[Air-L] CfP Learning or not learning from experience: Psychosocial approaches to researching and experiential learning

[Jacob Johanssen]

 Full CfP:
https://www.psychosocial-studies-association.org/conference-2024/

*A joint conference of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and the
Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society*

*17th-18th June 2024*

*St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London TW1 4SX*

*Conference enquiries:* conference2024 at protonmail.com

Submission link: https://www.conftool.net/aps-apcs-2024/


*Call for papers*

Psychosocial Studies is an inherently transdisciplinary field which
encompasses the interplay between psychological, social and cultural
experience. The forms of inquiry and modes of learning it tries to foster
include a focus on the unconscious dynamics at work in these various
domains. Psychosocial studies is informed by a body of theoretical work
that draws on psychoanalysis, critical social theory, anglophone and
continental philosophy and the arts and humanities. It has stimulated
considerable innovation in research and practice methodologies and in
learning and teaching. Experiential inquiry has often been at the heart of
these developments, including biographical, narrative, visual and other
sensory methods, and reflexive auto-ethnography. All this speaks to the
first part of the title.

However, as new psychic and social borderlines blur fantasy and reality,
confusion, insecurity and precarity are generated between actual and
virtual worlds, and between materialities and imaginaries. The temptation
to reach for simple and incontestable certainties leads to a range of
beliefs and behaviours that narrow the potential for learning from others
and our encounters with them. This is fertile ground for the polarisations
of populism, the idealisations of celebrity culture, the excitements of
disinformation and conspiracy and the comforts of the media echo chamber.
At the same time the structures that contain and mediate are in disarray.
Politics is said to be ‘broken’, welfare states are ‘unaffordable’,
education systems ‘fail’ to prepare the young to live in a fragmented world
that appears to be rapidly degrading its own habitat.  The gathering crises
of climate breakdown and human displacement appear irresolvable amidst the
social and political fragmentation that afflicts and divides whole
populations and manifests in everyday relationships and social institutions
as traumatic repetition, denial and disavowal. In that sense there is a
real danger of repeating mistakes from the past and not learning from
painful historical experiences, or of helplessness and hopelessness in the
face of technological and socio-political change.

We welcome submissions from clinicians and practitioners as well as
academics from different fields, arts, humanities and social/sciences, who
may be working at the psychosocial edge and/or working with psychoanalytic
and philosophical theories able to shed light on learning from experience.
We welcome submissions for experiential events and artistic productions.

In the face of problems of this severity what does learning from experience
look like? What does it involve and what are the obstacles? What processes
and methods will serve such learning? This conference will include paper
presentations, workshops and an experiential strand which will be threaded
throughout.

Its suggested sub-themes could include (but are not limited to)

   - Psychosocial approaches to digital culture
   - Climate emergency, environment and sustainability
   - Ageing societies
   - Colonial legacies, racism and migration
   - The evolving politics of gender
   - Political formations and discourses
   - Social memory and its erasure
   - Trauma and repetition
   - Experiential learning
   - Psychosocial methodsand methodologies
   - Psychosocial approaches to learning and teaching
   - Technosolutionism and medicalisation
   - Learning to live with problems
   - The de-humanization and pathologization of distress
   - Information overload: knowledge obstructing thinking
   - Mentalizing misery: working with reality
   - Institutional mindlessness

*We really encourage in person attendance to create the community feel that
comes from being together for social events, meals and coffee breaks,
however there will also be provision for online participation for those who
for their own health or the health of the planet would not wish to or would
feel unsafe coming in person.*
Please submit via Conftool here: https://www.conftool.net/aps-apcs-2024/