We are pleased to announce that the ECPA General Assembly will take place online on November 28, from 4:00-5.30 PM CET time during the 10th Conference and Workshop in Community Psychology in Slovakia 2023
European Community Psychology Association (ECPA) in collaboration with the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA) is organising an online webinar series, composed of five online webinar sessions. Each webinar will focus on key societal challenges and domains for community psychologists, such as borders and migrant justice; feminisms and gender-based violence; violence and resistance in transgender, queer and gender-nonconforming communities; climate/environmental justice; community mental health and homelessness; the prison-industrial complex and abolitionist struggles; decolonising academic knowledge and practices. For each webinar, scholars from ECPA and SCRA respectively will be invited to share their insights with the audience.
The series will take place between November 2023 and June 2024. We are looking for one to two European-based students enrolled in a Master or PhD programme with a focus on community psychology to help organise and disseminate the online webinar series.
Tasks: Collaborators will help designing the webinar series and identify the ECPA/SCRA scholars to invite for each session. Collaborators will also help disseminate the webinar series and run individual sessions. After each webinar, the two collaborators will finally write a short blogpost with key ideas and discussions coming out of each webinar, or will help ECPA board members finding someone who would be willing to write it.
Each of the collaborators will be provided a grant of 450 Euros .
Application process: To apply for this opportunity please send a brief description, of no more than two pages, of the webinar series how you will design it. Please indicate title and main topics addressed in each webinar and the reason why these are important for community psychology scholars, activists, and practitioners.
Please also provide a brief motivation letter, describing why you are applying for this opportunity and how this role aligns with and contribute to your academic/professional values and trajectory, and what you are looking to learn from it.
Applications from Black and ethnic minoritised students are particularly welcome.
Applications should be sent via email to ecpa.psychassociation@gmail.com by Friday 22nd September 2023, 24:00h CET. Any application arrived after that deadline will not be considered.
A Committee will assess existing applications and candidates will be informed of their outcomes by 16th October 2023.
CIRSDe (Interdisciplinary Center for Women’s and Gender Research and Studies – University of Turin is organizing the international conference Beyond Genders. Intersectionality between theory and practice. Interdisciplinary gazes.
The conference aims to foster a multidisciplinary debate and to explore the state of the art of research and reflections on intersectionality. What are the perspectives through which intersectionality has developed over the years, and what are its applications? What makes its implementation complex, and what are the pitfalls to its effective applicability? Why do some areas of study seem to have a more fluid dialogue with this concept while others still prove refractory? What are the most effective research methods, and why? How is the concept of intersectionality being explored and debated in different disciplines? How can an intersectional perspective be developed in global contexts that necessarily have to come to terms with a past of colonialism and oppression?
People interested in participating may submit a contribution: the deadline for abstract submission is June 15, 2023. More details can be found here
Hosted by the University of Johannesburg, University of Cincinnati, and York St. John University
The world is experiencing increasing global heating and adverse weather patterns, with associated biodiversity loss, natural disasters, displacement, migration, and negative health impacts. Psychologists, however, have been somewhat slow to acknowledge how climate change intersects with historical and contemporary injustices, including colonisation, racism, environmental health disparities, human rights violations, sexism, migration, and extractivism, to name a few. Psychologists have tended to downplay the politics of climate justice, too often adopting an apolitical stance that focuses on individual agency, attitude shifts, behaviour change and education. An additional problem is that writings and voices of marginalised groups are underrepresented in current climate psychology scholarship. There is also an underrepresentation of interdisciplinary work with disciplines such as law, peace and conflict studies, community development, migration, governance and public health.
How can psychologists become inclusive of movements and scholarship seeking structural and political reform, climate justice, racial and gender equity, reparations, and meaningful representation of marginalised groups? How can psychologists continue to work on healing and adaption while recognising upstream mitigation and socio-political reform? How can psychologists grapple with the growing inequities and problems within climate movements? How can psychologists contribute to movements that strengthen decolonised, community-oriented, critical and political approaches to the climate emergency? How can psychologists foster meaningful and conscientised solidarity in the fight for climate justice? How do we close the gap between scholarship and climate movements? What is the role of scientific evidence in climate justice struggles? How can we use politically engaged methodologies such as participatory, decolonising, and indigenous approaches in pursuing climate justice?
There is a growing interest by psychologists in these and other questions. Several recent publications and special issues have focused on a more politicised role for psychology and climate justice. These include, but are not limited to, community psychology and climate change, communities reclaiming power in relation to climate change, the role of justice in climate psychology, and inclusivity of marginalised scholarship in the climate emergency. These writings have focused on deepening the theoretical underpinnings of climate psychology, inter and trans-disciplinary approaches to climate justice, community mobilisation and intervention, literary and arts-based interventions, critical methodologies, marginalised youth activism, and migration. There is, however, much work to do.
This symposium focuses on psychology and climate justice through the lens of community. Communities worldwide are on the frontlines of resistance against the detrimental impacts of large-scale resource developments, deleterious climate change consequences, land dispossession, toxic contamination, and other climate and environmental injustice issues. These and other environmental injustices disproportionately impact those living on societies’ margins, and vulnerability is often rooted in histories of colonial violence and its reproduction in today’s unjust social arrangements. Resisting communities are also fighting for the universal right to a healthy environment for current and future generations, including a liveable climate, participation and fair treatment within environmental decisions, and the equitable distribution of environmental goods and harms. Additionally, indigenous environmental justice struggles often centre land and seek to restitute what has been made destitute through colonial violence. Thus, environmental justice struggles are not only against environmental violence but, importantly, for the flourishing of all life.
We invite theoretical, case studies, original research, critical reviews, and other contributions that may complement this theme. We will also include a broader political psychology analysis that helps frame environmental justice issues.The call is not limited to community psychology; we welcome any theoretical orientation (political, liberation, critical, feminist, indigenous and social psychology) with a community lens. We are particularly interested in the papers that focus on the following:
Deepening critical community and psychology theory in climate justice
Gender, queer theory and climate justice
History, climate justice and psychology
Race and racism
Intersectionality and climate justice
Disability and climate justice
Inter and transdisciplinary approaches
Critical conscientisation and climate justice
Civic monitoring
Allyship
Cohesion, connectedness and mobilisation
Identity and solidarities
Decolonisation
Youth activism, particularly among marginalised groups
Literary and visual arts
Participatory methodologies
Ethics and climate justice
Critiques of individualism and behaviour change
Critical mental health and the climate emergency
Representation and climate reporting
Conservation and justice
Please submit extended abstracts of no more than 800 words covering one more of the above topics. The closing date for abstract submissions is 30 March 2023. Please email abstract submissions to Brendon Barnes bbarnes@uj.ac.za.The hybrid symposium will take place at the University of Johannesburg from 5-7 June 2023, and include a face-to-face (at the University of Johannesburg) or an online option. Selected papers will be invited to submit a chapter to an edited collection after the symposium.
Environmental activism about climate change has been at the core of social movements. Across the globe, activists engaged in demonstrations, organised strikes, occupied buildings of corporations and, more recently, performed targeted civil disobedience actions. Some of these activists are engaged in transnational organisations that share, not only slogans (‘there is no planet B’) and information, but also educate one another on the use of online and offline strategies. More notably than before, many of these movements involve and are led by children and young people, in a clear demonstration of their political agency – and their concerns about the future.
While this raises important questions about the role of schools and education in this existential crisis, the complexity of the situation is enhanced by other factors. The actions of governments and politicians have been erratic. For some, climate change is still debatable, ideological and ‘fake news’. For others, promoting community resilience in the face of climate change is a new priority, but one that coexists with the maintenance of a carbon-based economy. As there are growing signs of the severe consequences of the rise in the planet’s warming, there are also signs of the lack of serious policy regarding climate change. Furthermore, it seems that the climate challenge is one of these new issues that drive political polarisation and structure the culture wars about the curriculum and the role of (socio-)scientific knowledge in school and society in general.
On the other hand, the intensity of environmental injustice is immense and works across other layers of inequality: intergenerational, as many of these changes will dramatically affect future generations; geographical since the countries most troubled by climate change are not those who are contributing the most to global warming; colonialism, given the historical continuity of patterns of exploitation, displacement and extractivism; as well as the intersection with existing economic, gender, race and disability inequalities.
This special issue welcomes papers that address climate change and environmental activism from this broad perspective, focusing on political, social and economic education, its policies, goals, institutions, practices and challenges. This includes discussions of the civic and political identities and experiences of climate change activists, but also on the political controversies and debates around climate change. It also welcomes papers that address how formal and non-formal education for climate change can play a role in generating relevant knowledge, dispositions and actions, or in creating community resilience towards climate change.
How does engagement with climate change activism influence participants’ civic and political agency and empowerment?
How are climate change controversies approached in educational settings and social and traditional media?
In what ways does climate change anxiety interfere with individual and community resilience about climate change regarding forms of dealing with it in diverse educational contexts?
In what forms are transnational and global activism taken up in educational contexts?
What are the effects of climate change formal and non-formal education in participants and communities? How are the knowledge and rationalities that have so far been deemed relevant in socio-scientific education being challenged, contested and changed?
Which transformative approaches to social science education are being further developed and how are these linked to the global education agenda setting, for example of UNESCO?
How does environmental injustice intersect with other layers of inequality and how is this interplay addressed in education?
How are minoritized groups and communities engaging in climate activism? How are links with capitalism, colonialism and globalisation explored in educational approaches to climate change?
Deadline for manuscript submission: March 15, 2023.
Editors: Maria Fernandes-Jesus, Andrea Szukala, Isabel Menezes.
Community Psychology in the face of the climate crisis: What contributions?
Climate change is long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns caused by chemical changes in the Earth’s atmosphere and in land use. Scientists agree not only on the reality of climate change, but also on the responsibility of human activities in determining it. Scientists also largely agree on the consequences: not only rising seas, declining biodiversity, extreme weather events, changes in agricultural productivity (e.g., IPCC Sixth Report), but also related impacts on migration, human health, conflicts related to resource scarcity, etc.
This scenario makes it even more necessary to strive towards the goals of the 2030 Agenda and makes the interconnectedness earth and human experience and action even more evident. Fighting against climate change is itself a goal (SDG13) of the 2030 Agenda, but it is clearly linked to reducing inequalities (SDG10); organising safe, resilient and sustainable communities and cities (SDG11); implementing sustainable production and consumption patterns (SDG12); protecting the oceans and seas and protecting the terrestrial ecosystem (SDG14 and 15); promoting peaceful societies (SDG16); and building partnerships that promote the achievement of the goals themselves (SDG17).
Achieving these goals will require addressing multiple challenges and capabilities. In particular, it is quite apparent that the negative impacts of the climate crisis on people’s lives in terms of well-being, decision-making, and disruption of individual, family, and whole community lives are increasingly important. While the climate crisis affects all of humanity, it does not affect all people in the same way. Indeed, it is evident that this crisis has exacerbated global inequalities between North and South and between classes and genders, making even more compelling the need for redistribution of power and climate justice, which is inseparable from social justice.
There are many varied skills that derive from Psychology and are useful in addressing this crisis and its effects. This has resulted in recent years in the rise of a “Psychology of sustainability”, which, hopefully, will continue to gain increasing relevance and cross-connections with psychological and other disciplines.
The goal of this Call for Paper is to elucidate specific contributions for understanding and intervention into the climate crisis that can be derived from community psychology. The perspective taken by community psychology (e.g. clinical and political, ecological, multilevel, action-oriented, multidisciplinary), the issues it addresses (e.g. resilience, coping, prevention, well-being, sense of community, participation, networking, power and empowerment), the justice-oriented values (e.g. social and climatic justice) may contribute a useful framework to face this crisis and offer intervention.
Anyone interested in submitting a paper may send an abstract (max. 200 words) to the Guest Editor at angela.fedi@unito.it, by November 30, 2022.
The deadline for submission of papers is January 30, 2023.
Environmental justice is based on psychological and social processes related to shared practices and characterized by solidarity, mutual respect and the understanding of rights and duties for all peoples and living beings. Any individual, independently of their geographical or cultural origin, is considered to have the right to be free from any form of discrimination or prejudice.
Environmental justice promotes ethics and responsibility in the use of land and renewable resources in the interest of a sustainable planet. Topics relating to the extraction, production and disposal of waste whose management threatens the fundamental right to clean the air, land, water and food will be valid for this Special Issue.
A significant part of this Issue will be dedicated to workers and their rights to stay in safe and healthy environments.
Issues relating to politics and economics will not be excluded, but these must not have the character of propaganda or meanings of supremacy. The Special Issue is intended to enhance multiple research perspectives, mixed methods, as well as traditional qualitative and quantitative approaches.
