Conference of the New German Psychological Society
July 28th – 30th 2008
To be held at Freie Universität Berlin Conference Center, Berlin, Germany
see CALL FOR ABSTRACTS below
You are invited to participate in an exploration of new possibilities of
action beyond the boundaries of the disciplines.
For booking details and further information please contact:
info@ngfp2008.org
and visit
http://www.ngfp2008.org/english
Call for Abstracts:
THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND POSSIBILITIES OF POLITICAL
ACTION
This year’s congress of the New German Psychological Society is concerned
with the embededdness of the Social Sciences in people’s actual life
circumstances. Within that framework it seems to be incredibly important
to question the scientific discourse and its claim to be objective and
neutral as well as its claim of being able to create ever more new
knowledge.
IThese claims, in actual scientific practice, often lead to coherent
definitions that create static explanatory models that reproduce, rather
than change the scientific discourse. The problem at hand becomes clear
when we envision the fact that this discourse does not stay within the
university but also occupies discourses within the social life and
therefore actively participates in the societal processes of negotiating
meaning. Hence, it seems to be important to focus on the political
relevance of Social Science research. For researchers, this means that
they cannot simply try to create new knowledge, but must also take into
account the political implications of their very research.
To implement change, we have to enable the Social Sciences to capture the
plurality of human life and the plurality of meaning making processes by
shifting the focus from affirmative research that creates certain
explanatory models of how social life actually is, towards an emancipatory
aim that politicizes human life and makes the marginalized speak. This
necessarily includes the understanding that the marginalization of certain
perspectives results from the establishment of coherent explanatory models
that produce their hegemony by actively excluding possible counters from
the sayable.
In five panels we aim at discussing different marginalized perspectives to
find ways to make them speak. This includes reflection on the
reproductional processes that enable certain hegemonies, as well as
exploration of specific possibilities of action within these hegemonies.
Για περισσότερες πληροφορίες, μπορείτε να κατεβάσετε και το call for papers σε pdf: cfp_en
Tags: conference, german, psychology
