June has been a busy month, as we approach our upcoming ECPA 2025 conference. We are very excited to share with our community the latest updates and developments! We are now organizing the program which will combine amazing workshops, roundtables, plenaries, working groups, thematic visits, artistic moments, and more. We are committed to creating opportunities to discuss ideas, share knowledge and help shape new projects and collaborations among our members.

In this issue of our newsletter we also wish to share with you an important open letter for psychologists against detention, initiated by an anticarceral psychology collective and an inspiring statement recently published by the student representatives of SCRA, calling for dissent and allyship in our discipline. 

In the community notice board, we share a call for papers  for a Special Issue on Decolonial Trajectories by the  International Journal of Health and Social Sciences (JORMA). We also share the recording of the conference organised last month, by the University of Bologna, titled: 'Witnessing in contexts of oppression: The ethical and therapeutic roles of mental health professionals facing colonial trauma.'

We invite you to contact us at ecpa.psychassociation@gmail.com with any suggestions of events, opportunities or papers to include in future newsletters, and don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn, BlueSky, or Facebook.

We appreciate you for being part of our community, and we look forward to connecting with you at our conference next month!

We notified all participants about the acceptance of their individual contributions, workshops, roundtables and other formats and we're finalising the program, which we will share with you shortly. As mentioned in our Call, the ECPA Conference is the result of a socially responsible, volunteer-led effort—an approach that reflects the values of both our team and our professional community. Thanks to this model, we are pleased to offer inclusive participation without a conference registration fee beyond the association membership. However, this also means that we are organizing the conference alongside many other professional commitments. We kindly ask you for your patience and understanding as we finalize program. Please check our website regularly for new updates.

Please note:

To be included in the conference program, ECPA membership registration must be completed within 15 days of the acceptance notification and no later than June 30th.

Fees:

• €50 for regular members
• €30 for students and PhD candidates

➡️ Register and pay your membership fee here: ECPA Membership Registration

While no additional conference fee is required, we warmly encourage participants traveling to Lisbon to consider donating in support of the 11th International Conference of Community Psychology, to be held in Lagos, Nigeria in 2026.

• 🧾 Learn more about the Lagos conference here
• 📱 Donate via QR code here
• 📚 Explore the history of International Community Psychology conferences since 2006 here

For further questions, please contact us at: ecpaconference2025@gmail.com

Call for Papers: Special Issue of the  JORMA IJHSS on Decolonial Trajectories.

• Submission Deadline:  30th of July 2025 
• Expected Publication: 30th of August 2025. 

JORMA International Journal of Health and Social Sciences invites submissions for a special issue titled Decolonial Trajectories. This issue aims to foreground critical scholarship that interrogates the entrenched colonial logics that continue to shape higher education and knowledge production globally, with a particular emphasis on the global South. 

Submissions may draw from a wide range of methodological approaches and should aim to contribute to curriculum transformation, knowledge justice, and the broader project of decolonial liberation. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary submissions are encouraged. 

Witnessing in Contexts of Oppression: The  Ethical and Therapeutic Roles of Mental Health Professionals Facing Colonial Trauma

This month we share an article recently published in The New Yorker, written by Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian awarded poet, writer and scholar, founder of the Edward Said library, in Gaza. He was detained by the Israeli army in November 2023 when he fled to Egypt with his family and later released. Since then, he has worked as a chronicler of the war from afar. "What Gaza Needs Now" is a powerful testimony of the current situation. 

On academic readings, we suggest a newly published SI by the American Journal of Community Psychology, focusing on Advancing immigrant and refugee rights. Please read the introduction here for further details, (by Oberoi, A. K.,  Buckingham, S. L., &  Suarez-Balcazar, Y). 

For Spanish speakers, we suggest a recently published article on the journal Teoría y Crítica de la Psicología, by Dr Samah Jabr and Maria Helbich, titled: "Colonización y resistencia: la lente de Frantz Fanon sobre la ocupación israelí de Palestina, género y salud mental". The article is available in open access here.