachelard teach us that theory begins when it breaks away from the "opinion", that is, as Althusser puts it, by performing an epistemological break. It follows that our problem is how to save theoretical practice from its solipsistic closure.

Curiously, there is no proper theoretical articulation of theory and social engagement in Marx, nor in Freud. Freudian clinic, one might say, is theory in action. However, it shuns social engagement and confines itself to the realm of an individual psyche. Conversely, Marx who, while young, called for a passage à l'acte of philosophy, keeps his theory well outside of the individual consciousness. For Marx, what objectively, although deceptively, appears "on the surface of society", directly appears also "in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production". Ideology takes on an objective existence, while its subjective mechanisms remain obscured under a mechanistic phraseology. In the same vein, Althusser's intuitions on "ideological interpellation" remain an unfinished task.

A first approach to our problem will be to examine how the second generation of Freudians, well aware of the revolutionary nature of psychoanalysis, and of the historical emergency of a social revolution, practiced their theory as social engagement. The inverse perspective of a revolutionary Marxist engagement with Freudian theory might then indicate yet another way of articulation of theoretical practice with socially transformative practice.

In conclusion, we hope to outline an articulation between theory and ideology, between social and psychism, without embarking on a dubious export-import of concepts from one epistemic continent to another.

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Why EDI matters as a theoretical-psychological topic:
Ontic, epistemic, and ethical reflections

Thomas Teo

York University

Equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives have come under attack in recent years to the point that offices at universities have been eliminated or banned. Beyond organizational problems, it is argued that EDI has philosophical significance in a discipline that has neglected equity, diversity, and inclusion at all stages of research. Using examples from the past and present, the presentation identifies explicit and implicit theorizing in the project of psychology. After challenging models of human nature in psychological science, a series of interrogations are proposed that aid in improving research practices in psychology. It is argued that EDI as an epistemic project can aid in overcoming white epistemologies and improve psychological knowledge. Consequences of omissions in epistemologies of neglect and ignorance are discussed. Theorizing in psychology is strengthened when EDI is understood in terms of onto-epistemic categories in all contexts of the research process and when combined with autoepistemology. However, it is suggested that calls for EDI are insufficient when they do not address concrete existing power differentials, including in international research, and that a true global psychology beyond ethnocentrism needs to reflect on how dominant approaches may be embedded in ideas of supremacy. Difficulties in discussing topics of academic privilege are outlined, while onto-epistemic changes that do not disadvantage or ignore groups of people, and research practices that move beyond problematization and exclusion are presented. Ideas for a discipline and practice of psychology beyond a narrow horizon are presented.
SYMPOSIA

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CAREFUL REPRESENTATIONS OF CRISIS -
TEMPORALITY AND TEXTUALITY

Morten Nissen

Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

In theoretical psychology, 'crisis' is the state of an immature discipline, the call for a 'critical' psychology, and the place for theory. More widely, the term is used to describe the present - covid, climate, refugee, opiate, security crises, etc. Politicians are quick to discover here a way to argue their policies, mostly as measures to defend or reestablish a status quo.

The politics of multiple and continuing crises remind us of classic psychological insights: That representations are crucial to how crises are faced, but also constituted; and that the interplay and mutuality of the acute and the chronic – dramatic and epic – call forth troublesome temporalities, which are themselves performed by those representations. The very medium of such insights – textual representation – is itself complex in its temporality; the ‘now’ of the text stretches far before and long after any crisis it may describe – situating hope, yet sub specie aeternitatis. Also, crises prompt a ‘psycho-social’ awareness of how events can weave socio-cultural and planetary movements with personal biography and experience. Writing of a care crisis – indexed by numbers of diagnosed, dependent, destitute – is to call for a more encompassing kind of care, which has long proven possible, hoping to realize it in the future, mindful that our writings are themselves to be judged as acts of care – at all levels, from diaries and letters to articles and books in theoretical psychology.

This symposium addresses the issue and the obligation of careful representations of crises in a number of different contexts.

Keywords: *Crisis, representation, care, temporality, textuality*

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# Mo(ve)ments beyond demonization at the (social) media - How can we co-produce care in time of crises after gang exit?

Line Lerche Mørck

School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark

In Denmark the government is addressing multiple crisis, such as "the fight against gangs", the rise of psychiatric problems, and a dire need of more welfare state workers within psychiatry and prisons, dealing with people in crime and mental crisis. At another level of everyday life practice, former gang members become psychiatric patients, and they struggle with stigmatization and double binds long time after exiting the gang environment. Some struggle for their right to a secure space of everyday life practice without visibility and stigmatized representations. Others struggle to co-create new more nuanced representations of themselves and the state of gang crime and mental health crisis - at the very same (social) media platforms.

On the social media these very different representations of crisis - across societal and individual levels - is (re)presented by politicians, former gang members, and us researchers. The representations live side by side, sometimes they meet in dialogue and/or disputes arranged by media platforms and/or research. In and across texts and visual media, the representations create double binds, contradictions as well as possibilities of collective transformative agency and care. This paper explores processes of stigmatizations as well as the co-creation of new forms of collective transformative agency and care. How can we, as transformative collective agents, builds new more nuanced self-representations beyond gang life, where you can live as (in)visible active citizens transforming your past gang experience into something good, co-creating new forms of careful representations and collective care in practice.

Keywords: demonization, after gang exit, (social) media, transformative agency, ethics of care

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# A writing parent; Danish boarding schools as caring alternative practices in a crisis of well-being

Kristine Bagge Kousholt

School of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

"How's your daughter at the boarding school?"

"She's fine, I hope... I haven't heard from her lately..."

Through a parent's auto-ethnographical memory-work (cf. Frigga Haug), dilemmas connected to the Danish boarding schools ('efterskole') as an alternative educational practice are explored ('efterskole' is a kind of 'boarding school' from 8th to 10th grade level which is private but receives significant economic support from the state). In medias and in research, the current crisis of well-being among Danish young people is represented as having several causes, e.g., social medias, societal acceleration as well as a culture of individualization and high performance. The representation of the crisis of well-being calls for caring alternative practices, and each year approximately 30.000 young people attain Danish boarding schools. The schools are developed based on alternative theories of learning and subject formation focusing on 'Bildung', communities and artistic, poetic and bodily representations, yet dependent on traditional educational standards, assessment and forms of disciplining (e.g., exclusion). Dilemmas concerning the Danish boarding school as part of societal, ambiguous practices are explored from the outset of the writing parent.

How to take care across contexts? How is care distributed and held together among families and schools when schools provide everyday life contexts for the young people? How can textual representations transgress divided contexts, genres and temporalities in caring ways?

Keywords: crisis of well-being, memory-work, Danish boarder-schools, textuality, cross-contextual care
Resonating crises

Oliver Pedersen

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Crises are seemingly multiplying and becoming part of many people's experiences, from the looming climate collapse to the growing inequalities maintained by extractive capitalism. Nonetheless, people's experiences vary significantly, and it is therefore important to understand what constitute a crisis, and for whom. Studies do not simply look at crises as extraordinary events but also as endemic structural violence or slow-building catastrophes - as the boiling frog can attest to. Some have shown how crises entangle and accumulate, but little research addresses how past crises can mitigate present or future crises, which is evident in people's ability to imagine a future despite crisis-induced uncertainties.

To capture these instances of resonance in time and the open-ended twist and turns that happen as people live through different crises, I analyse online diaries written for more than 20 years with a sociocultural psychological perspective. Some of these diaries contain millions of words. I am not trying to negate the lasting trauma some develop but sticking with the idea of taking people's experience seriously, I find it important to unravel how their engagement with crises changes throughout life and explore the developmental processes involved. Preliminary analysis suggests that temporalities and the realization that things will pass plays a crucial role. Moreover, studying these resonances also reveal the dissonances that inevitable also happen - when the past amplifies current crises experiences.

Keywords: Crisis, Imagination, Future, Diaries, Longitudinal

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Crises in the house

Tania Zittoun

Institute of psychology and education, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Among the many crises that hit our societies is what has been sometimes called the "silver tsunami", the ageing of the population. Countries and regions handle it in different ways, some by transforming the landscape of care (Milligan & Wiles, 2010), so as to support ageing-in place – both for humanistic and economical reason. From a sociocultural psychological, dialogical perspective, it is interesting to examine how societal crises translate or diffuse in people's lives, and are experienced by them, and how ruptures experienced by person correspond, respond or affect these crises (Cornish, 2020; Zittoun, 2008, 2022; Zittoun et al., 2008). In the Vineyard region, as response to this demographic crisis, policymakers have started a major transformation of the housing system: buildings are planned, care network are created, etc. – which takes time (Gfeller & Zittoun, 2023). Old people live their lives, at home, in villages or neighbourhood; yet they may brutally fall, loose their driving license, or be widowed – and so is their mode of housing suddenly put in crisis, which requires a prompt response. Hence, the temporalities implied by societal crises and personal ruptures are often out of joint. We have been dialoguing with this complex system for five years, and among others, have created theatrical fora to catalyse a dialogue beyond these disjunctions.

Keywords: Ageing, Dialogue, Crises, Care, Temporality, Theatre

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# The Hamlet Effect:
## Sense-making in times of crisis

Paul Stenner

Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

Amongst leading thinkers, designations like ‘Times of crises’ (Serres, 2015) or ‘Catastrophic times’ (Stengers, 2015) are today superseding earlier contenders (like ‘postmodern times’ and ‘neoliberal times’) as the main societal self-description at a global level. One social psychological implication of this collective self-identity is that ‘being in crisis’ becomes a premise. A world framed by such a premise must face the problem of how to decide between the multiple competing diagnoses of crisis routinely on offer, and must reach for new ways of grasping the permanent, multiple and interconnected nature of crises through new concepts like ‘permacrisis’ and ‘polycrisis’ (Henig & Knight 2023). The premise of this paper is that the self-description of ‘being in crisis’ is itself a form of sense-making with its own history (Koselleck 1988) and with its own ways of making us ‘care’. We must care about how a crisis is ‘diagnosed’, for example, because this may be crucial to the outcome. We must learn how to learn from, and care about crises if we are to make the progressive changes they call for. Particularly important is the role aesthetic experience in opening new possibilities for re-imagining sense-making in crisis. (Zittoun & Stenner, 2021). To explicate this role, this paper introduces the proposition of a Hamlet Effect whereby: a) crises throw time ‘out of joint’ by interrupting expected futures and presumed pasts, while; b) the arts allow a phase of ‘hesitation’ for development of new ‘responses’.

Keywords: Crisis, care, polycrisis, sense-making, Hamlet
Escaping dualisms through ‘green’ critiques

Ditte Winther-Lindqvist

School of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

The way the climate and bio-diversity crisis, is typically addressed in western educational contexts, aims at teaching children how the natural world works and on this basis, introduce green alternatives, question our everyday habits of consumption in concrete ways connected to everyday life in day-care and school. However, creating and maintaining more sustainable practices and habits require a deeper and philosophical reorientation towards new values and world-views regarding the status of and relation between human and nature. The hierarchical dualisms characteristic of the modern era philosophy and psychology still filter through in most understandings of the human-nature relationship as a clear divide. The distinctly human has been identified in classical psychological theorizing through maximizing difference and distance from the animal, primitive and natural. In this way, modern psychology has been part of the problem leading to severe imbalance now between human and non-human earthlings and we are witnessing a crisis in the eco-balance (some talk of a 6 mass extinction era). The psychology of human supremacy has led to a backgrounding of our dependency on nature and thus made it difficult to raise resistance and replace unsustainable and uncaring policies and practices with more caring and green one's. Movements like deep ecology (Arne Næss) and its further developments in eco-feminisim (Val Plumwood) and care ethics (Løgstrup, Tronto) represent alternative understandings of human needs, dependency and entanglement with "nature" that are fruitful in developing a new basis for green transition, based on care, in education as elsewhere.

Keywords: world-care, education, green transition, care-ethics, eco-feminism

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Anxiety, self, and help in practices of self-help

Jeppe Pasgaard

University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Anxiety is usually presented as a form of ill mental health, allowing for the misrecognition of a
subject problematized as irrational, inhibited, and dysfunctioning. However, at the same time,
the subjectivity of anxiety must be addressed and dealt with as a rather precarious, reflexive
deprivation of familiarity and certainty, i.e., in dis-/connection with our everyday ideologies.
Typically, and without much reflection, this is the opening of psychological discourse and
intervention in times of an alleged "mental health" crisis, providing and asserting certainty of our
mental states, with us being familiarized with ourselves and our anxieties, often through aesthetic
representations. This "aesthetics of psy" does not appear in the common-sense forms as art or
poetry, but in distinct and esoteric forms of earnestness, graveness, and prosaic scientificity.
As aesthetic experiences, the textuality of psychological representations is not opposed to - but
reflected precisely in virtue of - recognizing its discourse as scientific expertise, i.e., through
presentations that are thus not unessential. They are intricately caught up in the (re-)staging of
structures of ideology by way of us becoming sure, being made sure of the "order of things". With
the booming interest in self-help literature, often coined as a "personal development industry",
we also see the contours of the appeals and incentives of "mainstream psychology" reflecting
the (trans-)boundaries of clinical treatment. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly urgent to
interrogate the widespread commodification of - and thus the demand for - psy-knowledge in a
global reflexivization of interpretation, not least in times of crises.

Keywords: Anxiety, mental health, ideology, care, self-help

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# Conditions for interprofessional collaboration during a well-being crisis?

Dorte Kousholt¹, Anja Hvidtfeldt Stanek², Kurt Bendix-Olsen³, Tilde Mardahl-Hansen³

¹Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark. ²University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. ³UCL University College, Odense, Denmark

In Denmark, there are currently debates about a 'well-being crisis' as many studies point to increasing mental health problems among children and youth. Part of the debate revolves around how to interpret these studies: Are the alarming statistics a result of the way we measure well-being, societal changes that create more vulnerable generations, increased demands, or a lack of time and resources in daycare and schools? The notion of a well-being crisis places pressure on professionals working with children (e.g. schools and Educational-Psychological Services). They are faced with demands for both long-term preventive interventions and for addressing acute problems, essentially 'putting out fires.'

The idea that professionals should be responsible for solving societal crises, Rittel and Webber discussed in 1973. They criticized the notion that, grounded in modern science, professionals are intended to be the conduit through which scientific advancements can be applied in practice. The concept of wicked problems underscores that the issues professionals grapple with are complex, transcending location and professional boundaries and entwined with multiple interests. How we frame the problem is inherently connected to the solutions at our disposal.

In this paper, we draw from an ongoing joint research project titled 'Collaboration about children's well-being in communities of everyday life' to discuss the conditions for interprofessional collaboration. We explore how the notion of wicked problems alters the way we perceive solutions and how they can work across different contexts, diverse understandings of the problem, various professions, and societal tasks, among other things.

Keywords: *Children, well-being, collaboration, wicked problems*

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Listening in Crisis, Listening with Care:
Child protection and the crisis that never was?

Johanna Motzkau

Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

Child protection scandals, i.e. news that one or several children/young people have come to serious harm (suffering neglect, sexual exploitation or violence) due to apparent catastrophic failures within existing child protection systems, are so called 'never events'. These have, despite serious improvements and 'lessons learnt' declarations, continued to haunt child protection services internationally (since their inauguration in the 1970s), with the UKs systems described as in permanent crisis (Motzkau & Lee 2022).

In how far does the realization that existing structures and practices, carefully honed to keep children safe, have failed, constitute an instant crisis that challenges a status quo; or are such events better understood as indicators of an underlying permanent but systemic issue with the way policy and practice have operated for decades? I will argue that the tendency to catastrophise in the context of failures in child protection practice, has long obscured a broader issue affecting child protection practitioners and health/welfare services more broadly: a societal crisis of listening, which ultimately manifests as a crisis of care.

Drawing on recent work with researchers and child protection practitioners in Germany, this talk considers how different representations of child protection in crisis, affect how it is governed, conducted and researched with disparate results (Biesel et al 2021). Based on the exploration of this 'crisis of listening' I sketch 'listening with care' as a theoretical foundation for emancipatory approaches to shaping and appreciating evidence within welfare and justice practices, in order to promote different ways of listening in crisis

Keywords: Listening, epistemologies of care, welfare, justice, child protection
'Point of resistance' and social production – a way out of the care crisis?

Maria Voulgaris Valeur

Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

The care crisis shows itself in the health care sector, with the increase in young people having
mental health issues, and in the climate and biodiversity crises.

Capitalist society can be said to be characterized as a way of producing that is violent to the land and to its citizens, harvesting resources without giving back. It feeds into a logic of infinite growth. This kind of production hasn't focus on life itself. With feminist thinkers such as Maria Mies one could argue that production could be done with means which are social and sustainable – a way in which there is taken care of life. Even though the capitalist production is dominating, I will argue that, to make human life possible, social production is indispensable in the midst of capitalist society. Introducing Alfred Krovoza, a maybe forgotten freudomarxist, and his concept of 'point of resistance', it can be argued that social production (or 'metaeconomic production') takes place in primary socialization and and in practices of art, culture etc., although fleeting. The concept of 'point of resistance' can help us understand how social production can be expanded and capitalist production fought.

To articulate this, I will be turning to the local practice The Writing Group at U-turn, a facility for young drug users in Copenhagen. In the unfolding analysis of The Writing Group, I will show how their work with text as re-/presentation can be seen as a practice of social production and thus of care.

Keywords: *Crisis, care, production, point of resistance, work with text*

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# Escaping the Hamster Wheel:
## Poetry as a way to cultivate meta-motives

Morten Nissen

Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

To anyone coming from an epistemology of practice, interested in activism and social change, the cherishing of inactivity in art, highlighted in aesthetics theories such as those of Rancière (Aesthesis), Groys (In the Flow), or Adorno (Aesthetic Theory) may appear misplaced or even reactionary. Do they confirm art's status as a bourgeois realm of activities and artefacts of no purpose? I suggest the opposite: They theorize art as vital to cultural transformation. Art breaks with purposes because it breaks them up, to suggest their reconfiguration. This is why art can cultivate meta-motives: Motives for reflecting and transforming motives.

Addiction can be represented as a psycho-social crisis of motives. Its patterns of instrumental habits running amok caricature the onto-epistemology of contemporary culture, as Bateson identified in his Cybernetics of Self. Clinical treatment mostly mirrors those patterns, by manipulating clients into forming (better) motives as 'goal-directed'. But many clients see through it and are tired of running - and stumbling - in the hamster wheel. They may be ready for the Writing Group: my empirical prototype for an aesthetic cultivation of meta-motives. In this liminal space, 'addiction treatment' is expanded into a wider practice of care. I will try to show how poetry breaks with the obligation to motivated self-disclosure implied indexically by the therapeutic space.

Poetry mocks narrative coherence and expressive authenticity. Poetry displays multiple motives and implications, for writers and readers to recognize and reflect, relevant to us all, much richer than the clinical dimension 'pathological' vs. 'motivated for change'.

Keywords: Poetry, addiction, therapy, motives, care

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PUSHING THE FRONTIERS OF PSYCHOLOGY BEYOND THE HUMAN:
TOWARDS AN ECOCENTRIC TURN IN PSYCHOLOGY?

Laure Kloetzer

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Some scholars in psychology have been engaged in facing the main ecological challenges of our times since more than 20 years, studying humans-other-than-humans relations and interactions and their consequences, for example in the field of conservation psychology (Saunders, 2003; Clayton & Myers, 2009) or developmental psychology (Melson, 2001; Myers, 2007). In human and social sciences, the rehabilitation of others-than-humans has taken place through the so-called animal turn, as well as posthumanist ontologies in anthropology (Servais, 1999; Ingold, 2000 ; Descola, 2005 ; Demeulenaere, 2017), sociology (Latour, 1991 ; Stengers, 1995), semiotics (Kohn, 2013), or philosophy (Abram, 2013 ; Harraway, 2016). Multiple perspectives also account for the place of others-than-humans in education, especially through relational and critical pedagogies (see for example Cole & Stewart, 2014; Pedersen & Stanescu, 2014; Lloro-Bidart, T.; Banschbach, 2019; Nocella et al., 2019; Taylor, 2020). The rehabilitation of other-than-humans in social sciences requires researchers to re-think their concepts and tools as well as their old paradigms (considering animals, plants and any environmental elements as agents without omitting the domination effects) and giving them a diplomatic and transformative role in societies (Latour, 2004). Following this large movement, we might wonder what about psychology now? As the science of human behavior, subjectivity and development, psychology might experience some difficulties in extending its main conceptual tools beyond the human perspective. This symposium will present four papers dealing with the challenges of developing an ecocentric perspective in psychology, and introduce the roundtable called "How can psychological theorizing be(come) ecological?", co-organized by N. Chimirri and T. Tateo.

Keywords: humans-other-than-humans interactions; common worlds; animal turn; relationality; interspecies empathy

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# Engaging with plants-contact zones and indexes of affinity:
A role for art in our theorising?

Dawn Sanders, Harald Raajimakers, Alexina Thorén-Williams

University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

Finding the narratives that demonstrate ‘Life as Plant’ stories without negating their characteristics of “plantness” (Darley, 1990) is a critical challenge for communication about plants in a world where extinction proliferates. This challenge is particularly relevant to teaching and learning spaces beyond schools. Environments, such as forest schools, botanical gardens, (science) museums and science centres, are often rich and multi-sensory spaces (Braund & Reiss, 2006), which afford learners’ experiences, emotions, and reflections that extend outside curriculum plans. Our interdisciplinary approach positions art, science and education in a shared praxis which places plants in ‘contact zones’ (Broglio, 2011) with humans. These zones are complex socio-cultural spaces. Such spaces offer the opportunity to re-theorise the ways in which humans perceive plants and consider how the nature of the space and the role of art might assist us to consider different encounters between humans and other species, in this case plants. Human relationships with plants vary widely and affective connections depend on the interplay between knowledge and personal perception of plant’s aesthetic attributes. Yet there is no comprehensive theory nor instrument to assess ‘aesthetic experiences’ (Leder, 2004) with plant-life. Therefore, we consider the construction of a plant-life ‘affinity index’ as a multidimensional methodological tool to assess human’s cognitive and affective relationship with plants informed by psychology of aesthetics and empirical art studies. Bringing art-based approaches to these spaces can integrate the biological and the cultural into plant encounters. In these contact zones can we articulate potential spaces for new ways of theorising?

Keywords: Plants, education, socio-cultural, affinity-index, spaces
# The interspecies empathy: an object of an engaged and ecocentric theory coping with ecological crisis

Marion Picard, Laure Kloetzer

Universié de Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

How are children apprehending the others-than-human living beings around them? Proposing an alternative model of education, forest schools change the classic paradigm of teaching by using the outside world – immersive spaces mainly composed by plants and surrounded by animal alterities – as a learning tool. These immersive spaces possess transformative potentials which can expanding the boundaries of the perceptive and perceptible human environment (Picken & Ferguson, 2014) while encouraging empathic relationships towards the living alterities (human and others-than-human) (Weinstein, Prybylski, & Ryan, 2009). From a multispecies ethnography approach – inspired by phenomenological perspective – conducted alongside forest schools, we propose to discuss the development of interspecies empathy, as a capacity to recognize and understand the feelings of the other-than-humans, considered as agents, or to imagine the mental representation of those living alterities (Boulanger & Lançon, 2006). Interspecies empathy is questioning the constitution of intersubjectivity while taking seriously the others-than-human perspectives (Servais, 2004). It deals with sensible interactions, projection, imagination, and interspecies communication. Moreover, exploring interspecies empathy brings epistemological, methodological, ethical, and political challenges. Firstly, it sets in a conceptual vagueness moving through plural disciplines (Boulanger & Lançon, 2006) : revealed by anthropology approaches (Brunois, 2015), this sets deeply into interdisciplinary frameworks passing by philosophy, sociology, neurosciences, and developmental psychology (Vidal, 2014). Secondly, interspecies empathy pushes the scientific frame beyond anthropos: an engaging project rehabilitating the other-than-humans in social sciences carried by the ontological turn (Latour, 1991 ; Descola, 2005 ; Kohn, 2013 ; Demeulenaere, 2017) which is spreading into psychology and education, toward a shift we might call ecocentric turn.

Keywords: interspecies empathy - ecocentric turn - multispecies ethnography - forest school - immersive spaces
Ethics of acting for the environment in formal education

Antti Rajala

University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

This presentation examines students' agency formation in a school environmental action project. The project involved an orientation to re-imagine and transform the existing ways of living and organizing activity. The study asks: For what ends and with what means do the students assert their agency? How can the values associated with students' agency be characterized as anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric?

Agency accounts for the opportunity, will and skill of people to act upon and transform activities and circumstances in their lives (authors). Student agency cannot be inherently regarded as worthwhile; yet very few studies explicitly address the question of for what ends students assert their agency and the ethical basis of these ends (Renshaw, 2017). Here, we focus on accounts of concrete acts which are responsive to and address others and their voices, connecting actions at the moment-to-moment lived reality to large scale historical developments of societies (Stetsenko, 2016; Bakhtin, 1993).

Data were collected in an upper secondary school in Southern Finland, informed by an ethnographic research approach (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). The primary are observational fieldnotes and longitudinal student interviews. The data were analyzed using inductive qualitative analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1997).

The findings show that human perspectives were prioritized over the inherent value of the natural environment in the students' accounts of their agency. The findings shed light on ethical dilemmas that the students faced, which mostly had to do with social and generational justice. In all, the study advances understanding of the less-researched ethical dimension of agency.

Keywords: agency; ethical; environmental crisis; upper secondary school

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# Standing face-to-face with climate change:
A non-dualist approach to subject matter in education for sustainability

Alfredo Jornet

University of Girona, Girona, Spain

Climate change poses important challenges to both psychology and education. These challenges have to do with an apparent disconnect between knowledge and action, as our understanding of climate change as a complex yet solvable socio-scientific issue does not seem to have led us to effectively tackling it. Taking a critical and dialectical materialist perspective, in this presentation, I account for this apparent disconnection by examining a prevalent anthropocentric epistemic divide—in education and in psychology—separating human subjects from a world of external objects. In line with this divide, school subject matter—including the subject matter of climate change—is often presented as an object that is ontologically separated from the thinking of students and teachers, who are to grasp it. From a dialectical materialist perspective, however, thinking denotes not an isolated mind examining an external object but the irreducible relation between subjects participating in object-oriented, object-forming activities. Understanding climate change from this perspective does not consist of trying to grasp an object out there but consists of acknowledging and rediscovering the ways in which we already are implicated in (re) producing climate change as a real object, and the ways in which we already are subjected to it as implicated subjects. Drawing on empirical studies conducted as part of a diversity of European national and international research projects on climate change education—mostly across Norway and Spain—I substantiate the significance of this approach and reflect on its pedagogical implications as well as on its implications to non-anthropocentric perspectives.

**Keywords:** Non-anthropocentrism, non-dualism, dialectical materialism, climate change, sustainability education

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IN NEED OF CRITICAL CARE: ENGAGING FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS OF
THEORY BUILDING IN WORK AND ORGANISATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Johanna Lisa Degen¹, Franziska Kößler², Severin Hornung³

¹Europa-Universität, Flensburg, Germany. ²Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. ³Universität Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

Work and organisational (w/o) psychology has been characterised as an ill-defined subfield. From its very inception, w/o psychology has betrayed core humanistic values, while submitting itself to instrumentalization by economic interests. Thus, w/o psychology has progressively converged towards a one-sided managerialist perspective. In line with the corresponding neoliberal imperative of quantification, w/o psychology predominantly relies on positivist methods. As a result, scholars rarely engage in theory building. Instead, extensive empirical research tends to employ similar methods, redundant constructs, and overused models in a repetitive loop without substantive theoretical advancements.

However, recent uptake of critical psychology perspectives introduces greater reflexivity, a broader methodological scope, and an alternative focus on the principles and values of radical humanism. This symposium features selected theoretical and empirical contributions from the critical w/o psychology stance. Assembled presentations problematize fundamental epistemological and ideological challenges to theory building in w/o psychology. Presented topics include the conceptualisation of power, control, and resistance (abstract 1), the employee-employer relationship and its psychologisation, individualisation, and "harmonisation" in the managerial interest (abstract 2), as well as toxic positive (re-)framings of psychologically harmful stressors (abstract 3). Empirical evidence on harmful effects of w/o psychology concepts is shown with regard to alienation from social values in a capitalist logic, alongside a newly developed measure of Mistrust in Diversity Management (abstract 4).

Finally, we discuss the future of critical w/o psychology based on these contributions, with a focus on de-ideologizing theory-building and politically engaging the discipline.

Keywords: Work and organisational psychology, managerialism, critical psychology, theory building, epistemological critique
# What Does it Even Mean? Critically Interrogating the Treatment of Power, Control, and Resistance in Work and Organisational Psychology

Severin Hornung<fnref n="1" />, Franziska Kößler²,<fnref n="3" />

Work and organisational (w/o) psychology is notorious for turning a blind eye on issues of power. This lacking attention is rooted in its functionalist managerial and individualist perspective. Systematically neglecting power in hierarchical organisations leads to (sometimes bizarrely) erroneous conclusions regarding the motivation of human behaviour. Examples are the misclassification of obviously normative or subtle coerced behaviours, such as "extra-role" performance or overtime work, as "voluntary". In contrast, scholars in critical management studies (CMS) have presented elaborated conceptualisations, theorising, and investigations of overt and hidden manifestations of power, control, and resistance in work organisations, based on sociological theory (e.g., labour process analysis). This contribution seeks to contrast and integrate these disciplinary positions to reorient theorising in w/o psychology. In CMS, power refers to (episodic or systemic, direct or indirect) forces influencing interactions within organisations. In contrast, w/o psychology focuses on experiences of empowerment or leadership. While CMS has intensively studied management control systems, w/o psychology emphasises individual job autonomy and participation. Socio-ideological organisational control (e.g., affective commitment) is framed as a desirable outcome of "employee-oriented" management practices. CMS has elaborated how employees creatively resist being controlled by management. Contrarily, w/o psychology has denounced counterproductive work behaviour and resistance to change as employee deviance. Overall, concepts of power, control, and resistance in the two analysed literatures appear paradigmatically incommensurate. Discussed are dialectic strategies for engaging w/o psychology by radically reinterpreting its findings and extending its theoretical repertoire through critical treatments of power.

**Keywords:** Work and Organisational Psychology, Critical Management Studies, Power and Control, Resistance, Theoretical Critique

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<footnote n="1">¹University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria. ²Université de Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany</footnote>
# The Psychology of Employee Relations:
Critical Perspectives on Theoretical Underpinnings and Current Concepts

Thomas Höge, Severin Hornung

University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

The field of "employee relations" is a prominent topic of work and organisational psychology, centring on the psychological dynamics of the employee-employer relationship in the context of waged labour. Current key concepts include "organisational commitment", the "psychological contract", and individually negotiated "idiosyncratic deals". Research in this field primarily draws on theories of social exchange and adopts an "unitarist" or "managerialist" perspective that presupposes a fundamentally harmonious employee-employer relationship based on broad convergence of interests. In this presentation, we first reconstruct a terminological shift in this field since the advent of the neoliberal era in the late 1970s and early 1980s: From its origins in "industrial/labour relations" to "employment relationships" and its present decontextualized and reduced version of "employee relations". This terminological shift indicates a more fundamental ideological transformation of the common understanding of the employee-employer relationship in general and in work and organisational psychology, in particular. We propose three progressive ideologically-driven processes that characterise this transformation: (1) psychologisation (from working conditions to perceptions), (2) individualisation (from collective to individual perspectives), and (3) harmonisation (from conflict to convergence of interests). Reversing these trends, we advocate for a de-ideologization from the neoliberal contaminations in this field of research. This includes a reconsideration and reinterpretation of unorthodox, neo-Marxist concepts (e.g., from Labour Process Theory), not negating or obscuring, but acknowledging fundamental conflicts of interest and antagonisms inherent in the employee-employer relationship. Finally, we present preliminary reflections on how to incorporate such a "pluralist" and condition-oriented perspective into empirical research on employee relations.

**Keywords:** Employee-employer relationship, work and organisational psychology, de-ideologization, epistemological critique
# The Positive Side of Everything.

## Toxic Reframing in Work and Organisational Psychology

Franziska J. Kössler<fnref n="1" />,², Wilken Wehrt<fnref n="3" />, Bram Fleuren<fnref n="3" />, Severin Hornung⁴

Work and organisational (w/o) psychology has increasingly theorised and investigated the positive side of stressors, such as interpersonal conflicts, illegitimate tasks, or time pressure. However, in contrast to resources (e.g., social support), stressors consume physical and psychological energy, evoke distress and strain, and, thus, involve a certain degree of negativity. Extreme examples of this tendency include studies that claim to demonstrate the positive side of job insecurity, by showing positive correlations with work engagement or productivity. Less apparent examples highlight the positive effects of leadership styles, such as servant leadership, which appear to be positive but actually aim to control and manipulate subordinates. Stressing the positive side of stressors and leadership styles without addressing their negative or exploitative core raises several problems: First, framing stressors (e.g., illegitimate tasks) in a positive light does not diminish their negative consequences. Second, a positive relationship between a stressor and well-being might be observed due to other (unmeasured) variables, commonly embedded in the social context. Third, w/o psychology, as an applied science, has to consider that highlighting the positive side of stressors might suggest a false innocence of these stressors to practitioners. In this contribution, we explore the methodological and ideological bases of the counterfactual positive framing of stressors and leadership styles. By doing so, we want to stimulate theoretical discussions in w/o psychology. We caution against an academic culture that seems increasingly unwilling and unable to "speak truth to power" regarding the detrimental effects of management and workplace practices.

Keywords: Work and organisational psychology, Framing, Negativity, Contextualization, Stressors

<footnote n="1">¹Université de Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland. ²Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands. ⁴University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria</footnote>
# Can I Trust You?

## Introducing a Measure for (Mis-)trust in Diversity Management

Johanna Lisa Degen¹, Jasmin Joecks²

¹Flensburg, Flensburg, Germany. ²Kalaidos Fachhochschule, Zürich, Switzerland

Diversity Management claims to support disadvantaged subjects and to inhibit structural discrimination. However, for many years, it has been suspected of not only having negative effects (e.g. discriminating) but also of acting primarily in capitalist interests overruling the ethical stance. In this understanding, diversity is evaluated against efficacy and economic potential, e.g. for access to new markets or for proliferation as an employer. As such, it often becomes either a mere facade, an organisational token, or is being instrumentalized for economic advantages. Critical research on Diversity Management commonly relies on qualitative study designs, which are often criticised for being anecdotal and thus lacking generalizability. Based on extensive qualitative data from expert interviews, a measure for assessing (Mis-)Trust in Diversity Management (MDM) was developed.

In this contribution, we will first introduce the 32-item scale (incl. subscales regarding the self, the practices, the organisation, and actors) that measures trust and perception of Diversity Management practices. Next, we present insights from the analysis of data collected in German, Austrian, and Swiss corporations. First findings show that a) subjects mistrust the practices of Diversity Management and the actors behind them, b) subjects observe severe negative effects, and c) their sceptical stance is premised on the alienated practices of Diversity Management, not the original values.

Finally, we use the results from the survey to build a theoretical approach to understanding how turning social values into a capitalist vehicle involves negative effects on (disadvantaged) subjects on all hierarchy levels.

Keywords: Diversity Management, Business Case, Social Values, Neoliberal Capitalism, Tokenism

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PROCESSES OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Séamus Power¹, Sarah Awad², Brady Wagoner¹,², Fathali Moghaddam³

¹University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. ²Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark.

³Georgetown大学, Washington DC, USA

We will present our latest theoretical research on the psychology of radical social change. Each
theoretical presentation will be supported by contemporary examples and empirical research. In
the first presentation, we set a broad frame for considering social psychology as world-making
and illustrate the theoretical ways in which social psychologists can, and do, contribute to
processes of social change. Next, we detail the latest theorizing on crowd psychology, arguing that
contemporary models of crowd action are limited and describe how viewing crowds through the
lens of distributed cognition offers a beneficial way to advance our understanding of social change.
People protest, but authorities respond. Our final talk theorizes how governments in democracies
and dictatorships respond to social mobilizations from direct to imagined violence. We will end our
symposium with an open discussion between the four presenters based on the content of the talks
and questions from the audience.

Keywords: crowds; democracy; dictatorships; social change; world-making.
Social change and world-making

Seamus Power

University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

I introduce the idea of social psychology as world-making. This conceptualization,
iluminated by field research, aims to re-expand the dominant social psychological paradigm
and create space for different ways of thinking about social psychology. I illustrate the forms
and possibilities of this approach through a discussion of empirical research examining
social movements

Keywords: field social psychology; world-making; social movements.

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Cultivating a crowd:
Four devices of protest mobilization

Brady Wagoner<fnref n="1" />,²,<fnref n="3" />, Sarah Awad²

This paper applies Durkheim's concept of collective effervescence to protest crowds, highlighting its role in shaping group solidarity and protest action. After exploring some of the continuities and discontinuities between Tarde's crowd theory and Durkheim's concept, we will outline four devices through which protest crowds are unified and maintained—namely, embodied rhythms, space, affective symbols and narratives. These devices are based on the idea that the specific form of consciousness that emerges from being in a crowd is not inevitable but must be cultivated through various cultural means. Moreover, while we recognize approaches like extended social identity theory as a clear advance on classic crowd theories, our dimensions emphasize the embodied, experiential qualities of participating in a crowd in contrast to the current focus on the discursive construction of identities. We conclude that Durkheim's concept continues to prove invaluable in making sense of contemporary protest action, but must also be further elaborated to include other factors, such as social conflict and new forms of interaction.

Keywords: protest, Durkheim, crowds, cultural tools, embodiment

<footnote n="1">¹University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. ²Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Oslo New University College, Oslo, Norway</footnote>
Revolution as an Example of Radical Change

Fathali Moghaddam

Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA

Research psychologists have neglected the topic of revolution, even though psychological
processes are of central importance in revolutionary movements. This presentation is based
on a psychological study (The Psychology of Revolution, Moghaddam, 2024) of five major
revolutions (French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Iranian). First, I focus on government
reactions to revolutionary movements prior to regime collapse. Second, I examine the
actions of the revolutionary government in the immediate post-revolution period A
distinction is made between dictatorial and democratic regimes, with respect to the role of
elite cohesion, conformity, and obedience, in maintaining rule by the regime. Before regime
change, revolutionaries give priority to the rhetoric of rights, and government authorities
give priority to the rhetoric of duties. After regime change, revolutionaries switch to giving
priority to duties, as part of a larger program to force behavioral changes toward meeting
revolutionary goals. In the post-revolution period, more radical leadership takes charge, but
political plasticity limits changes. Revolutionary governments use aggressive tactics to try to
force behavioral changes, as well as to control what they label as 'counter-revolutionary
movements.' In many cases, the same activists who agitated for freedom and were jailed
before the revolution are targeted by the revolutionary government and jailed, exiled, or
killed after the revolution. There is considerable continuity before and after the revolution,
both in the behavior of the masses and the elite, and in the tactics used by ruling regimes
to try to control and direct behavior. This continuity is explained using the concept of
political plasticity.

Keywords: Revolution, Social Influence, Radical Change, Political Plasticity, Behavioral Continuity, Leadership, Government Policies, Regime Change, Regime Collapse, Government Tactics
SITUATED INEQUALITY AND PARTICIPATION IN THE INSTITUTIONS OF
CHILDREN'S EVERYDAY LIVES

Maja Røn-Larsen, Charlotte Højholt

Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

Societal and educational inequality is a persistent issue - a question that calls for psychological theorizing and engagement. In this symposium, we argue for theoretical development that makes it possible to analyse inequality as related to social situations and nexuses across a compound everyday life.

Despite the fact that much research challenges understandings of unequal life chances as linked to social family background, understandings of "social inheritance" are still dominant. However, studied from children's perspectives inequality relates to their possibilities of participation and access to social resources in their everyday lives across different institutions.

Hence, in our theoretical approach we relate inequality to possibilities of participation and theorize institutions as social practices where different people live their lives together and constitute conditions for each other's conduct of everyday life. Institutions are not unambiguous entities that some individuals cannot "fit into", but subject to political dispute and conflictual collaboration. When such conflictual processes lead to individual categorization of some children, they are understood and met in unequal ways and experience limited access to social resources. We term this 'situated inequality'.

In an ongoing cross-institutional practice research project, our research group explore how unequal conditions are constituted in social situations and linked to how these situations are organised due to conflictual collaboration among several parties.

This ambition involves conceptualisations allowing us to gain insight into institutional conditions and social dynamics in the everyday life among children, young people and different professionals.

Keywords: situated inequality, participation, conflictual collaboration, children's perspectives, educational psychology

<figure><img src="image_29.png" /></figure>
Conceptual development of ‘participation’ in and ‘conflicts’ about
educational institutions

Charlotte Højholt¹, Maja Røn-Larsen²

¹Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. ²Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

From a social practice perspective and in collaboration with professionals we explore situated inequality, and in the paper, we will discuss and exemplify theoretical development in relation to the concept of participation and conflictual collaboration. How can we understand unequal possibilities of participation in societal institutions of education? We want to shift the psychological focus on inequality from issues outside societal institutions for children and young people (intergenerational transmission, family relationships, social background) to how the involved are dealing with social conflicts and historical contradictions within these institutions. This conceptual turn emphasises possibilities of participation in social situations and leads to a concept of ‘situated inequality’ – but what is meant by ‘participation’ and ‘participation possibilities’? How can we observe social possibilities for participation and not just individual children, and how can we work professionally with the way children and their adults make up conditions for the participation of one another?

Different professionals across children's lives simultaneously have common tasks in relation to
the children and different areas of responsibility and perspectives on the issues surrounding
the children. The collaboration between professionals is thus both necessary and conflictual. To
strengthen the conditions of children's conduct of everyday lives across contexts, we need to
conceptualise 'conflicts' as related to collaboration on common but still contradictory matter. In
the everyday life of educational institutions, different considerations must be reconciled every day
through a flexible and exploring 'conflictual collaboration'.

Keywords: situated inequality, participation, conflictual collaboration, children's perspectives, eductional psychology
# How does inequality manifest itself in educational psychology practice?

Sarah Kirkegaard Jensen, Thomas Szulevicz

Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Historically the function of educational psychology (EP) practice has been to ensure the most equitable conditions for children's participation possible. Yet, EP practice has been criticized for reproducing existing power structures in the assessment of children, thus perpetuating societal inequality. Due to the historical development of school psychology as closely connected to the IQ test, a dominant way of understanding unequal possibilities for educational participation within EP practice has been and still is the idea of individual differences as being accountable for the inequality in educational success. Our assertion is that knowledge of or preoccupation with inequality rarely plays a significant role in the work of EPs in EP practice with the result that social and material conditions for participation in everyday school life are not included in the understanding of educational inequity.

Based on a current research project on the professional engagement of EPs with school children in vulnerable positions in a rural area of Denmark, we aim to discuss the role of inequality in EP practice through the theoretical notion of situated inequality.

* How does a conceptualization of situated inequality stimulate a theoretical development in which the understanding of inequity moves from one being situated within a family/child (inheritance) to one embedded in the conditions for participation of children and professionals in everyday school life in this particular 'rural setting'?

* How does a conceptualization of situated inequality enable EPs in EP practice to relate to patterns of inequity when working with school children in vulnerable positions?

Keywords: Situated inequality, educational psychology, educational psychology practice

<figure><img src="image_30.png" /></figure>
# How to analyze situated inequality in institutional life in a vulnerable residential area?

Rebekka Knudsen¹, Gry Marie Tybjerg²

¹Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. ²UCL University College, Odense, Denmark

We aim to discuss limited participant possibilities in social practices with a concept of situated inequality. The context is a school and youth club in a vulnerable residential area ("ghetto") with a lot of political conflicts in a city in Denmark. The object of the analysis are the participant conditions of young people from 12 - 16 years old mostly with a minority background in and across school and club.

A conceptualization of situated inequality helps us grasp the young people's participation and unequal access to social situations. Such situations are often linked to many complex processes as locked conflicts, powerlessness, and mutual abandonments between many participants over time. But what we find is, that these processes often depend on how young people's social and material life circumstances outside the institutions are grasped and given situated meanings insight the social practices and develops within social dynamics. Here young people are singled out as carriers of some conflicts because of their socio-economic background, which the club and school's many participants find problems dealing with in the concrete social practices.

In such processes, the explorations of the concrete participant conditions insight school and club often disappear from the professional's understanding of the problems. But how can we understand these processes as not random processes, but neither process' systematically linked to the background with which children and young people enter their institutional life in across school and leisure time?

Keywords: Situated inequality, social practice, participant conditions, school, "ghetto"
BAKHTIN BUDDIES AND THE CULTIVATION OF 'FORMS OF LIFE' IN
EVERYDAY LIFE

Paul Sullivan¹, James Cresswell², Atsushi Tajima³, Hannah Intezar¹

¹University of Bradford, Bradford, United Kingdom. ²Ambrose University, Calgary, Canada. ³Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, Japan

We evaluate the ethics and aesthetics of 'forms of life'. In different ways, the papers take issue with the finalising tendency of ideology to present forms of life that are immutable and intractable. While the finality of these has an aesthetic and ethical appeal, the dialogical framework challenges us to cultivate the contradictions, disagreements, alterity and revised understandings that accompany any ideology. Sullivan will examine the aesthetics of 'final ends'. In contrast to goals that present a finalised 'good' on the bedrock of ideology, the comparisons and contrasts between different versions of 'final ends' aim to prompt reflection on how final ends aesthetically shape practices of life. Cresswell will argue that cultivation of dialogical genres of thinking provides an antidote to thin thinking or dilletantism. While dilletantism is a form life characterised by boundary-raising and an irrevocable commitment to a final position; Cresswell focusses on the role of the ironic genre to subvert and engage seriously with the open-ended, difficult thinking needed in a hyper-real but moral world. Tajima suggests that SNS (social network services) have the potential to act as echo-chambers via their AI algorithms that undermines (but not fatally) the heteroglossia of different languages in dialogue. Finally Intezar uses the example of veganism to draw attention to the rush to occupy theoretical but finalised labels that do not reflect the contradictory and personal search for meaning of a 'form of life'. Overall forms of life are examined in this symposium as a project of dialogical cultivation in social life.

Keywords: Bakhtin, Ideology, Aesthetics, Ethics, Genre
# The aesthetics of final ends:
A dialogical analysis

Paul Sullivan

University of Bradford, Bradford, United Kingdom

What are final ends and what do the reveal about collective differences in our values or in our architectonic structures that guide everyday living? Here, I will examine different attempts to conceptualise these final ends through the use of a dialogical analysis of two case studies.

The first case study comes from a description of Pogue-Harrison's (2008) contrast between paradise as articulated in the Koran and paradise as articulated by 'Dante's inferno'. He suggests that the Koran, in contrast to the Bible, offers a very clear image of heavenly paradise as the Garden of Eden. The Bible is more vague or barely mentions what heavenly paradise is although Dante comes closest to articulating a vision of restless energy that reaches an ecstatic frenzy in Heaven, in contrast to the peace in the Garden of Eden.

The second case-study will draw on fiction (particularly science fiction) of utopias and dystopias which variously outline a battle between the rational mind and unruly emotion that has been won but is precariously open to revolution.

A dialogical analysis (Sullivan, 2012) will be undertaken to examine the organisational role of cultural final ends in shaping the aesthetics and ethics of everyday life. In contrast to the use of goals and goal-setting as a key psychological tool (e.g. CBT, emotional regulation), there has been relatively little attention paid to the aesthetics of final ends, despite the continual foreground-background role they play in structuring the practices of identity.

Keywords: Bakhtin, Utopia, Paradise, Dystopia, Dialogical Analysis
# On Being Wrong:
## Ironic Life as an Antidote to Thin Thinking Promoted by Hyper-reality

James Creesswell

Ambrose University, Calgary, Canada

This paper starts from the reality that we dwell within a hyperreal milieu where technologically mediated life creates an ethos marked by the following: people support their positions merely by feeling committed to them, raise boundaries by claiming that others cannot understand me or us, prohibit critique, and discredit experts. I have called this an ethos of dilettance after the notion of the dilettante who engages in many ideas without depth and substance. Effective dialogue enables us to deal with dilettance and sharpen our own engagement with life. I argue that particular genres of thinking offer practices amounting to disciplines of mind that enable us to engage in effective dialogue. One such discipline of mind is drawn from Bakhtin and Kierkegaard: cultivating Ironic Life. Ironic life entails the powerful seriousness of laughter that can reveal reality, allow earnest engagement, and simultaneously allow for humble detachment. I articulate how dilettance is actually without laughter because it requires a kind of seriousness that is the antithesis of ironic life. By way of an illustration involving stand up comedy, I will show how moral and aesthetic life is predicated on an ironic mode where there is deep existential concern accompanied with the humility to recognize where one can be wrong.

Keywords: dialogue; hyperrealism; irony; critical reflexivity

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**“Freedom” of thinking in Bakhtin's ideas on dialogue and heteroglossia
relating today's SNS communications**

Atsushi Tajima

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, Japan

In this presentation, I treat freedom of thinking in today's world from the perspectives of M.M. Bakhtin's dialogism. We are ostensibly assured freedom to think, express our thinking and make decisions for critical choices at least in western countries. However, we are restricted to construct similar ideologies on the world, especially in recently developing social networking services. For examples, we are not free from the influences of digital algorithms that form ideologically homogeneous communities on line termed "echo chambers" (Bail, 2022). People tend to shut themselves up in these closed communities and reject alien others' ideologies that might bring multifaceted perspectives. Russian philosopher M.M. Bakhtin was a scholar who alerted the risks of the relationships closed in homogeneous communities in the early- and mid-20th century. He proposed "heteroglossia" indicating optimal multicultural situations, in which each speaker respects different and alien perspectives nurtured in each cultural milieu and negotiate them with their own thinking. On the other hand, Bakhtin criticized the situations, in which people are locked themselves in their familiar communities and do not reflect on relationships between ideologies of different communities and their own. "Dialogue" that Bakhtin proposed indicates the communication between alien others unfolded in heteroglossia. I discuss the freedom of thinking in today's SNS communities from Bakhtin's views on heteroglossic dialogues. I should propose freedom as speakers' capacities to bridge heterogeneous ideas nurtured in different cultures by dialogues between alien perspectives and their own in heteroglossic situations.

Keywords: Bakhtin, heteroglossia, dialogue, SNS, freedom of thinking
# Applying a dialogical framework to re-frame the concept of ideology from 'finalisable' to 'unfinalisable': using Veganism as a case study

Hannah Intezar

University of Bradford, Bradford, United Kingdom

Historically, social theorists, such as Marx, have applied 'ideology' as a framework to describe how the dominant ideas and values within a given society. More specifically, how said ideas and values not only produce hegemonic discourses of knowledge, but also perpetuate asymmetrical power relations between the Classes. From this interpretation, the understanding of a given ideological concept arche above and beyond the grasp of an individual, because of its finalised and totalised nature.

The aims of this paper are two-folds. Firstly, by drawing on Bakhtin's concept of the unfinalisability and the 'living' discourse and explore the potential error of presenting cultural movements and socio-ideological phenomenon, such as Veganism, as a singular practice or ideology; and questions whether Vegan ideology should actually be conceived as infinitudnal ideologies. In the West, there are multiple contested definition of 'Veganism,' primarily divided into two camps: Veganism as a practice-based-ism, and Veganism as a broader ideology-based-ism. However, what of the position of the practitioner? From a Bakhtinian perspective, the word, such as Veganism is always pre-saturated with the heterogeneity of meanings and values that previous cultures have deposited in it. Secondly, therefore, this paper argues that a concept such as Veganism can only be understood in the various collective cultural interpretations that express it and the ought (violation) and act, of the individual vegan practitioner. Hence, unfinalisable, rather than finalisable.

Keywords: Bakhtin, Finalisable, Unfinalisable, Ideology, Veganism

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HUMOUR IN LIFE AND ART

Andres Haye

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Humor and laughter, although different phenomena, point to the same slippery events of life in which life detaches from the normative order of a given situation, social group, or larger power structures, without splitting with it, but playfully negotiating with social and cultural norms, usually in the form of a slight transgression. Although they have been addressed by philosophers from all times in these terms, the topic has a very marginal place in psychology.

We focus in humor and laughter to argue that we may learn from how the humorous is produced practices such as political graphic humor, film, or stand-up comedy, about what is at issue in everyday-life humor and laughter. The papers are essentially theoretical but draw of these specific examples.

The theories of humor/laughter in classical authors such as Kierkegaard, Bergson, Freud, and Bakhtin, are re-interpreted in contemporary contexts of theoretical debate. The papers discuss different moral, ethical, and political implications of the kind of normative transgression in humor/laughter. The discussion includes the possible distinction between humor and laughter according to the different classical authors considered.

We share that humor/laughter implies a strong collaboration of psychological and bodily processes with social and normative processes, and within this relationship the technical dimension of humor/laughter, as developed in the arts and popular culture, is a key to better understand the role of comic transgression in everyday life.

Keywords: Humor, Laughter, Normative, Transgression

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# Ironic Discipline:
## Cultivating Irony as a Lived Practice

James Cresswell
Ambrose university, Calgary, Canada

Irony can help people cope with life by enabling a rigorous critical self-reflexivity while providing hope to continue in the face of challenge. I outline how irony accomplishes this task by first discussing Kierkegaard's work where he defines irony as marked by three components: (1) a recognition/admission of what is the case in terms of reality constituted by a community; (2) one's own experiential commitment to what seems to be real; and (3) one's simultaneous awareness of the precarity and relativity of (1) and (2). The presence of these three components enables critical self-reflexivity and a simultaneous commitment to continuing in earnest. I present different forms of humour and styles of stand-up comedy to illuminate how irony works differently than other forms of humour. In particular, I focus on the distinctive regenerative quality of irony highlighted by Bakhtin when he discusses the creation of self-hood. The result is a presentation on how we can cultivate an ironic mode of being that enables us to be critically self-reflexive while earned in our engagements with life.

Keywords: irony
Affective and normative entanglements of laughing

Andres Haye

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Based on classical theories of laughing, I approach laughter as a discursive operation of taking
distance from power structures through the reorganization of affective-normative assemblages.
According to Bergson, laughter pops up as a symptom of the failure to follow the social norm. That
which deserves laughter is what breaks the social expectations of normal and smooth behavior.
Bergson's theory stresses the function of social control, whereas Bakhtin's theory draws attention
to the role of laughter in social liberation. Bakhtin suggests that the role played by laughter in
the cannibalization of hierarchical social structures is to take distance, to build a difference or
boundary to limit the powerful official voice of the Church or the state. As control, laughter is used
to signal normative deviance and push for re-adjustment to a social norm. As liberation, laughter
is used to express joy associated with the relaxation or transgression of a social norm. Following
one of Bergson's key concepts, the former is thought of as the contraction to the required or
expected action, while in Bakhtin this is conceived as the centripetal forces within discourse, and
the latter as widening or scattering and centrifugal forces, respectively. Common to these theories
is the strong relation of laughter with normativity. Paralleling this opposition, Freud distinguishes
between humor and jokes, where the former is related to normative reinforcement and the latter
with the relief of giving implicit ways to meanings that are socially censored. With this background,
contemporary perspectives of affect theory are discussed.

Keywords: Affect, Laughter, Normativity, Discourse
# Joyless humor: Thaumazein at a world on fire

Augusto Rodriguez-Paniagua

Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Why theorize about humor in a world that appears to have lost its mind? Bergson argued that humorous laughter occurs there where there is a repetition, "something mechanical encrusted upon the living". Regarding repetition, psychoanalysis took a different approach and posits the existence of a traumatism at its core. Where psychoanalysis found a tragedy, Bergson found a comedy. How so?

Although Bergson falls prey to his optimism regarding creativity and elasticity, he nevertheless shows -perhaps unintentionally- how humor serves as an estrangement mechanism that questions the relationships between contingency and necessity. In doing so one can read Bergson's theory of humor as aligned with thaumazein -wonder or astonishment; as such theorizing about humor involves engaging with an object that calls into question the horizon upon which one projects one's own and other's actions. It is this which prevents repetition from turning into a tragedy, or perhaps that which produces an ironic consciousness capable of oscillating between tragedy and comedy. This is particularly evident when studying violent or exclusionary humor, simply questioning the validity of calling it humor or focusing on its role as a mode of propaganda fails to take into account how those modalities of humor transform the way its audiences engage with everyday customs. Humorousness does not necessarily entail joy, glee, or happiness. In this sense there's validity in Bergson's assertion of a "coldness of the heart", however, humor -both experiencing and studying it- implies a pathos, being struck by something and our response to what has struck us.

Keywords: Bergson's theory of humor, politics, repetition, astonishment, normativity

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PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIZING OF COMPLEX POLITICAL PHENOMENA

Sandra Obradovic

The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

The present symposium includes four papers that address the ways in which engagement
with theoretical insights in psychology can render better understandings of complex political
phenomena. The symposium brings together scholars from different countries and disciplines who
collaborate within the recently launched Horizon Europe project 'OppAttune' to share their insights
and research. A key aim of the symposium is to consider the tensions between theory and research
in practice, and the limits of engaged theory in empirical practice. Across four talks the symposium
tackles how psychological theories, concepts and methods can be used as tools to inform research
on political dialogue, compassion, extremism and attunement between oppositional sides. Each
talk will also consider the challenges of doing so and discuss the unique position of dialogical
theories from psychology to underpin contemporary research within the political domain.

Keywords: dialogue, identity, compassion, extremism, attunement
# How can we turn theory into practice? On the challenges of a dialogical approach to studying political identities and dialogue

Sandra Obradovic, Tetiana Shyriaeva

The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

In the present talk I will tackle the question of how we can use complex theories to inform empirical practices in the study of political identities and political dialogue. In a lot of psychology, the complexity of theory is often reduced when ‘used’ to inform research, which can threaten how we in turn develop theory through research. In particular, dialogically informed theoretical approaches are crucial for capturing the intersubjective nature of identities and dialogue in the political sphere. However, as scholars we often face difficulties in turning theory into practice, especially if we work with data that is not qualitative. Drawing on some of my own research I will discuss these empirical challenges, with reference to both qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods data. I will argue for the importance of considering meta-representations and perspectives as a way to acknowledge dialogicality empirically and to ensure that theoretical complexity translates into empirically sophisticated research.

Keywords: identities, dialogue, politics, intersubjectivities, research design

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# Deparochializing Theory:
## Compassion as a Catalyst for Global Dialogue

Zona Zarić

American University of Paris, Paris, France. The Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade, Serbia

This presentation seeks to explore the moral and political significance of compassion in the context of deparochialization of theory and the opening up of dialogues previously marked by inequality and engaged in with tolerance and its implicit hierarchy between the one who tolerates and the one who is tolerated. Through the lens of compassion as a guiding principle for fostering meaningful cross-cultural conversations, we will examine how this intellectual, educational, and political practice can enable and sustain dialogue among diverse cultures and belief systems.

Keywords: compassion, tolerance, dialogue, hierarchy, deparochializing

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# Chronotopia and Democracy: Exploring the Dialogical Parameters of Political Attunement towards Future Worlds

Kesi Mahendran, Anthony English, Sue Nieland, Evangelia Vergouli

The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

This paper begins to articulate an attunement model for polarized political contexts. In recent years, there has been a privileging of consensual models of democracy, indebted to Habermas's idealism around communicative action, these models use techniques such as mini-publics, citizen juries, citizen assemblies reducing citizens' dialogical capacity to deliberative consensual decision-making. This model is often challenged by a critical-pluralist agonistic model of democracy which, drawing on Mouffe and Laclau, privileges counterspaces, dissensus, social movements and protest. We respond to these two models within the context of increased polarization, lack of citizen efficacy and the exclusion of certain groups (Calhoun, Gaonkar & Taylor, 2022). We redescribe the demos by proposing the dialogical concept of political attunement. Theorising political attunement involves Ragnar Rommetveit's intersubjective attunement which privileges shared meaning and empathic attunement which privileges affect taken from attachment theory.

Political attunement is understood as an events-related process. We investigate it as a tension-filled dialogical exchange between the possibilities and impossibilities of oppositional worldviews. Rather than common fate, political attunement engages the strategic use of chronotopes of past worlds and a chronotopia of future possible worlds. This exploratory paper draws on four studies within the Public Dialogue Psychology Collaboratory; these explore sustained dialogical exchange (English), juxta-political positioning in the development of political subjectivity (Nieland), the public's political attunement to the extreme narratives of political actors (Vergouli) side shadowing and multilateralism (Mahendran). We begin to articulate how the process of political attunement combines oppositional worldviews with a commitment to future worlds.

Keywords: dialogical, attunement, political narratives, worldviews, chronotopia
**Everyday Extremism:**
**Ecological scaling of human action**

Gordon Sammut, Rebekah Mifsud

University of Malta, Valetta, Malta

Human activity, in every domain of human behaviour, gives rise to problematic instances in the social domain by virtue of its extremity. Examples include addiction, activism and conflict. In each of these domains, a range of behaviours might be personally or culturally acceptable for some but extreme for others. We aimed to develop an ecological definition of everyday extremism that distinguishes motivated action from its mundane, everyday occurrence to its exceptional, extreme manifestation. We gathered reddit data from Reddit posts made in discussions about activism in general or with regards to particular causes. We analysed data qualitatively to extract a range of activist actions which we subsequently ranked from everyday to extreme. We propose that our ecological scale of everyday extremism, that is, the middle portion of the quantitative distribution, provides a critical ingredient for understanding intergroup and cross-cultural disparities worldwide.

Keywords: extremism, ecological scaling, qualitative, social media data
DIGITALIZATION AND LEARNING AS ENGAGEMENT WITH THE WORLD

Ernst Schraube

Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

This symposium explores the significance of digital technologies, especially ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems, in human learning. It builds on a concept of learning beyond the transmission model and theorizes learning as an activity of engaging with the world, a relational movement of both meaning making and world making. Focusing on learners' activities of engaging with the world, such as attention, resonance, or dialogue, it raises the question in how far digital technologies can help to expand learning as a collaborative worlding practice. Where can digital devices facilitate learning to become with the world, and where are they more of a hindrance? In what ways do they transform learning and how can we, as learners, teachers, and educators, approach these transformations critically and constructively? Building on participatory, subjectivity- and world-centered conceptions of learning, the symposium will explore the inner connection between digitalization and learning, focusing in particular on how students learn with ChatGPT and similar devices, and how to understand the significance of the emerging new forms of interaction and dialogue in the activity of learning.

Keywords: Theory of learning and digitalization, participatory learning, dialogue, artificial intelligence, politics of digital technology
What and How do Students Learn When They use Chatbots?

Ines Langemeyer

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

Linguistic actions that were otherwise only possible in companion with other human beings have
now become a mode of operation of digital technology. It invites social interaction. Shifts can be
perceived on different levels so that decisive differences between humans and technology can be
named: For only the living can assume responsibility for itself and others. Therefore, it remains
a contested question which possibilities of influence and which decisions and ergo how much
decision-making power are transferred to an AI.

This paper considers these questions in the context of knowledge institutions and presents
insights from an explorative empirical study.

Like a learning partner, Chatbots can be involved into the sense-making when students learn
to read scientific texts, use methods of literature research, and learn about scientific research
methods. But we do not know yet what and how they learn. The paper presents a review of a first
data collection based on students' and teachers' reflections on the first semester in educational
science. Interviews will focus on the question whether students perceive the results of Chatbots
as reasonable and trustworthy, whether they detect deficits and how this effects their subjective
grounds to use artificial intelligence in the future.

Keywords: *Critical thinking, Chatbots, knowledge institutions, subjective grounds of learning*

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# Developing a metatheoretical dialogue on learning with digital technologies: Challenges and prospects

Haris Psaros

Theory and History of Psychology Department, School of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

Learning with digital technologies constitutes a challenge for theoretical psychology. Even though in psychology extensive research has been conducted on the topic, most of this research remains at an empirical level and does not attempt to develop thorough theoretical discussions. In addition, the few systematic theoretical approaches to the topic have not managed yet to develop a metatheoretical dialogue with each other. In this presentation, therefore, I will attempt to bring into dialogue three important theoretical approaches to learning with digital technologies: sociomaterial approaches, post-phenomenological approaches, and cultural-historical approaches. To this end, I will try to argue that such a dialogue can reveal the existence of several tensions and dichotomies in the study of the topic, such as: 1) between the interest in the pre-reflective relationship and the interest in the conscious relationship with digital technologies, 2) between the focus on the human side and the focus on the technology side in the human-technology relationship, and 3) between the emphasis on empirical case studies and the emphasis on the development of theory. The ultimate goal of this presentation is not to suggest a reconciliation of these tensions, but to stress the significance of acknowledging them and of developing a metatheoretical dialogue on them. From my perspective, such a dialogue is necessary if we aim to critically engage with the field of learning with digital technologies, and to develop transformative practical interventions.

Keywords: metatheory, dialogue, sociomaterial approaches, post-phenomenological approaches, cultural-historical approaches
# The Worldlessness of ChatGPT: Can Dialogue with Digital Machines Facilitate Learning as a Worlding Practice?

Ernst Schraube

Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

Dialogue is central for learning as an engagement with the world, and in this process dialogue with the world of material artifacts and digital machines is nothing unusual. With ChatGPT and similar devices, however, dialogue in the act of learning takes on a new quality. It is not only who the learners are talking to and the form of the digital response that is new, but also the mode of conversation. How does ChatGPT transform learning dialogues? How to understand the responses the machine offers and how are they generated? They seem to be meaningful narratives, but aren't they just worldless generated strings of words? Based on an embodied, subject- and world-centered conception of learning, the paper explores the specific nature of dialogue with ChatGPT and its possibilities and limitations for learning as a worlding practice.

Keywords: Theory of learning and digitalization, participatory learning, dialogue, artificial intelligence, politics of digital technology
# THEORY DREAMS: FEVERED AND FUMBLING TOWARD CONDITIONS FOR EPISTEMIC JUSTICE

Patrick Sweeney¹, Sara Paloni², Kate Sheese³, Friederike Windel⁴, Alexis Halkovic⁵

¹Fielding Graduate University, Brooklyn, USA. ²Sigmund Freud University, Vienna, Austria. ³Sigmund Freud University, Berlin, Germany. ⁴American University of Paris, Paris, France. ⁵University of Colorado, Denver, Lafayette, USA

In this symposium, we share vignettes of our theory dreams in action, moments we liken to fever dreams, at once vivid and troubling, full of both longing and doubt. Our vignettes serve as starting points for exploring epistemological, ethical, and ontological dilemmas and desires across diverse sites of engagement – the university, refugee camps, self-defense classes, and high school classrooms – and across a range of concerns including the body, trauma, collaborative research, and political struggle. In our talks, we raise questions regarding access to and imaginative participation in the academy, constraining conceptualizations of suffering and care in activist/ academic fieldwork, the possibilities and pitfalls of theorizing from ‘lived experience’ among white teachers, and regarding feelings of disembodiment, insufficiency, and harm generated in the work of theorizing violence, resistance, and self-defense. Drawing on critical feminist perspectives, autoethnographic, phenomenological, and poetic methods, we explore our longing for epistemic conditions that would foster the enactment of care and vulnerability and facilitate imaginative, fumbling, and fruitful engagement with the unsayable, inexplicable, and traumatic in our work without demanding abstraction, disembodiment, or tidy resolution.

Keywords: epistemic justice; embodiment; trauma; resistance; belonging

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# The desire to possess theory and theorizing as collaborative practice

Sara Paloni

Sigmund Freud University, Vienna, Austria

In this talk, I aim to explore differences between theory as a way of possessing knowledge and theorizing as collaborative practice. Following feminists' critique of the politics of knowledge in the university context, I argue that before we consider theory as social engagement, as something that we can use to understand something other, we (still and again) need to talk about who is even able to access theory and under what conditions and how this constitutes theory as a social phenomenon. By illuminating processes of exclusion and inclusion in academia and by drawing on my own "theory-work", I aim to explore the possibilities and impossibilities of being and belonging in the academy. I argue that emotional work, boundary work and balancing contradictions are essential parts of producing theory, but at the same time hinder possessing theory and claiming it as my own. The desire to possess a theory - to know it inside out, to 'stand for it', to author it - is a desire to be in power, is to claim power. By emphasizing and making space for collaborative and embodied practices of theorizing we are able to dismantle the workings of power in "theory-work" as historically gendered, racialized and able-bodied practices and as producing precarious bodies. Thus, I conclude by exploring past, present and possible future projects and spaces of collaborative theorizing inside and beyond the academy for an embodied learning and caring about crises, solidarity and social engagement.

Keywords: theorizing as collaborative practice; desire; power; caring; embodied learning
**Self-care in crisis:**
**Concepts for a not-so-solitary solidarity**

Kate Sheese

Sigmund Freud University, Berlin, Germany

In this talk, I will explore ways in which individualizing, mastery/resolution-oriented, cognitive and computational notions of 'processing' difficult emotions reinforced a solitary solidarity in the work of activist volunteers in refugee camps in Greece. I will discuss how activists relied on discourses of self-care and resilience that pushed them to deny vulnerability and grief and to imagine recovery as a matter of making time for adequate cognitive 'processing' alone and away from the site of devastation in order to return and endure further. Concerned with possibilities for protecting capacities to feel and to be moved and with an interest in theorizing attunement as collective affective-ethical capacity in crisis, I will explore specific wounds, desires, losses, fears, and agonizing dilemmas/impasses activists encountered in their work as they registered the violence of the humanitarian border. Drawing on work from movements for healing justice, critical decolonizing psychosocial approaches to conflict and crisis, and psychoanalytic perspectives on trauma, I will ask and explore what epistemic conditions are needed in order to open up imaginative/poetic lines of inquiry and what kinds of conceptualizations of suffering, care, and well-being are needed to develop responsive and respons-able practices attuned to particular conditions of crisis, conflict, and resistance.

Keywords: self-care; refugee crisis; activism; trauma; resistance
# Theory, affect, and embodiment in conversations with well-meaning white German-speaking teachers

Friederike Windel

American University of Paris, Paris, France

This talk examines the possibilities and limitations of theorizing in conversations among white people who mean well but often reproduce power dynamics. Based on data from two focus-groups on the topic of Heimat (home or homeland in German) with seven white German-speaking cis-women teachers who view themselves as "open and tolerant", I explore how teachers use their lived experiences to make sense of (theorize) difference and sameness in German society. I examine how using lived experiences, for example experiences of sexism, provided participants with a structural analysis of difference and yet also reproduced Whiteness by recentering conversations about sexism over racism. In this analysis, I raise questions about the role of theorizing in activist settings and public education as a potential for movement building. I ask how pausing to theorize and learn about social issues can be a valuable response to the urgency culture that calls for immediate action. Emphasizing the need for anchoring such theories in lived experience and in the body, I argue that theorizing needs to move beyond reason to a more embodied approach; one that white supremacy has worked to sever since its inception.

Keywords: Whiteness; education; embodiment; Heimat; community
# The body as evidence:
Trauma as a theoretical conundrum

Alexis Halkovic

University of Colorado Denver, Lafayette, USA

In my research with women who participated in self-defense and gun training courses, my participants offered their stories of personal trauma and victimization. Trauma and the lived experience of violence became the Trojan Horse of my research as my intention was to explore discourses of resistance. In addition to individual interviews, I participated in both armed and unarmed training courses and, through the autoethnographic process, experienced and wrote about my embodied experience. As I processed the complex emotions of participating, interviewing, and listening to women's narratives (on repeat), I felt traumatized and physically limited. I fumbled to identify theory that was adequate to explain my feeling of disembodiment. I drew on Iris Marion Young's theory of female bodily comportment from Throwing like a Girl (1980) which describes an altered and limited sense of embodiment based not on biological factors, but on "sexist oppression in contemporary society." My participants' narratives signal that overwhelming experiences of personal and/or secondary trauma are joint contributors to these physical limitations which characterize women as "always already victims." To further understand this phenomenon, I draw on van der Kolk and van der Hart's (1991) discussion of traumatic memory as dissociated from language and trapped in the body which offers a way to integrate the problematic disconnection between language, body, and dis/empowerment.

Keywords: embodiment; trauma; traumatic memory; gender socialization; autoethnography
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HUMANITIES:
PROJECTS, CRITIQUES, AND POSSIBILITIES

Thomas Teo

York University, Toronto, Canada

One can argue that the psychological humanities (PH) have a long past but a short history, reclaiming a famous dictum from the historiography of psychology. The idea that "we" need the humanities (e.g., philosophy, history, social theory, feminist theory, economic theory, etc.) as well as the arts and the concept-driven social sciences for understanding human mental life goes back to the 19th century, but the term has been claimed only recently, with very different understandings what this approach could mean and its extent. Certainly, claiming an area of inquiry that has come under politically-motivated criticism as well as aligning the discipline with a framework with diminished power and money, seems to be doomed to failure from the beginning in the struggle for recognition that has plagued psychology throughout its existence. However, the epistemic program of the PH is separate from any public relations project that markets the discipline. In this symposium, the presenters describe and discuss the accomplishments of the PH, accounting for geographical regions (South America, North America, Europe), various methodologies, and aspirations. These initiatives take place and are theorized on the background of an increasingly scientifically committed discipline that distances itself from the "softer" areas of research. Discussed are the necessities, complications, and possibilities when working within and applying the PH and make a case why they are indispensable when studying human mental life.

Keywords: Psychological humanities, history, theorizing

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Socio-subjectivity and the psychological humanities

Thomas Teo

York University, Toronto, Canada

The presentation aims at extending the boundaries of psychology by drawing on the psychological humanities that embody traditions inside and outside of the discipline to develop knowledge on the content of human mental life. It is based on the argument that for an understanding of subjectivity, psychologists need to account for the entanglement of socio-subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and intra-subjectivity, and, to do justice to first-person mental lives, an analysis of this nexus is necessary. The analysis of overarching socio-subjectivities is grounded in the philosophical assumption that economy and communication are carriers of human history. To understand and explain socio-subjectivity, historical and theoretical approaches are used that analyze the emergence and development of this concept and reconstruct how relational and a political-economic socio-subjectivities have shifted over time in the Western world. The idea of an overarching socio-subjectivity is justified, assessing its expressions and contradictions, and their impact on individual mental life. The presentation develops the concept of suture that refers to the agency of persons to stitch themselves into cultures, societies, and histories in which they live. Socio-subjectivities are available forms into which persons actively enact themselves, but they can also oppose, refuse and resist them, which opens possibilities for change and critical research (e.g., social justice socio-subjectivity). The argument also involves an assessment of this Western concept by employing epistemic EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion). Socio-subjectivities are culturally contextualized and contrasted, for instance, by taking social characteristics into account. Finally, the project justifies and articulates an epistemology for studying socio-subjectivity

Keywords: Subjectivity, mentality, suture, culture, Zeitgeist.
# Clinical Psychological Practice in Times of Global Crisis: What can the Psychological Humanities bring to the Table?

David Keller¹, Lisa Malich²

¹Sigmund Freud University Berlin, Germany. ²Universität zu Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

Our current age is an age of global crises, affecting the mental health of individuals and communities worldwide. Media reports in Europe and North America point to increased feelings of exhaustion, anxiety, and depression in the general population, associated, for example, with the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, the emergence of new wars, and accelerated climate change. In turn, particularly exposed individuals and communities are especially vulnerable to developing post-traumatic stress responses in the face of existential threats. Nonetheless, they need to cope with experiences of loss and face the challenge to find new ways of surviving for themselves. Given this situation, public demands for clinical psychological interventions are on the rise: e.g., to reduce stress, to deal with anxiety about the future, and to develop coping-skills. Psychotherapy and psychosocial counseling are being called upon to provide tools to help individuals personally cope with the consequences of global crisis-like conditions.

Our contribution takes these observations as a vantage point to ask whether and how the Psychological Humanities (PH) could meaningfully contribute to the current state of affairs: What might the PH hold for clinical psychological practice? And what would a practice inspired by the PH look like?

We argue that the PH can significantly contribute to clinical practice on two levels: First, their perspective provides a toolkit to critically examine the primary focus on greater individual adaptability. Second, they offer important ways to address intersubjective experiences by being particularly sensitive to the social and cultural contexts they take place in.

Keywords: ethics, psychotherapy, critical clinical psychology, psychological humanities

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# Reconceptualizing Diasporic Belonging Using a Psychological Humanities Approach

Zed Zhipeng Gao¹, Katherine Bischoping²

¹The American University of Paris, Paris, France. ²York University, Toronto, Canada

In this study, we apply a psychological humanities approach to theorize an alternative view of belonging. The mainstream notion of belonging has been informed by an essentialist, individualistic ontology that prioritizes the person. According to this view, belonging is an intrinsic need and a relatively stable property of the person; even though belonging contains relational and contextual features, the latter are of secondary importance. This ontology is reinforced by the positivist research approach that aims to measure one's belonging and identify what social factors causally contribute to belonging. In this study, we argue that this mainstream view of belonging is based on individuals who possess privileged identities and stable social relations. It is less applicable to marginalized individuals whose belonging is disrupted by exclusion and alienation. Shifting our attention to the latter, we propose an alternative theorization of belonging by incorporating theories and methods from diaspora studies and cultural studies. Drawing on diaspora studies, we explore the fluidity and multifacetedness of belonging due to displacement and identity fragmentation. In the meantime, we borrow insights from cultural studies to theorize belonging as a cultural practice (instead of an individual need or property) that is laden with power relation and ideological struggle. To illustrate this theorization, we analyze the Chinese "roots-and-leaves" metaphor of belonging in its literary, ideological, discursive, and affective forms. To conclude, we reflect on how the psychological humanities approach enables the development of new research directions.

**Keywords:** Belonging, Chinese immigrants, cultural studies, diaspora studies, psychological humanities
# The idolatry of the method and the ghost of the shaman:
## Challenges to the psychological humanities in Chile

Adriana Kaulino

Diego Portales University, Santiago, Chile

Psychology usually responds with hyper-science (Teo, 2020) to the accusation of charlatanism. This path meant moving away from subjectivity and submitting to replicability, measurement, and control demands. The Psychological Humanities (PH) responds to this problematic treatment of subjectivity. However, in Chile, PH continues to face the shaman's ghost. Even the translation into Spanish distorts its meaning. Humanidades Psicológicas refers to the idea that the humanities need psychology. Inadvertently, in its translation, its original meaning is being betrayed. This challenge is heightened by academic capitalism's difficulties in developing interdisciplinarity and collaborative work (Bergland, 2017). In most interdisciplinary research, psychology keeps appearing as a specialized science, empirically and methodologically based on statistics and/or rigorously controlled experiments. In this context, a) how to expand a psychology oriented by the humanities (POH) in a curriculum increasingly specialized in an empiricist discipline? b) How do we persuade funding agencies of the validity of POH's research? c) How do we modify the expectations of the labor market regarding the skills of psychologists? Despite these obstacles, there are some spaces in which POH has been developed: in doctoral psychology programs and through methodological tools of teaching. Finally, I argue that a psychology that neither fears the ghosts of the shaman nor surrenders to the idolatry of method should be creative to be recognized as a valuable asset in institutions that are suspicious of the humanities. Should we start inventing a proper Spanish name that remains faithful to the meaning of the Psychological Humanities proposal?

Keywords: Psychological Humanities - Academic Capitalism - Interdisciplinarity - Chile - Psychology oriented by Humanities - Chile

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PERSPECTIVES IN EVERYDAY LIFE:
DIALOGICAL APPROACHES TOWARD PERSPECTIVE-INTEGRATING,
ARGUMENTATION AND OPENNESS

Joshua Phelps

Oslo New University College, Oslo, Norway. Norwegian Police University College, Oslo, Norway

Engaged theorising means grounding our approaches in the messiness and ever-changing complexity of everyday life. Those of us intent on researching people's interconnected worlds are confronted with the need to describe and explain how multiple perspectives are present and negotiated across different life domains. This symposium focuses on four applied contexts of research which have developed theoretical approaches to account for how people orient to or engage in activities in which multiple perspectives and/or voices may coincide, compete, or be integrated. These include police-trainees who engage with legal, societal, and interpersonal perspectives to resolve conflictual multiparty interactions; citizens confronted with multiple perspectives in trying to make informed choices to vaccinate or form an opinion on restrictive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic; and how today's youth living in liberal democracies may experience different facets of openness when discussing mental health. Each research strand presented in the symposium takes on an overarching dialogical approach to theory development on multiple perspectives and shows how it can be applied in real-world contexts. Our joint discussion will focus on how we can better theorise complexity involving multiple perspectives in everyday life in light of potentially competing societal tendencies to simplify and see the world in binaries.

Keywords: multiple perspectives, dialogicality, perspective-integrating, argumentation, openness

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## Perspective-integrating: going beyond perspective-getting and perspective-taking in multiparty interactions

Joshua Phelps<fnref n="1" />,², Alex Gillespie<fnref n="3" />,<fnref n="1" />

We propose that perspective-integrating is a central communicative activity involved in complex multiparty interactions, and defined as understanding, evaluating and creatively coordinating multiple perspectives. Perspective-integrating emerged in our research when we applied sociocultural theory on language, dialogism, and Mead's Generalized Other to investigate how Norwegian police-trainees resolved a multiparty conflict training scenario. Starting with exploratory, empirical findings from real-world training has led us to begin theorising the role of perspective-integrating across several domains – as a general communicative activity that is compatible with, but moves beyond, perspective-getting and perspective-taking during multiparty interaction, and as central in developing collective understandings of complex phenomena and organizational decision-making with stakeholders. We will illustrate by discussing police officers trying to resolve public order disturbances as fairly as possible and video assistant referees intervening to improve decision-making in football as two examples of perspective-integrating potentially occurring “in real life”. Our theoretical contribution will draw upon ongoing developments within sociocultural psychology in combination with current understandings of deliberative theory, collective sensemaking, situated awareness and common operational picture from within organizational and crisis management literature.

Keywords: perspective-integrating, perspective-taking, perspective-getting, multiparty interactions, communication

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<footnote n="1">¹Oslo New University College, Oslo, Norway. ²Norwegian Police University College, Oslo, Norway.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom</footnote>
# A Shot in the Dark?

## A longitudinal study of COVID-19 Vaccination reasoning in Germany

Brady Wagoner¹,²,³, Lisa Herbig⁴

¹University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. ²Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark. ³Oslo New University College, Oslo, Norway. ⁴University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

This paper explores people's motivations and concerns about being vaccinated against COVID-19 as a dialogical process. Based on a large national representative survey of the German population, 40 interviewees were selected to elaborate on their attitudes and behaviours in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccination willingness. The first phase of data collection took place in December 2020 (shortly before the vaccine's approval by the European Medical Agency), the second phase in April 2021 (when the vaccine had been offered to a subset of the population), and a third phase in August 2021 (after it had been offered to everyone). Results reveal the mobilization of multiple arguments for and against COVID-19 vaccination that are structured around the antinomies: trust/distrust, risk/non-risk, and community/liberty. In the first phase many participants voiced arguments both for and against vaccination, while in latter phases arguments became increasing polarized and focused on constructing 'the other' (i.e., (anti-)vaxxer). After presenting general argumentative tendencies used across the sample, a case study is analyzed to illustrate how these arguments play out as a dialogical process, wherein different arguments are voiced and countered. The paper concludes by nuancing the arguments about the 'infodemic,' where we are all in our own information silos; instead, the findings here point to people managing a complex array of different information and arguments from multiple perspectives.

Keywords: vaccination, argumentation, dialogical, longitudinal, polarization
Compliance or critical thinking? Dilemmatic negotiations of
non-compliance with the COVID-19 cabin ban in Norway

Ella Marie Sandbakken¹,², Sigrun Marie Moss²

¹Oslo New University College, Oslo, Norway. ²University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Norwegian government made it a punishable offence to spend the night in privately owned cabins, to control the spread of COVID-19 in rural areas. This so-called "cabin ban" resulted in discussions and pushback. In this study, we investigated the research question: "How do interview participants discursively explain why the cabin ban was the first measure that evoked pushback in Norway?". We conducted a Foucauldian discourse analysis of our longitudinal interview material, finding that participants provided three overarching explanations of why this measure resulted in pushback. In the first explanation, the pushback was presented as a result of the cultural importance of the cabin. Here, participants partly legitimised the pushback by constructing it as a predictable reaction in this cultural context. In the second explanation, participants constructed the pushback as an expression of 'cabin people' in particular and Norwegians in general being 'too privileged' to acknowledge the measure's necessity, constructing pushback as an illegitimate reaction. In the third explanation, participants explained the pushback as a result of people seeing the measure as meaningless. This interpretation constructs pushback as a legitimate response. With some temporal variations, the same participants were using these competing explanations, actively negotiating individual freedom against solidarity, and compliance against critical thinking. We discuss these findings in light of Billig and colleagues' (1988) framework of ideological dilemmas. Our study contributes to the understanding of compliance with restrictive measures as processes that are connected to the temporal, cultural and ideological context.

Keywords: Compliance, COVID-19, Foucauldian discourse analysis, non-compliance, ideological dilemmas
# Youths' understandings of openness about mental illness:
A qualitative study

Natalie Rolandsgard¹, Christina Kvamme Amengual², Ole Jacob Madsen²

¹Oslo New University College, Oslo, Norway. ²University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Openness about mental disorders has increased in recent decades. How do youths understand the ethos of openness about mental illness? In this qualitative study, we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews and three focus groups with young adults aged 16-19, the majority recruited from psychology classes in upper secondary school. Thematic analysis was used to analyze data. Social representation theory was used as a theoretical framework. The results show that the participants shared the widespread perception in society that openness is an effective outlet for negative feelings and a way to combat stigmatization. However, we also found that the participants had more critical understandings of openness. Among the downsides of openness that were highlighted were potential misuse to gain attention, uncertainty regarding the legitimacy of the disease categories applied, and the potential romanticization of mental illness. Thus, the study indicates that a more nuanced, ambivalent attitude towards openness has become widespread among the younger generation.

Keywords: the ethos of openness, mental illness, stigma, pathologizing, social representation theory

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ENGAGING THEORIES OF CARE IN EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE TOWARDS
GREEN TRANSITION: STRUGGLING WITH DILEMMAS AND LIMITS OF
CARE AND RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBAL CRISIS

Ditte Winther-Lindqvist

Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

The climate and bio-diversity crisis calls for new theorizing and engagement in various theoretical and applied fields of psychology. Climate psychology, educational psychology for sustainability, and diagnostic categories like eco-anxiety/depression, are examples of such responses. Most theorizing, largely represent worldviews formed around modernity in western societies that have legitimized human exploitation of natural resources and non-human earthlings, and backgrounded our dependency on nature and on each other. We are addressing the issue of green transition in education by engaging theories of care, and suggest a conceptual framework of inter-related caring domains based on care-ethics, praxis-theory, (eco)feminist theory and phenomenological inspirations (Tronto, Løgstrup, Merleau-Ponty, Pahuus). The contested status of 'eco-crisis' make green transition efforts interesting sites for studying paradoxes in both maintaining and changing habits and values in more sustainable directions. Collaborative research in ECEC settings, allows us to explore and transform pedagogies of everyday practices, and to identify differences in our resources and perspectives on the matter. We would like to discuss some of the challenging questions: How do we balance normativity and an activist stance with scientific ideals of democratic participation and 'objective' knowledge? How do we operationalize and identify conceptual constructs like world-care and caring domains in everyday life and allow practice to answer back to theory? How do we avoid despair when engaging 'small scale' changes and caring efforts as a response to a global wicked problem? What is the scope and the limits of care and responsibility, in a global crisis?

Keywords: *Green transition, climate change, education, world-care, care theories*
A broader vocabulary of care - Conceptualizing world-care

Ditte Winther-Lindqvist

Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

This talk outlines the vocabulary of the world-care project inspired by the Danish life-philosopher and care-ethics of K. Løgstrup and feminist J. Tronto (Winther-Lindqvist 2023). Alongside this vocabulary of care and caring domains of; self-care, other-care, we-care, and world-care, caring objectives of responsive and proactive dimensions are exemplified with reference to care understood as activities that remain, continue, and repair our world (Tronto & Fishers definition). Suggesting a broader concept of care as domains that can overlap, or exclude each other highlights the conflictual and political aspects of care and that caring requires a recognition of an existence worth caring for (Hundeide 2007). To care is also to worry, thus care implies a burdening in responsibility on the one who cares. As such, caring, and introducing world-care is potentially distressing for parents, professionals and researchers when asked to engage with the bio-diversity and climate crisis in collaborative research. Depression or denial may be realistic positioning's in terms of the current crisis, but are unhelpful pedagogically, as children are depending on adults who remain hopeful and agential in engaging with the problems of our times. Formulating alternative understandings of care, human needs, and entanglement with 'nature' as a basis for green transition, produce paradoxes between responsibility and hopefulness in educational settings, where phenomenological concepts of world-openness, a common life unfolding, and moral imagination may serve as productive alternatives to think about human dependency.

Keywords: *Green transition, climate change, education, world-care, care theories*

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# The concept of World-Care in dialogue with practice - challenges and qualities

Marie Kolmos

Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

This presentation focuses on the challenges and qualities inherent in working with the theoretical engaging concepts of 'world-care' and 'caring domains' in the ethnographic fieldwork in connection to The Green Transition as World-Care project (see concept definitions above).

The Green Transition as World-Care project is empirically based on a qualitative and collaborative research approach aiming at both exploring and transforming the involved early childhood educational practices. The ethnographic fieldwork takes place in daycare facilities, where selected staff members participate in workshops where the concepts of 'world-care' and 'caring domains' are introduced and reflected together with researchers. As Gruenewald (2003) points out, issues concerning ecology and climate change can easily become abstractions from the immediacy of the places where we live and thus also from the practical everyday life in daycare facilities. The presentation discusses how the distinction between space and place (i.e. Løwlie) and the concept of social aesthetics (MacDougall) can be helpful rendering qualities and paradoxes visible in the engagement with the concepts of world-care in the dialogue between theory and everyday educational practice.

Focusing theoretically on children and the educational staff as emplaced persons inscribed in the context of their embodied and material existence, the aim of this presentation is to allow the educational practice to answer back to the concept of 'world-care' as a way of addressing issues of green transition.

Keywords: Green transition, climate change, world-care, practice research, ethnographic fieldwork

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# Conceptualizing, exploring and transforming caring habits and caring awareness in pedagogy - engaging phenomenology of embodied sensory-aesthetics

Anne Maj Nielsen

Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

This talk suggests a sensory- and aesthetics-based approach to conceptualizing, exploring, and transforming caring habits and caring awareness in everyday pedagogy practices. The theoretical framework integrates existential-phenomenology (Fuchs, Merleau-Ponty, Waldenfels) and sociocultural psychology (Vygotsky) to conceptualize experience as; sensory pre-reflective embodied perception loaded with intensity, and mediated aesthetically by sociocultural artefacts, tools and participatory practices. This framework is applied to conceptualize 'caring habits' and 'caring awareness', departing from the suggested vocabulary of the World-care project and caring domains.

The caring domains in pedagogical practices may conflict and be experienced by professionals as dilemmas, involving affectivity and difficulties about how to (re)act and prioritize actions. In the present climate- and biodiversity-crisis, ideas of 'nature' have become center of concern, and simultaneously a void has opened when it comes to knowledge and practices in pedagogy: what is important and significant when wishing to caring for our environment and 'nature'? This void is filled with different normative and automatic reactions, ideas, based on culturally, personally formed habitual and pre-reflective practices, and orientations of the participants. Affective and emotional intensities in this void of un-knowing are strong forces emerging pre-reflexively in ways often challenging intentions of 'caring'. This presentation discuss how the vocabulary of caring domains and reflections on domain-related caring awareness and practices may bridge the void of un-knowing in theory and practice.

Keywords: *Green transition*, *climate change*, *education*, *world-care*, *existential phenomenology*

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# Parenting in times of crisis? - Conceptualizing care practices in families in relation to climate change and demands for more sustainable living

Dorte Kousholt

Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

This paper brings together conceptualizations of contradictory concerns in care for children in everyday family life (Kousholt, 2011, 2019) and discuss "shared care" between parents and professionals (Haavind & Andenæs, 2018) with the conceptual framework of inter-related caring domains (cf. symposium introduction).

Since the global Covid pandemic, war in Ukraine, and economic recession in Europe - combined with climate changes - crisis no longer seem to be a temporary condition for families, but a more chronic situation. Radical societal changes and abruptions change the conditions for family life and care and make visible the intrinsic relation between everyday family practices and societal and political conditions. Parents must now not only take care of their children and strive to ensure that they can do well in relation to for example, the school system, but also take care of them in an unpredictable world and prepare them to deal with an uncertain future.

Anthropological studies in precarious areas find that living with crisis and uncertainty holds the possibility of producing despair, powerlessness, anxiety - but also hope and new ways of living (Calkins 2016). How do environmental and societal crisis influence, (de)stabilize and perhaps transform how parents perceive of issues of care in everyday family life? How do parents experience conflicts and dilemmas between different care domains and demands in and across children's life contexts? How do they perceive of their own role and resources for supporting and taking part in green transition together with their children?

Keywords: *Green transition*, *climate change*, *care theories*, *parenting and family life in crisis*
SITUATED STRUGGLES OF OTHERED POSITIONS AND MOVING BEYOND

Sabina Pultz¹, Sofie Pedersen¹, Mads Bank²

¹Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. ²University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Current norms dictate societal expectations: You are supposed to be well-educated, in good health, and holding down a proper and well-paid job. In some regards, strong discourses predict that 'you can become whatever you want', and yet, restricting norms and processes of othering, also on a smaller or more subtle scale, counteract and contradict that promise. This symposium explores people, who, in different ways, may find themselves "outside the normative script" (Ahmed, 2014, p. 107). Whether we find ourselves in the realm of education, on the brink of employment or in need of psychiatric services, the settings and spaces we participate in tell us 'who we are' or perhaps even more so 'who we ought to be', leaving people to deal with situated struggles.

From a social-psychological perspective, we intend to explore subjectification processes and how people navigate and manage themselves in relation to the various institutional settings - and how theorization matters in relation to moving beyond othered positions. By expanding our unit of analysis in institutional welfare and care settings we may create new possibilities for action and participation.

From a critical standpoint, this symposium thus addresses the intersection of 1) how people in various ways alter the systems and settings in which they take part, allowing them to experiment or re-negotiate their identities and social positions in society. And 2) how reconfiguring institutional spaces may co-create new possibilities for becoming and moving beyond othered positions. And finally, we discuss how theoretical concepts contribute to such processes.

Keywords: Othering, subjectification, participation, welfare, theorizing
# How do unemployed people deal with (in)dignity and work to get rid of sticky shame?

Sabina Pultz

Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

Unemployment often comes with a diffuse sense of feeling less dignified as a citizen, accompanied by a strange sense of sticky shame (Ahmed, 2014). But how do we develop the theoretical concepts apt to grasp such subtle affective pushes and 'othering' mechanisms to understand the situated struggles unemployed people find themselves in?

Based on rich qualitative data consisting of in-depth interviews with 44 Danish unemployed people and follow-up video-diaries, I explore the 'lived experience of unemployment' (Boland & Griffin, 2015). This allows me to identify under researched aspects of how (in)dignity and shame are linked to encounters in unemployed people's everyday lives; with the public employment services (PES), encounters with the labor market, and last, through encounters in the private domain. By applying the concept of 'affective subjectification' (Pultz, 2017), I aim to enhance our understanding of how unemployed people are attuned in particular ways and how this is orchestrated politically, societally, and culturally. While shame is a very intimate, bodily, and private feeling, I track the underpinning of such experiences linking to wider societal structures and practices, that distribute respect and dignity unequally in the population. Some manage the sticky shame by 'shifting' (Norris, in press) towards new wanted identities or by 'sustaining' other more dignified roles. These situated struggles and ways of negotiating make clear the value systems underpinning our society and allow us to critically discuss the link between psychology and politics.

Keywords: unemployment, affects, othering, identity, dignity

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A matter of space:
(co)creating enabling spaces for becoming in mental health care

Sofie Pedersen

Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

In Denmark, as in most western countries, the conceptualization and treatment of mental illness issues is highly individualized and biologized. Despite the bio-psycho-social model being a dominant narrative of mental illness for a longer time, mental illness issues are largely - and consistently - considered the property of the individual. Consequently, the often-complex aspects of the human lifeworld are reduced, both theoretically and practically. This impacts not only the self-understanding of the person suffering, but also the way in which we design and consider institutional spaces for rehabilitation and recovery.

Drawing on the ecological psychological concepts of behavior setting (Barker & Wright 1955) and affordances (Gibson 1979/1986), I discuss the potential of expanding the unit of analysis in mental health care, by exploring how space matters in relation to recovery. Though much psycho-social work fails to consider or include space as a factor (in what would be a bio-psycho-social-space model), recovery does not take place in non-spaces; it is never not-situated.

I shall therefore explore the meaning of working with the invitational character of the environment,
of creating the possibility of 'both/and' (or liminal) positions, and of using inclusive architecture to
support a sense of inclusion, new possibilities for participation and the development of agency, as
well as the experience of lived citizenship. I shall thus argue for the meaning of 'enabling spaces'
(Nielsen & Pedersen 2022) in relation to moving beyond othered positions in mental health care.

Keywords: recovery, enabling spaces, behavior settings, affordances, participation
Talking with the hammer:

An affirmative theoretical analysis of Vocational educational spaces and
materialities as multi-voiced dialogues

Mads Bank

University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

In contemporary political and educational discourse, vocational education is often articulated either negatively as the "other" to traditional scholarly education or as being associated with practical skills. Such articulations are problematic as they reproduce a class-based hierarchy in education, separate knowledge from practical skills, and obscure the significant strengths of vocational education.

In this paper, I will draw on Bakhtin (1986, 1981) and post-structuralist theory to affirmatively theorize vocational educational practices. Based on empirical fieldwork, I will argue that we can theorize vocational education as dialogically multi-voiced, student-centered practices. Building on Dyson's (1996) distinction between monologic and dialogic teaching, I will demonstrate how dialogic educational practices are produced through an assemblage of heterogeneous materials, tools, discourses, spaces, and subjectivities. Additionally, I will show how the flexibility and heterogeneity of spaces in vocational education allow for a plurality of ways of participation, offering more autonomy and collaborative work.

I suggest that such a theoretical model of vocational education can provide us with new models for designing more inclusive and engaging educational practices. These models can counter the marginalization processes that many vocational students are subjected to and that are structurally embedded in traditional monologic and disciplinary educational practices.

Keywords: Dialogism, vocational education, post-structuralism, Bakthin, materiality
# TROUBLED PERSONAL ENGAGEMENT AS A CATALYST FOR A THEORETICALLY COMPREHENSIVE INQUIRY OF (PSYCHOLOGICAL) PHENOMENA: ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE SERBIAN CONTEXT

Biljana Stanković

University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, Serbia

It has become a widely accepted thesis that our existence and experience are situated. Location is even recognized as "a basic ontological category for psychology" (Benson, 2001). As a consequence, reflexively grasping our particular position has become both an ethical and a methodological obligation when researching and theorising. What is often not elaborated in this familiar picture of self and research transparency is how these complex and often lifelong processes work. In this symposium, we aim to illustrate how our contexts constitute us by imbuing our lifeworlds with built-in perplexities that we infused with personal meanings and affects. By trying to resolve them, we as researchers become fixated on certain phenomena. But this is more than a case of personal investment in the topic – it is an authentically troubled personal involvement in the phenomena themselves. An unsettled lived experience is at the core of the will to know and understand. In her "Notes toward a Politics of Location" (1984), Adrienne Rich asserts that "whatever circumscribes or mutilates our feelings makes it more difficult to act, keeps our actions reactive, repetitive". The reduction of affective involvement – either through the distancing movement of abstract thinking or through sole commitment to one position or point of view (as in loyalty to theoretical or ideological camps) – makes us prone to settling for more familiar, simplified or biased theoretical articulations of our phenomenon of interest. In contrast, we will try to illustrate how troubled personal (and embodied) involvement in our respective research phenomenon served as both a driving force and a guide for its more integrative theoretical conceptualisation and empirical exploration.

Keywords: situatedness, embodied engagement, reflexivity, theoretical integration
# The messiness of theorizing girlhood in Serbia:
## Toward a discursive and phenomenological exploration of embodiment

Tijana Nikitović

University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, Serbia

Young women growing up as part of Generation Z in Serbia belong to a postsocialist society in transition, introduced to capitalism and neoliberal ideology. The Zeitgeist they live in is permeated with diverse and often contradictory discourses on femininity, e.g., feminist and postfeminist discourses. As part of the previous generation, I grew up in a society that offered far fewer alternative constructions about what a female body can do and how it should look like. The way I position myself in relation to discourses about the female body, as well as my own lived experiences, made me ponder how young women today make sense of their experiences. One notion is that the diversity of discourse is of service to young women. However, contradictory discourses may be a source of great anxiety and ambivalence concerning one's body. To untangle the messiness of my research phenomenon, I deemed it necessary to take on a nuanced and critical theoretical approach. In psychology, the topic of young people's bodies, especially girls', is predominantly explored within the positivistic paradigm. The dominant theoretical approach in this field is individualist, cognitive, and pathologizing. Contrastingly, I propose theorizing the (female) subject as processual and embodied, situated in a sociocultural context. This subject is agentic but also constrained by discursive and material conditions. To this end, I utilized a critical-discursive approach grounded in the poststructuralist tradition and a phenomenological approach to the body. The proposed framework takes into account the symbolic mediation of the subject, the role of discourse and power relations, as well as the embodiment of the subject.

Keywords: postfeminism, female embodied experience, young adulthood, discourse, theoretical integration

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# Reconnecting theoretical “opposites” - revisiting notions of interest and organizational structure in theorizing self-organized efforts to maintain a common resource

Isidora Popović

University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, Serbia

Critique of rationalist notions around the "tragedy of the commons" (Hardin, 1969) has yielded a more optimistic prospect for collective rationality (Ostrom, 1990). A further shift towards theorizing practices of commoning has replaced rational self-interest with affective dimensions of the phenomenon - concepts of community and care (Federici, 2018; Hardt & Negri, 2009). Indeed, I recognized the cultural centre in Belgrade I was researching in the alternative urban spaces and housing cooperatives I was reading about in the literature. However, my participants articulated issues of participation in common duties rather as issues of common reason, than as crises in community. They used notions like "free riding" to articulate unequal participation and "secret government" to articulate deviation from horizontal structure. They claimed that having an interest in common - and not mutual affection - was key. Instead of affective dimensions of care, I encountered invisible unpaid housework as pertinent to commoning. However, community had made me interested in the phenomenon. As I developed personal relationships with the more active members of the cultural centre, I was initially eager to learn their views, only to later feel the need to emancipate myself from them. My inner conflicts were epistemologically useful - as a researcher trying to be more objective and as a young woman trying to be more independent from male authority figures. Alternately defending their perspective and rebelling against it sensitized me to different structural positions in the explicit and implicit division of labour. I conclude by proposing a move to integrate our theorizing of commoning efforts.

Keywords: commoning, collective rationality, theoretical integration, urban commons
# Caught in the pendulum movement: The dynamics of immersion and detachment in exploring female embodied subjectivity and reproductive politics in Serbian maternity wards

Biljana Stanković

University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, Serbia

My preoccupation with what I consider to be my central research topic has been motivated equally by socio-political and theoretical reasons. Neither had a greater advantage, although both were not equally present during my long-lasting engagement with the topic. It therefore took me a while to understand the interplay and dynamics between them. In a much later reconstruction, I recognize repeated cycles of immersion in the phenomenon (my very personal and embodied involvement) and detachment from it (my attempts at theoretical articulation of its various aspects). Thus, I would move from the empathetic engagement with the traumatic experiences of women in local maternity wards that showcased practices genuinely perplexing to me – both intellectually (how did we end up with something that seems so irrational) and experientially (how to come to terms with something like this happening on a large scale to a number of young women like me and nothing being done about it); and move to trying to theoretically grasp and articulate the aspects that I considered central – the female embodiment as both constructed and shaped by dominant ideologies and practices and as a potential site of resistance; as well as the situatedness of medical representations, procedures and technologies in very material and tangible institutional arrangements. This pendulum movement was both an expression and a consequence of the real entanglements of theoretical articulation of the phenomenon and practical engagement with it, which was simultaneously deeply rooted in and constitutive of my own embodied experiences, concerns and political positionings.

Keywords: empathetic involvement, socio-political engagement, female embodied experience, institutional practices
THEORISING MICROGENESIS AS ENGAGEMENT

Tania Zittoun, Martín Vergara

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Both understanding or supporting human development and social change require a deep
understanding of micro-processes of change, without losing sight of their underpinnings or
implications at a wider scale. Theorising microgenetic dynamics requires patience and precision
- it needs both to account for instant-to-instant, here-and-now emergences, never losing sight
of deeper or wider dynamics of interactions, development or sociocultural change. Capturing
microgenetic dynamics thus paradoxically requires serious and deep theorising. Hence, theorising
microgenesis is a form of engagement.

In this symposium, four presentations propose different theorisations of change and development: Martin Vergara will show the slow emergence of concept thinking by composite utterances, leading to possible generalisation; Agnès Camincher propose to see how the emergence of meaning about desire in an interaction with a sexologist reveals wider sociocultural dynamics; Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie will examine how everyday diary entries reveal wider patterns in the course of a life; and Louis Kernahan proposes to see how museum visitors' attempts to make sense of exhibitions reflects wider historical transformation of museography.

Keywords: Microgenesis; meaning-making; concept development; life course; engagement

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Instant concept development

Martín Vergara

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

From a cultural-historical approach, concepts are generalizations processes: authentic acts of thinking by which an exemplar is treated as part of a class. Concepts develop throughout life, as attested by the fact that, using the same words, people generalize in different ways at different points in their ontogeny. As a fundamental principle of developmental psychology, it is not complicated to think of such changes across the lifespan. Less evident, however, are the claims on the microgenetic development of these ways of thinking, according to which each time we generalize using words, we do it in particular ways that depend on the specific use of the signs. How is it possible to conceive "the same thing" differently each time? And, how can we account for these ever-changing yet stable ways of thinking?

The specific use of signs that characterizes concepts, we will argue, is not limited to speech, but makes use of various semiotic means, such as artifacts, inscriptions, abstracts representations, and gestures. Speech is hardly ever alone. In this paper, we will discuss how the flow between these composite utterances, the successive translation from one to another in interaction, can tell us about the multiple instances of concepts. Furthermore, we will address how this reflection feeds back into our understanding of the development of concepts through ontogeny.

Keywords: Concept development, microgenesis, semiotic means, composite utterances, cultural-historical theory

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# Subjectivity and eroticism: micro-change and meaning-making

Agnès Camincher

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

In the history of psychology, the relationship between subjectivity and sexual desire (eroticism) has been established in some detail, from a variety of perspectives, given the complexity of the topic. However, the processes of change in favor of subjectivity in the signification of sexual desire remain partly unknown, even though they are at the heart of contemporary questions such as the notion of consent. This research aims above all to offer an unequivocal discourse on the psychic dimensions of sexual desire, while it is clearly captured by naturalistic approaches in dedicated institutions.

More concretely, then, it is a question of highlighting the psychic structure of the events of subjectivity in the discourse of sexual desire, and to see how they are articulated within intersubjectivity itself. We begin with an historical and theoretical milestone on the subject of sexual desire.

This is qualitative research, based on the accounts of sexology patients with a request directly or indirectly related to the question of sexual desire. Only the passages concerning signification are transcribed and analyzed using the dialogical method (Grossen, 2006; Markova, 2017; Salazar-Orvig & Grossen, 2008). It will then become clear that the advent of erotic subjectivity is a complex process, involving temporality, micro-events and changes, where the levels of intersubjectivity (Gillespie & Cornish, 2010) are decisive.

Keywords: dialogism, intersubjectivity, meanings, sexual desire, subjectivity.

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# Themes and variations in the course of a life

Tania Zittoun¹, Alex Gillespie²

¹University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland. ²London School of Economics and Political sciences, London, United Kingdom

Each course of an adult life is a unique combination of routines and habits, and sudden crises and disruptions. In the past years, pursuing the projects of lifespan and life-course approaches (Levy et al., 2005; Spini et al., 2017), a sociocultural psychology of the life-course has let us account for both daily changes and major ruptures and transitions, the evolution of multiple engagements in different domains, and the role of imagination within (Zittoun, 2022; Zittoun et al., 2013). But how can we understand the importance of daily changes in the light of a course of life? Are the origins of some major ruptures and transitions not to be found in the slow cumulation and variation of daily events?

Drawing on online diaries written over more than 20 years, WE propose to highlight the relationship between microgenetic daily changes, as seen in diary entries, and their translation in terms of ontogenetic development, that remain over longer periods of time. More specifically, we will show how the way in which people engage over life in their preferential domains - work, hobbies, friendship - is slowly transformed as they develop new understandings, or disinvest from these domains (Zittoun, 2024; Zittoun et al., 2023). We wish here to explore the emergence of unique styles that characterise people's life-courses, through their thematic engagements and modes of resolutions, or dynamic patterns.

Altogether, this paper will thus both contribute theorising the development of people's life-course in society, and illustrate the importance of theory when addressing large sets of data.

Keywords: Diaries; Life course; Sense-making; Technologies of the self; Microgenesis
# Application of sociocultural psychological theory in the museum: application as engagement

Louis Kernahan

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

As modern museums continue to change and evolve, the people who work together to staff and run them also learn and develop. Similarly, the theory and practice of psychology in our modern world have developed immensely over several centuries. Following the behaviourist, constructivist, and affective turns within museological research-based upon psychological knowledge- new ways of thinking about museum practice in the real world have been explored. By theorising via the application of the relatively new discipline of sociocultural psychology, we can investigate the experiences of museum professionals and other staff. Here, it is hoped that we can extend the pragmatic use of psychological theory via engagement in the sociogenetic evolution of museums and see how their changes have led to developments in the ontogenetic and microgenetic processes within visitors associated with the museum. To illuminate this, the current oral presentation will consist of an analysis surrounding one subset of data from an ethnographic study. This subset consists of 10-15 narrative-style interviews conducted within the National Railway Museum, York, United Kingdom. A phenomenological analysis will be evoked to understand how professionals make sense of their experiences and construct narratives of their careers within the museum as it changes around them.

Keywords: sociocultural psychology, museology, science museum, narratives

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TROUBLESOME FUTURES AND WHAT TO DO WITH THEM: PERSONAL
AND COLLECTIVE AGENCY IN RELATION TO IMAGINED FUTURES

Hana Hawlina

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Slovenia. University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Imagination grants the human mind a remarkable capacity to exist within a dynamic temporal heteroglossia where the past, present, and future are endlessly interwoven. However, our relationship to imagined futures is rarely easy or straightforward—they are uncertain and impossible to stabilise, often bleak and anxiogenic. We have limited agency to act upon the future, to bring about desirable outcomes or evade negative ones. People might feel trapped in a difficult political situation, where governing entities propel them towards unwanted futures; some futures seem too vast to act upon, such as the apocalyptic visions of the climate crisis; we may even imagine posthumous futures, where we are no longer able to intervene.

Confronted with difficult futures, people and communities exercise agency in diverse, inventive ways to shape what is coming, or resist the change. In our symposium, each paper explores different expressions of individual and collective agency in relation to destabilising futures; first, Ivan Flis investigates how Nikola Tesla wrote his autobiography as a textual monument for the future, creating a self-narrative that exerts influence long after his death. While Tesla heroically projected himself into the future, contemporary young people in Alja Pehar's study wanted to escape the bleak collective future and exercised limited agency in symbolically removing themselves from it. In times of political turmoil, Hana Hawlina observes how people rediscovered hope and agency as a community, which catalysed a social movement. Finally, Matthew Porges explores how opposing communities struggled to define the future in the context of bordering.

Keywords: collective futures, imagination, personal agency, collective agency, temporalities

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# Nikola Tesla's Textual Monument for the Future

Ivan Flis

University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia

The wizard of electricity who invented the future. This is how Nikola Tesla is often remembered by his most fervent fans who number in the thousands: electrical engineers, Serb/Croatian nationalists, historians of technology, Silicon Valley techbros, neurodiversity advocates, conspiracy theorists, science teachers, Yugoslav communists, science fiction fans, vegetarians, Yugoslav-Americans, and many others. Very many communities of people, since the beginning of the twentieth century and Tesla's stratospheric rise to celebrity in fin de siècle New York, have invested considerable effort to both remember Tesla as a heroic figure of the past and a futuristic prophet of the future. In this paper I will discuss the quizzical temporality of Tesla's only autobiography. The autobiography was published in the American hobbyist magazine Electrical Experimenter in 1919. Written by Tesla when he was in his sixties, with the heyday of his career already two decades in his past, the magazine's editor explicitly solicited it from the aged inventor as his 'textual monument' for the future. From 1919 onwards, it prefigured as the most exhaustive source about Tesla's life both for academic historians and the diverse memory cultures that salvaged Tesla from the march of time. By analyzing the autobiography and its editorial inception, I aim to show how Tesla was celebrated during his life as an imaginative visionary of the future whose past futures, via the autobiography, kept rupturing the presents of twentieth century memory cultures. In the theorization of the legacy of Tesla's agency through self-narrativization, I will juxtapose Ian Hacking's "looping kinds," Aleida Assmann's theorization of collective memory, and G.E.M. Anscombe's action under description.

Keywords: Collective memory, Nikola Tesla, history of technology, intention

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(Im)possible futures:
imagining collective futures and how future selves got lost on the way

Alja Pehar

Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Why does it seem like imagining the collective futures has become especially complicated and anxiogenic, even more so if we try to picture ourselves as a part of it? Our relationship to the possible futures reflects our current preoccupations and worries and offers an insight into the complex interplay between subjective and social contradictions, the ways in which we understand ourselves, others and make sense of the world. Based on the synthesis of key findings from in-depth interviews with a sample of young adults from Switzerland and Slovenia, I observe their shared difficulty in imagining the ideal and actual future. By placing their answers in the context of capitalist realism I aim to analyse the striking discrepancy between the personal and collective futures and the prevailing inability of imagining oneself as a part of the collective future. Guided by different affective momentums, the experienced contradictions numb the insertion of the self in the collective imagining, culminating in various ways; from a tendency to isolate in both symbolic and concrete terms, actively detaching oneself from the social, to radically annihilate the self in the future. With the help of their answers, I look for alternative conceptions of future-making and subjectivity that surmount the individual-social dualism.

Keywords: imagination, collective future, personal future, capitalist realism, agency
# Resisting illiberal futures: collective imagination and agency in the genesis of a social movement

Hana Hawlina

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Slovenia. University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

The spring of 2020 was a uniquely tumultuous period in Slovenia, where the day after a centre-left government declared the state of epidemic, a right-wing coalition came into power. The global Covid-19 pandemic thus collided with a national political crisis; the new government under the leadership of Janez Janša received record low approval ratings from Slovenian citizens, and the first wave of the pandemic was characterised by numerous scandals of crisis mismanagement, corruption, criticisms of authoritarian tendencies and enactment of unlawful policies. Drawing on the analysis of diary entries from this period, the paper will delve into the months leading up to the beginning of the Bicycle Protests, exploring how collective imagination and a burgeoning sense of agency contributed to the birth of a social movement.

In the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Slovenia, the prevailing sentiments among the diarists were of isolation, fear, and powerlessness. Confined to their homes, they faced a global crisis and felt trapped by a government they did not trust. Participants' imaginings of the future under Janša's rule became increasingly bleak and dystopian, yet this sense of a shared fate began to rekindle a sense of community in a time when physical gathering was prohibited. As people imagined themselves belonging to a wider public that resisted Janša's policies, they described a greater sense of agency to affect collective futures. Such imaginings were crystalised into and scaffolded by artistic practices, as well as historical representations of solidarity and liberation drawing on Slovenia's socialist past.

Keywords: collective imagination, future, agency, social movement, diary analysis
# Ambiguities of the Borderscape: Imagining the Slovenia-Croatia Border in the Context of Irregular Migration

Matthew Porges

University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Imagination is central to bordering, and to understanding the physical and temporal boundaries of political units. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted along the Slovenia-Croatia border among “irregular” migrants and residents of Slovenian border villages in order to draw empirical and theoretical conclusions about the role of political imagination and futurity in relation to contemporary European migration. Villages along this border are caught up in multiple temporal discourses: as a frontier of “Europeanisation,” as a repository of the Yugoslav or Austro-Hungarian legacies, or as the gateway to a new, migration-inflected Europe imagined (positively) by migrants seeking asylum, or (negatively) by some residents of the border. The Slovenia-Croatia border, in particular, has multiple historical resonances: until 2023, it was an external boundary of the Schengen Area, an internal zone of the European Union in which border checks have been largely eliminated (which has since grown to include Croatia), and as a historical military frontier of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Until Croatia’s accession to Schengen, this border was arguably the most important in Europe for both migrants and policymakers attempting to “manage” migration. Residents of the border villages are not devoid of agency in this process, but seek to influence migration routes in order to stake a claim to onrushing futures. Imaginations of the past and future, and relations between temporality and political agency, are explored in order to draw broader theoretical conclusions about collective understandings of bordering at the margins of the European project.

Keywords: Migration, Collective Imagination, Bordering, Slovenia, Temporality
ROUND
TABLES

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# Is equality fundamentally unattainable? An investigation of the limits, implications and effects of egalitarianism

Flora Botelho¹, Thomas Madsen¹, Irini Kadianaki², Vladimer Lado Gamsakhurdia³, Fathali Moghaddam⁴

¹University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. ²University of Cyprus. ³Tiblisi State University. ⁴Georgetown University

The table works from the contention that egalitarianism is inherently paradoxical insofar it is necessarily embedded in broader, global social hierarchies. Concretely, we propose that, rather than indeterminately extending equal status to all humans, egalitarian ideology reaffirms the commonality of members of democratic, liberal societies in terms of their moral allegiance to values of individual autonomy, freedom and gender equality. This allows members to perceive each other as equal and themselves as egalitarian and yet simultaneously exclude those who do not correspond to predetermined notions of liberal, democratic individuals. Thus, egalitarianism becomes a mechanism whereby the superiority of white, Christian-secular, modern, democratic societies is asserted over other cultures and social groups. The argument is meant to inspire critical thinking and lead to a productive discussion of how to conceptualise the multifaceted dynamics of egalitarianism and social inequality.

Keywords: egalitarianism, racism, discrimination, inequality
How can psychological theorizing be(come) ecological?

Hannah Arnett¹, Erik Axel², Niklas Alexander Chimirri², Patrick Jørgensen², Jacob Klitmøller³, Gloria Muñoz⁴, Luca Tateo⁵

¹Independent researcher, Bristol, United Kingdom. ²Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. ³Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark. ⁴University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom. ⁵University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Psychology is nowadays challenged by the growing awareness that most life on planet Earth - including non-western and non-human beings - has widely been neglected by psychological theorizing, leading to knowledge that is little helpful for grappling with today's environmental crises. In other words, current hegemonic psychological theory is insufficiently ecological. We propose to bring this issue to the theoretical arena, starting from a roundtable that will discuss challenges and potential avenues to overcome the limits of current theory and its relevance for practice, for instance in the translation of ecological concerns into sustainable daily actions (and vice versa). The presenters will engage into an interactive discussion with the audience in response to a concrete empirical problem introduced at the beginning of the session, and in ongoing response to the audience's conceptual questions and propositions. We invite discussing themes such as: To what extent are ecological concerns an integrated part of everyday life, whose everyday life, and where on the planet? How do current concepts used in psychology stand in tension with other concerns and priorities, and how do positively connoted concepts such as 'care', 'love', 'resonance', 'climate/environmental/social justice', 'sustainable practice' and more assist in making sense of these tensions? How do different ways of understanding and working with the ecological in everyday life transform practices and subjectivities differently in varying societal contexts? And is the role of the academic researcher to jointly develop in these transformations, or shall we foremost learn and innovate our theories and concepts?

Keywords: environmental crises, ecological theory-practice gap, everyday life, social-environmental justice, researcher role
**Encyclopedia of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology**

Thomas Teo

York University, Toronto, Canada

The chief organizer of a newly planned Encyclopedia of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (with Palgrave Macmillan's Major Reference Work series) hosts a roundtable for associate editors, contributors, and possible readers. Discussed are the scope and depth of the encyclopedia entries, the structure of entries, as well as the purpose of an encyclopedia in times of Wikipedia and ChatGPT. Open feedback and debates are welcome.

Keywords: Theoretical psychology, Knowledge, Enlightenment
Phenomenology and Psychology of Performance

Tetsuya Kono¹, Shoji Nagataki², Martin Nitsche³, Shogo Tanaka⁴

¹Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan. ²Chukyo University, Nagoya, Japan. ³Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic. ⁴Tokai University, Hiratsuka, Japan

Performance is an important theme with great potential for the development of philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive science of embodiment. However, in order to understand the phenomenon of one-time performance, conventional hard science methodology is disqualified since it places reproducibility as the basis of research. In contrast, phenomenology has the potential to provide the basis for a science of performance to analyze the structure and the meaning of performance experiences. In recent years, phenomenology and related cognitive studies of embodiment (4E cognition) have begun to pay more attention to skilled performance and tact in performance (Fuchs & De Jaegher 2009, Gallagher 2021, Grant et al. 2019; Hutto 2012; Welch 2019). So far, we have been conducting phenomenological and qualitative research on intercorporeal interactions. Kono will talk about how children have a dialogue in the practice of philosophy for/ with children. Nagataki will focus on certain typical scenes in a soccer game and the linguistic expressions of the coaches who analyze and describe these images. Nitsche will speak on sonic performances (not only music), how they create sound-spaces, and immersion within the sonic in-between. Tanaka will talk about an experiment in which a pair of people drew in improvisation to confirm the process of "participatory sense-making" that emerges "in-between".

Keywords: Performance; Embodiment; Phenomenological approach; Digital humanities

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**Theory requires a passport?**

**Cross-national perspectives in Critical Educational Psychology**

Christoffer Granhøj Borring¹, Dorte Kousholt², Olja Jovanović³, Tim Corcoran⁴

¹UCL University College, Odense, Denmark. ²Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark. ³University of Belgrade, Belgrad, Serbia. ⁴Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

This roundtable brings together international scholars in Critical Educational Psychology (CEP) to consider contemporary matters of interest within the field. CEP continues to emerge as a response to traditional psychological understandings and applications in educational settings where reductionist and pathological ways of understanding have historically dominated. CEP examines the givenness of hegemonic research – theoretically as well as methodologically – and how this affects ways of understanding within schools and other learning institutions (e.g., universities) around the globe. Psychologists working in educational settings engage in different practices including assessment, consultation, and location-based interventions, often working collaboratively with educators and other allied-education professionals. Like other areas of contemporary life where psychological theory-practice occurs, there is a long tradition of essentializing difference, individualizing problems and labeling in education. Although practice (educational and psychological) develops under different conditions, several critical concerns are regularly present across international contexts. For instance, education-focused matters should be conceived, examined, and managed according to prevailing political, structural, and practical conditions. In response, contemporary CEP theory-practice decenters and connects to relational, material, and non-material circumstances affecting events taking place. Potential similarities – as well as differences – in CEP will be a focal point for discussion in this session. Specific attention is drawn to the immutable relationship connecting theory-practice and how this engagement is enacted within and across different kinds of borders.

Keywords: Educational/School Psychology, Critical Educational Psychology, cross-national perspectives, theory-practice.

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THEMATIC
SESSIONS

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CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH DOMINANT NARRATIVES 1

Literature as Theorizing in Public:
Standpoint Theory and James Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man"

Steven Weber

Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey, Canada

Perhaps the best explanation of how society writ large collectively engages in theory is in Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of metanarratives—our biggest stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—where we use stories to theorize about who we are, how we relate to each other, how our society functions, and even how we find purpose in our lives. These narratives are the most common way that people engage in theorizing, and because they are so common, they become our most dominant theories, no matter how inaccurate or overly simplistic they may be. If narrative is the primary way in which the public theorizes (and therefore engages in theory), then one of the most powerful ways to counter these metanarratives is with counternarratives whose theorizing runs counter to the dominant theories communicated via metanarratives. Metanarratives can be understood as narratives with no specific characters and no specific actions, events, or contexts (e.g.: "How the West Was Won" and "The American Dream"). Literary narratives are the exact opposite in that they almost always involve specific characters, actions, events, and contexts. In this way, literature is perhaps uniquely positioned to engage in standpoint theory, which, as Sandra Harding explains, is based on the assumption that "activities of those at the bottom of [...] social hierarchies can provide starting points for thought—for everyone's research and scholarship—from which human relations with each other and the natural world can become visible." Literature, like that of James Baldwin, is filled with innumerable "starting points" of this kind.

Keywords: metanarratives, standpoint theory, American Literature, James Baldwin Jean-Francois Lyotard
# Repair the mandate: what has been said (and not said) that emerges in a resistant idea of the state repair

Camila Urrea

Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile. Programa de Reparación Integral y Atención en Salud del Ministerio de Salud, Santiago, Chile

Human rights violations committed by the State of Chile during the dictatorship (1973 - 1990), and police violence exercised by armed agents during the "social outbreak" in Chile between October 18, 2019 and March 20 Of 2020, they consecutively brought democratic governments to execute public reparation policies in the form of programs that are inserted in public institutional health contexts. Supported by a biomedical model, in repair programs proliferate diagnoses about traumatic and its corresponding symptomatology, configuring the complex identity of the patient and its respective disease. This is how, through conventional reparation models a pathologistist paradigm is promoted, which subsidizes power relations and leads people to recognize themselves as victims and users who depend on the repairing work of different professionals, especially on psychology. A resistant idea of repair seeks to tension the monologue that emerges in the form of the state protocol, circumscribed to execute in complex places where the repair industry is inserted. Through linguistic practices, from the work of Mijail Bakhtín, between different generations is that there may be a repair that makes sense. Because people are more than carriers of traumas or symptomatologies derived from repression. They are also transmitters of struggles and resistances, of claims and resiliences, which through social, real and dialogic language show the assumptions, inheriting the stories counted by their protagonists to the new generations, in a new idea of repair.

Keywords: Repair, intergenerational dialogy, assumptions, memory, resistance.
# Neoliberal collectivism: double hermeneutics in the context of mass vaccination

Natalija Ignjatović, Teodora Vuletić, Sonja Janicic

University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Serbia

The theory of double hermeneutics introduced by Giddens (1991) holds great value in social sciences, emphasizing a dialectical, two-way relationship between theoretical concepts and the ideas/practices of laypeople. Based on prominent societal phenomena, specific theories are formulated, which recurrently penetrate and alter society and its daily functioning. This notion implicates the ever-present need for potential redefinition of certain theoretical concepts. From a critical psychological perspective, and relying on the results from our previous qualitative study, we intend to consider the dialectical interplay between theory and practice in the context of mass vaccination. In our research, we gathered 16 narratives of young self-declared collectivists in Serbia, whom we asked to provide argumentation for and against the COVID-19 vaccination. The results of multiple thematic analyses showed that, beside the expected collectivistic argumentation, narratives also contained a significant proportion of individualistic argumentation. We proposed the term neoliberal collectivism to interpret these findings among self-perceived collectivists. In the present work, we plan on using the notion of double hermeneutics and fitting Althusser's ideas of the subject's interpellation to explore the novel concept of neoliberal collectivism further, offering a new understanding of the collectivistic practices in contemporary Western society. Relying on our previous findings, we aim to demonstrate and discuss how the contingency of neoliberal social change consequently and inadvertently alters the notion of collectivism. Furthermore, we recognize the need for a potential theoretical reevaluation of this crucial cultural dimension.

Keywords: neoliberalism, collectivism, vaccination, hermeneutics, young adults
# Navigating Narratives – A study on meaning-making of everyday life under COVID-19 in Ecuador

Ella Marie Sandbakken

Oslo New University College, Oslo, Norway. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

When making meaning of restricted everyday lives under the COVID-19 pandemic, people had to navigate different narratives circulating in society when constructing their own narratives of their lives under the pandemic. The Latin American country Ecuador was severely affected by high infection rates and a health crisis in the largest city early in the pandemic. The Ecuadorian government introduced several strict measures, such as mandatory confinement, for the first months of the pandemic. Living both under uncertainty of the severity of the new virus, and under shifting and periodically highly restrictive measures, Ecuadorian citizens had to make meaning of and handle their own everyday lives. In this study, I have conducted a narrative analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with participants in Ecuador one and a half years into the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a narrative cultural psychological perspective I explore how the participants engage with narratives that circulate on different levels: personal-level, interpersonal-level, community-level, national-level and global-level narratives. The different narratives circulating can be accepted, rejected, negotiated and adapted when people make meaning of their own situation in a crisis, and this process is temporal and contextual. I illustrate how these negotiations function in the interview participants' narrations and discuss the findings up against theory on master narratives. The study contributes to theory development on the complex process of meaning-making in everyday life, enhancing the understanding of narrative engagement under a global crisis.

Keywords: COVID-19, Ecuador, master narratives, meaning-making, cultural psychology
ENGAGING WITH EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS 1

Moral Career of a Freshman University Student

Hanna Koivisto

University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

Goffman's concept of moral career includes and involves gradual temporal changes which the operation of the institution imposes on the individual. In that process the individual "learns" to examine and to value himself or herself using the institution's evaluation criteria. Strongly connected to this process is the development of institutionalized self.

The current study is part of my doctoral research that deals with student engagement from interaction research perspective. In this study I applied Goffman's concept of moral career in the analysis of the Finnish university student's freshman year.

My research material consists of 11 interviews with second year university students. Interviews focused on the beginning phase of their university studies. The analysis concentrated on the structure and the content of the student's moral career. I found that entering university, the student encounters a continuum of stages, positions and virtues defining those positions. This forms their moral career in which an institutional self is also formed, meaning a perception of themself as a member who has internalized the institution's meaning system. This study sheds light on the meaning systems that exist in the university and on how students negotiate their relationship with them. The moral career and the institutional self can be used to shed light to those aspects of engagement and guidance that are partly invisible. Making them visible helps to develop guidance practices for initial stages of the university studies to better meet the diverse needs of freshmen students.

Keywords: moral career, institutionalized self, student engagement, university student

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# Psychology students' moral struggles: Should we teach hermeneutic moral realism in undergraduate education?

Dominique Mailloux

Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, Canada

Psychology is generally taught like a value-neutral science that supplies us with enlightening facts about human behaviour. However, it studies phenomena that are irreducibly moral and it is a kind of social moral intervention that changes who we are and who we can become (Brinkman, 2011). I conducted a participatory qualitative inquiry with 83 undergraduate students in psychology that had completed two thirds of their studies to understand how their psychological knowledge impacted them and their lives, both positively and negatively. The participants had 10 minutes to reflect on the question individually, 20 minutes to discuss it with their peers, and 20 minutes to write their answers in an online qualitative survey, which I analysed abductively (Brinkmann, 2012). Even though the students reported positive benefits, such as the development of psychological contextual integrative thinking (Kallio, 2020), they also reported concerning negative effects, such as becoming anxious, being uncomfortable in relationships and struggling with an interminable, uncontrollable, and scary analysis of the normal and pathological. It appears that they are stuck in a moral analysis that they are not aware of doing and not equipped to complete. Furthermore, they are constantly reminded that whatever conclusion they come to is invalid because it is not scientific, and they are not psychologists. I argue that because of the moral nature of psychology, we ought to educate our students morally, and that the hermeneutic moral realist perspective proposed by Slife and Yanchar (2019) provides an interesting starting point for that task.

Keywords: metatheory, dialogue, sociomaterial approaches, post-phenomenological approaches, cultural-historical approaches
# Navigating Aggressive Behavior: Building Bridges between Theory and Practice to Foster Self-Regulation of Negative Academic Emotions in Teacher Training Environments

Cristian Jofre

Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile. Universidad Central de Chile, Santiago, Chile

The widespread sharing of aggressive behaviours from school environments on social media emphasises the numerous challenges that educational psychology still has to face. One potential area for improvement is to observe interpersonal and task level interactions between teacher trainers and future teachers. The goal is for trainers to integrate teaching and promotion of strategies for self-regulation of moral judgement and resolution/modification of transgressive behaviour into their practice. Developments in the self-efficacy theory analysed by Bandura and the discrepancies highlighted by Higgins provide the foundation for examining beliefs and expectations that underlie behavioural motivation. However, further research is needed to fully understand the role of negative academic emotions (NAE) in promoting prosocial moral self-regulation judgements in learning situations. This article use a feature of transition, state and temporality proposed in NAE by authors such as Pekrun, Muis, D'Mello and Graesser. Additionally, an evaluation of the adaptability and bidirectionality of the beliefs and outcome expectations of those taking part in a teaching-learning process is deliberated. It is proposed that Educational Psychology should work towards the development of theoretical-practical processes that promote the self-regulation of complex negative academic emotions in teacher trainers and their teaching, based on the exchange of metacognitive experiences.

**Keywords:** Aggressive behaviours, Self-efficacy, Negative Academic Emotions, Self-regulation and self-discrepancies, Teacher Trainers.
# Collaboration as articulation: outlines for a dialogical conceptualization of teacher teamwork at neoliberal school

Álvaro Sánchez

Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile

The contemporary school system, shaped by the neoliberal logic of accountability, drastically limits the possibilities for collaboration between teachers and other education professionals. These people are demanded by a set of emerging and diverse problems that are addressed by them as individuals, while the few moments foreseen for collaborative work are destined to administrative work, attention to parents and performance evaluations. Additionally, there are a considerable number of teachers and professionals who are on sick leave, revealing a significant level of distress and discomfort, and fragmenting teamwork experience. In these circumstances, what a teacher and professional body can do is to meet in the interstices of everyday practice and address certain common problems. Based on ongoing ethnographic research, my aim is to develop a theoretical concept for this kind of teamwork. Instead of collaboration –I claim–, we should talk about articulation. Articulation in two senses: “articulate this or that” student or articulate a problematic situation; “articulate with” a certain professional, depending on the nature of the case or situation. Articulation is an emergent but relatively stable network of relations linking people and objects in the treatment of a given subject, which requires few conditions and can even survive the interruption of the teamwork flow. This uneven social practice has its typical discursive forms, or discursive genres, which give it a certain continuity. It is a collective way of coping with educational work under the conditions of the current school system.

Keywords: Teacher teamwork, articulation, collaboration, discursive genres, neoliberal school system
INTEGRATING THEORIES 1

Critical Psychology and Cultural Psychology:
Common Concerns - Divergences - Productive Linkages

Wolfgang Maiers

Free University, Berlin, Germany. Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences, Stendal,
Germany

Standing in the tradition of the Cultural-historical School, which is unanimously recognized as an essential contribution to Cultural Psychology, German Critical Psychology is also repeatedly attributed to this field. Despite undoubtedly existing commonalities between its subject-scientific perspective and cultural psychological programs, there are also characteristic differences to be pointed out - and this equally concerns the above-mentioned reception of Vygotsky and his collaborators: Both the Cultural-historical and the Critical-psychological approaches clearly oppose any 'culturalist' dissolution of the materialist concept of societal relations/practice into either fuzzy or straightforwardly idealistic notions of culture as a system of linguistic-symbolic meanings, and any dichotomisation between the naturalness and societality of human development of consciousness.

Marxist Critical Psychology focuses on the capitalist mode of production and life with its class-
specific, intersectional relations of inequality, oppression, and discrimination, which determine
cultural processes and involve a contradictory interplay of possibilities and restrictions of personal
agency - structural relationships, which are easily ignored in social constructivist or discourse-
theoretical conceptions of culture.

When framed in this materialist way, the concept of culture can, in turn, enrich our concept of society with an action-relevant dimension by opening access to the actors' perspective on the diversity and mutability of socio-cultural codifications of lifeworlds and subjectivities. In this respect, cultural theories refer to a level of research that is basically laid out, but not sufficiently differentiated in Critical Psychology. In order to achieve this concretisation, further elaboration of a Marxist concept of culture is needed, from which existing cultural theories can be reinterpreted.

Keywords: 'culturalism', Cultural-historical School (- theory), Critical Psychology (as Marxist-based historical subject science and emancipatory action research), restrictive vs. generalised agency, socio-cultural codifications of lifeworlds and subjectivities

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# Transitioning from Psychology to Dialogics: A Theoretical Framework for Formalizing Natural Language and Managing Interactions

Claudio Croce¹, Adrià Gibernau², Luisa Orrù¹, Gian Piero Turchi¹

¹University of Padua, Padua, Italy. ²Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

Historically, Psychology has been characterized by common critical aspects (Campolonghi & Orrù, 2022) at the theoretical level that depower its expendability in the operational field: (1) theoretical fragmentation (starting from a hypothetical construct - anxiety, behavior, mind, etc. - each theoretical perspective offers a value that is always different); (2) the lack of its own unit of measurement that would allow for adequate handling of the uncertainty and changes in the psychic, social and cultural dimensions; (3) the lack of a "normal" psychic/behavioral dimension against which to evaluate the effectiveness of one's interventions.

This paper introduce Dialogics, a theoretical framework that draws its origins from Wittgenstein's and Foucault's reflections on language and interactionist paradigms. Dialogics abandons the study of Psychology altogether and assumes that there is no factual reality but configurations of realities that are interactively generated in the use of language, which have truth value and pragmatic effects (Pinto et al., 2022). It will be described that, as happened with Chemistry in 1869, Dialogics formalized the ways in which language is used in 24 basic units, Discursive Repertoires, each of which has its own Dialogic Weight (unit of measurement) and which are the only ways through which people interact. Finally, it will be shown how, by adopting this theoretical lens, useful knowledge is generated to: precisely track the configuration of realities of people at a precise historical moment, including through the use of innovative methodologies (cf. Hyperion Observatory (Turchi et al. 2023)); calculate the error rate of interventions; measure their effectiveness.

Keywords: Dialogics; Interaction; Language; Discursive Repertoires; Theoretical Framework
# Identity Dissonance.
A revision of Festinger's theory based on discursive psychology.

Adrià Gibernau

Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

As acknowledged by scholars from different fields in social sciences, the Cognitive Dissonance Theory (CDT) presented by Festinger (1957) describes a very common phenomenon in an extremely simple manner: when individuals maintain two contradictory cognitions simultaneously, it leads to a state of psychological tension. However, this proposal identifies three primary theoretical limitations inherent in both the original proposition and subsequent revisions. Addressing these limitations is essential for the development of a more comprehensive and contemporary theory of dissonance.

Primarily, CDT delineates a self-ontology confined to cognition, characterized as attainable and governed by rational processes. Secondly, akin to numerous cognitive theories, CDT portrays the individual with a fixed intentionality, closely linked to survival instincts, biological optimization, and utilitarian behavioral patterns. Lastly, CDT assumes a pre-existing state of harmony prior to dissonance arousal. While acknowledging instances where individuals may align with these characteristics, it is challenging to universally accept these assertions as always applicable. To approach these issues, this paper combines theoretical and epistemological perspectives from discursive and dialogical psychology, as well as insights from other disciplines, to reframe the dissonance phenomenon from Cognitive Dissonance into Identity Dissonance. Thus, it is argued that dissonance is not caused by clashes between cognitions, but rather by clashes between identities and the discourses, social relationships, and cultural narratives they imply. Among others, the implications of this shift include the division of the self beyond the classic "emotion-reason" binomial and reconceptualizing conflict as a constitutive element of the subject rather than a predicament necessitating resolution.

Keywords: Dissonance; Cognitive Psychology; Discursive Psychology; Identity; Intentionality.