Anthropologies and Psychologies in Inter/Action – Engaging Interdisciplinary Perspectives
This conference takes the recent emergence of psychological anthropologies (and also anthropological psychologies) as an opportunity to reflect on the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. It invites 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. It is the main aim of the conference to catalyze or set forth ideas and imaginations for future inter/actions between psychologies and anthropologies.
The conference invites 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 highlights 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 encourages 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 is 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 3rd ENPA 2025 Biennial aims to foster new insights in research contexts, policymaking, therapy, healing, caring, resisting, or learning, to mention but a few initiatives. It explicitly invites interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborations.
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