Panels are a new format developed to stimulate debate and discussions between panelists, and between panelists and the audience. All panels are organized by a moderator, who take charge of the time, and balances the debate between speakers. All panels take place in Building D at Campus.
Jan Smedslund’s contributions to psychology are radical not only in challenging its empirical foundation, but also in advancing an alternative. However, his ideas are rarely discussed among researchers and practitioners and are hardly presented for students and governmental authorities. Instead, Smedslund’s most cited work is a paper from the sixties that triggered the heuristics-and-biases program of Tversky & Kahneman. From the late sixties, however, Smedslund challenged this program, as well as any other psychological research strand presuming to be dependent on statistical evidence.
Thus, for the growing number of psychologists who are critical of the narrow emphasis on inductive generalization from empirical data in scientific journals, research institutions, and practice guidelines, and that this paradigm cannot pay apposite respect to human meaning-making, Smedslund’s work is prominent. Particularly important is the notion of pseudo-empirical research originally introduced as part of Smedslund’s critique of Bandura’s Social Learning Theory and denoting research in which assertions are needlessly put to empirical test.
However, Smedslund’s related advancement of Psycho-logic to clarify psychological common-sense, and the descendent proposal of a Bricoleur-model of psychotherapy, have not gained needed attention. Moreover, the researchers acknowledging the notion of pseudo-empiricism have not agreed about what the alternative should consist in and how it can be explained. This could be a sign of aptly critical voices within a research field in progress, but it also indicates the importance of conciliatory work.
From the perspectives of the contributions to the forthcoming book 'Respect for Thought; Jan Smedslund’s Legacy for Psychology' (Eds.: T. G. Lindstad, E. Stänicke & J. Valsiner; Springer Publications) the panel invites the audience to critically engage with these questions in two sections:
Section 1 - 45 min
Section 2 - 45 min
Other contributors to the book that will be part in the audience-discussions are:
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Latin America has been one of the most productive and fertile grounds for the advancement of theoretical and empirical elaborations of a non-reductionist and socially responsible psychology. The panel aims to promote a debate around the theoretical conception of humanity in the contemporary societies, starting from a peculiar Latin-American perspective.
The notions of otherness, intersubjectivity, vulnerability and temporality will be discussed, and confronted with the performativity-based theories in psychology. The panel will give voice to the generative and innovative features that characterize the Latin-American thought and will provide a fertile ground for the further advance in the theoretical psychological investigation.
Simão will discuss the complex issue of sharing 'myths' and creating 'phantasms' in otherness. The focus is the relationship between sharing and otherness as a dialogical relationship, instead of the nowadays fashioned speech of otherness as the excluding opposite of sharing, this latter sweeping the very character of alterity away.
Molina and Fossa will analyze the temporal and spatial dimensions of intersubjectivity. The encounter addresses a main human experience that has important implications for affective relationships particularly amorous ones. The attempt is to explore the theoretical implications of time and space in order to reflect on couples’ interactions and their difficulties.
Oliveira will discuss the contributions of semiotic cultural psychology to the understanding of violence and vulnerably from a communitarian and subjective point of view. Violence is a very important topic when we conceive of Latin America and its historic roots as colonized territory and its intrinsic and extrinsic relationships nowadays. This contribution provides a reading of the semiotic effects of issues such as social economic inequality, colonization and slavery over subjectivity and community lives in our continent, considering how these elaborations can contribute to the projection of innovative future perspectives.
Lyra will focus on the generality of processes in the construction of imagined futures. How to map psychological phenomenon in their temporal unfolding? Reconstructed past and imagine future requires focusing on person’s meaning-making processes immersed in the directions offered by the sociocultural environment. These processes are discussed through illustrations of a homeless, a small business owner and a simple house resident facing Brazilian Northeast city’s transformations.
Pina Marsico, University of Salerno, Italy and Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, pina.marsico@gmail.com
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A central aim of this conference is to reflect on whether theoretical psychologists have a responsibility to challenge and resist atomistic, rationalistic, and reductionistic frameworks for understanding human experience, thought, and behavior. Despite deteriorating health, Tod Sloan – a leading member of the Critical Psychology community – looked forward to joining us to address these issues at ISTP this year. Unfortunately, Tod passed away late last year leaving his undeniable mark on our discipline and many of our lives. As a tribute to Tod’s scholarship and activism, we would like to engage with these issues and more as we draw on Tod’s scholarship and activism to chart a course for the future of critical psychological research and practice.
Mary Beth Morrissey will argue that theoretical psychology has been reluctant to engage in movements of resistance against forms of political oppression. Elitism and disengagement from the lived world of suffering can no longer be ethically countenanced in the face of dehumanizing policies and practices and massive violence across the globe. Drawing inspiration from Tod Sloan's work, Mary Beth will push for a refocusing of the tasks of theoretical psychology toward the goals of achieving social justice and equity. As an example, Mary Beth will briefly discuss an activist scholar immigrant-refugee advocacy initiative that aims to build solIDarity and practices of care and concern.
Raquel Guzzo will approach psychology in Latin America as a colonized profession/science and articulate the challenges of supporting actions and knowledge that enable people and groups to interrogate the adverse conditions of life and to strengthen the social organizations that militate for the conquest of basic rights. Specifically, she will focus on the role that Tod Sloan’s Critical and Community Psychology perspective has played in organizing people around various causes in Latin America and beyond. Tod’s work has been vital for addressing a range of challenges both inside and outside Brazil and Raquel hopes to use this gathering as a opportunity to share some of the ways that his work has improved the lives of a diverse collection of groups and people.
Michael Arfken will discuss Tod Sloan’s contribution to critical psychological scholarship in general and the impact that Tod’s work has had on his own research and practice. Right up until his untimely death late last year, Tod was working on a range of projects from exploring the shape and scope of decolonial struggles to working with emerging and established scholars on the organizational challenges of building a robust critical psychology community. Drawing on both personal anecdotes and theoretical reflections, Mike will attempt to make some sense of the work we do as theoretical psychologists, mentors, and activists.
Daniel Sloan will discuss his collaboration on a project to organize and increase accessibility to his father’s work. As a tribute to Tod’s important contributions to critical psychological research and practice, Daniel will update us on this process and discuss some of the potential ways that we can become involved in this important project.
Dorte Kousholt, Aarhus University, Denmark
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Human phenomena take place in “arenas” where complementary and (often) opposing views are at stake, where the people make their personal synthesis of coordinated “processes of creating, managing, demolishing and rebuilding” meanings about themselves and the world. Thus, research cannot be a competition between opposing views that strive to prevail and occupy academic niches, rather a collective effort of understanding through dialogue. Can we overcome the deadlock of hegemonic, colonizing mainstream opposed to a self-marginalizing “counter-culture”? Can we promote “synthetic” and “syncretic” theories in psychology?
An insight can come from the Brazilian modernist movement, presented by Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) in its iconic Manifesto antropófago (1928), which is a reference for contemporary debates about hybridity and cultural dialogues. The panel discuss the Anthropophagic Psychology as the metaphor of a renewed epistemological stance, which does not reject any emerging idea because it belongs to a different “species” or “perspective”. It is never hegemonic, rather open to the construction of knowledge through the dialogue and complementarity of views.
The idea of Anthropophagic Psychology promotes the rebuttal of any “monological” epistemology and the development of an arena in which the polyphony of perspectives can lead to a rich epistemic orchestration.
Guimarães discuss the principles of an indigenous psychology in light of the innovative notion of Dialogical Multiplication. From the modern criticism of the traditional knowledge, the epistemological reflection looked for strategies to construct methodically a subject able to represent the world free from any cultural mediation. Nevertheless, psychology is a discipline that faces the limits of the modern project of constructing such epistemic subject.
To become a general science, psychology needs to understand how other indigenous perspectives on the topics approached participates in the process of knowledge construction instead of imposing cultural values, present in all theories and methodologies, without reflecting about the ethnic-cultural belonging of these theories.
Dazzani focus on the Anthropophagy under the signs of poverty. The Brazilian novel Macunaíma (De Andrade, 1928) traces a confrontation with the cultural, political and economic order in Brazil. Macunaíma resists, learns, confronts, surrenders, mocks, creates strategies to survive and invents a particular form of social interaction. In this work, starting from the narrative of the novel Macunaíma, the semiotic strategies for confronting scenarios of economic and social poverty will be analyzed.
Silva-Filho discuss how Brazilian anthropophagy offers a sophisticated form of epistemic pluralism (which accepts different forms of production of valuable epistemic states, such as understanding, justification and knowledge) that is not confused with simple epistemic relativism.
Tateo analyzes the Anthropophagic Manifesto by de Andrade (1928) that claimed the originality and the creativity of Brazilian modernist culture in its capability to elaborate -in original ways- the European, Indio and African heritage. It will be discussed as a metaphor of a psychology open to diversity and interdisciplinarity rather than a hyper-fragmented technical knowledge.
Pina Marsico, University of Salerno, Italy and Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, pina.marsico@gmail.com
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We currently observe a rise of new types and uses of classification of people, especially targeting marginalized people. Othering and problem-categorization are characteristic across educational, psychiatric and social work practices. They are intertwined in policy, administration, risk assessment, and prevention. They are built into pragmatically adopted information technologies and manualized procedures. They are taken up in everyday life to handle self and others, in ever new rounds of medicalization, and generally as self-presentations in everyday life including cyberspace. This implicates and challenges psychology as well as other human sciences.
This opens a field of empirical inquiry: How do these practices, technologies and knowledges form conditions and tools for new subjectivities?
There are also theoretical challenges. When the dynamics of classification and stigmatization reappear in new places and new forms, repeating old lessons is not only ineffective but also analytically insufficient. The tension of categorization with complexity is recast in ways that reveal the impotence in calling for complexity as such, or in documenting a diversity of complexities. This impels us to revisit interactionism and discourse analysis, and to reconnect them in new ways to science studies and to social and technology critique.
It raises ethical and political questions, too. Should the ethical value of equality be reconfigured when the problematic implications of standardizing lives become clear? If new categorical practices cause a suffering that we cannot ignore, how can we conceptualize it without boosting the increasingly autonomous machinery of categorization and legitimizing identity politics? In general: How can theoretical psychology reflect on its own complicity in productive ways?
In the panel, we will address these issues mostly through offering different conceptualizations of measures to counteract measured lives for debate. The crucial questions are: How – if at all – do such alternative theories and practices of documentation address the contemporary problems of othering and belonging? And how do they facilitate a reflection of their own performativity?
Bertau discusses othering as part of the agenda of neo-liberal societies and takes its ethical-political dimension to understand the role of psychology and psychologists as its agents. These reflections are synthesized into proposals emphasizing belongingness crucial to human life, focusing on the co-construction of practices allowing psychologists to be subjects to other subjects. Self-reflection illuminates our role as objects and subjects of transmitted power on others.
Mørck discusses (de)humanization from the perspectives of critical psychology, Løgstrup’s ethical philosophy, and critical criminology. (How) can we produce new forms of belonging and humanization of people from the margins? What are the possibilities and dilemmas when collaborating around resource-oriented documentation and collective forms of research practice? How may we avoID the risks of reproducing stigmatization and othering?
Nissen analyzes current forms of ‘aesthetic documentation’ made to counteract and provide alternatives to stigmatization, building on the coincidence of aesthetics and politics in such writers as Rancière, Groys, Brecht, and Boal. Aesthetics may help develop the performative understanding of artefacts and infrastructures of information in interactionism and science studies, and even connect them with those of theoretical psychology.
Lisa Malich, Department of Medical History and Science Studies, Universität zu Lübeck, malich@imgwf.uni-luebeck.de
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