ENPA 2025 Conference

The third ENPA Biennial Conference “Anthropologies and Psychologies in Inter/Action – Engaging Interdisciplinary Perspectives”  took place 11-13 June 2025 at the Schloss, University of Münster, Germany.

Before the conference, the Writing (Co-)Lab: ENPA Pre-Conference Workshop for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars was scheduled for 10 June.

Information about the conference has been sourced from the conference website, prepared by the organising team at the University of Münster.

Conference theme: Anthropologies and Psychologies in Inter/Action – Engaging Interdisciplinary Perspectives

This conference took the recent emergence of psychological anthropologies (and also anthropological psychologies) as an opportunity to reflect on the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. It invited anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars from related disciplines who are interested or engaged in joining forces across disciplines to present their research and reflect on their scholarship, interventions, and academic landscapes. The key aim of the conference was to catalyze or set forth ideas and imaginations for future inter/actions between psychologies and anthropologies.

The conference invited research papers and contributions on methodological, theoretical, and conceptual innovations and reflections on the potential of anthropologies and psychologies that are increasingly concerned with power asymmetries, critical epistemologies, and the effects of universalizing theories and interventions. In the face of growing human and non-human interconnectedness, psychological anthropology fosters insights into new forms of inequality, violence, and human subjectivity. The assumption that psychological and bio-psychiatric insights are to be imposed on human experience and behavior is itself open to question, creating tensions between universalizing and relativizing understandings of the human condition that collaborations between anthropology and psychology are uniquely positioned to address.

In addition to exploring current interdisciplinary engagements, the conference highlighted perspectives on diversifying and decolonizing research methods, infrastructures, and curricula. Such self-reflexive and collaborative lenses seem paramount as they challenge hegemonic key assumptions on feeling, thinking, interacting, or learning.

The conference encouraged participants to think of their contributions not just, or even primarily, as critiques but rather as constructive attempts to define and propose future trans- and interdisciplinary engagements at the intersections of psychology and anthropology and related disciplines. This conference was interested in retrospectives, current initiatives, and proposals for ways to do interdisciplinary research, analyze results, theorize, and apply them in academic and non-academic settings.

Through a fruitful dialogue within and between disciplines, the conference aimed to foster new insights in research contexts, policymaking, therapy, healing, caring, resisting, or learning, to mention but a few initiatives. It explicitly invited interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborations.

Conference programme

The conference shedule is available here (PDF). You can also view the abstract booklet here (PDF).

Keynotes

Lemelson is a cultural anthropologist, ethnographic filmmaker and philanthropist. He has conducted visual psychological anthropology research in Indonesia for over 25 years. As the founder of Elemental Productions, the 2020 Recipient of a “New Directions Award” from the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association, he has directed and produced over fifteen ethnographic films on a range of topics, including mental illness and genocide. He is also the recipient of a 2017 “Creative Scholarship Award” from the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture for his significant creative contribution to the field. He is the co-author of Afflictions: Steps Towards a Visual Psychological Anthropology and Widening the Frame with Visual Psychological Anthropology: Perspectives on Trauma, Gendered Violence, and Stigma in Indonesia.

Prof. Good has a long trajectory of work on theorizing psychological anthropology, on culture and mental illness, subjectivity, and haunting/hauntology. Since 1996, he has been collaborating with colleagues in Indonesia in both basic and action research focused on early psychosis and mental health services, particularly in Yogyakarta, and on post conflict mental health care in Aceh. Prof. Good delivered the 2000 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures and Oxford University’s 2010 Marett Lecture. He was President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 2013-2015 and was awarded the SPA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.

Prof. Good conducts comparative work on ‘medicine’s modernist projects,’ the rise of biotechnologies, end of life care, and global bioethics. Her long interest in political subjectivity has included work with Indonesian artists and women’s response to traumatic violence in post-conflict Aceh. Prof. Good is recipient of the 2019 William Silen Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Mentoring from Harvard Medical School and the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Profs. Mary-Jo and Byron Good edited the journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 1986-2004. 

A cultural developmental scientist, her research seeks to understand how individual, relational, and contextual factors shape the development of youth and their families across different cultural contexts. Prof. Cheah employs mixed-method, longitudinal, and cross-cultural approaches to illuminate risk and resilience processes. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, and her research has been recognized by a Fulbright Research Fellowship and the University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award in Scholarship or Research.

Davies obtained his PhD in Social & Medical Anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2007. He is now Associate Professor in Medical Anthropology and Psychology at the University of Roehampton, London. He is also a practicing psychotherapist, having worked clinically in various settings, including the NHS. He is co-founder of the Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group, Westminster, UK, and has been an advisor to the UK Government & Public Health England. He is author of numerous books including the bestselling: Sedated: how modern capitalism caused our mental health crisis (Atlantic 2022), and Cracked: the unhappy truth about psychiatry (Icon 2014). He also co-edited ‘Emotions in the Field: the psychology and anthropology of fieldwork experience’ (Stanford Uni Press 2011), and is a founding member of the European Network for Psychological Anthropology (ENPA).

Cox received his MA and PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. His work engages at the intersections between art and science and anthropology and innovative forms of public engagement. He currently works on the anthropology of sound, investigating questions about the politics of noise from perspectives of acoustic science, sound studies, and sound art. He has written books on the idea of the Zen Arts, Copying Culture and Material Heritage in Japan for Routledge Press, and about forms of representation that lie ‘Beyond Text’ in anthropology for Manchester University Press and Wiley Press.