Critical Psychology

Psychology in Society now online

2009-01-14T23:14:00.002+02:00

The long-running critical psychology journal edited by Grahame Hayes, Psychology in Society (PINS), is now available online. So far only four issues are up, but the idea is to gradually add all previous issues, plus new ones as they appear. Complete articles are provided in pdf form, with no log-in or payment required.

Evidence-based psychotorture

2007-07-11T16:04:00.000+02:00

The US DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE's COUNTERINTELLIGENCE FIELD ACTIVITY (CIFA) BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE DIRECTORATE (APPLIED BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE) recently issued what they call a 'Presolicitation Notice' (Solicitation Number: Reference-Number-BAA-CIFA-DB-07-01) tendering for some good old applied research. They frame it so:

'The purpose of the research is (1) to develop, test and evaluate the application (translation) of known principles and findings of the behavioral and social sciences to enhancing capabilities relevant to current and future intelligence, counter-intelligence, and human intelligence collection; and (2) to understand threats to national security in terms of the principles and methods of the social and behavioral sciences. A portion of the funding may be made available for meritorious proposals from minority institutions and historically Black colleges and universities, and these entities are encouraged to participate.'

They continue:

'This research is primarily focused on: (i) developing and evaluating reliable, valid, behavior-based methods of evidence and human intelligence sources ssessment; (ii) developing and evaluating methods for understanding terrorist groups and their relationships to populations of interest; and (iii) methods for the translation principles and models in the social and behavioral sciences developed in laboratory settings to field and operational settings.'

A colleague of mine correctly summarises the aims of this, er, solicitation, in the following way: 'The call states that many of the techniques currently in use often are based only on the individual experiences of the interviewers, anecdotal information, and shared beliefs, rather than on empirical behavioral and social science. It goes on to say that until evidence-based approaches to interviewing and elicitation are established, little progress will be made in our ability to distinguish effective from ineffective techniques. Is it just me or is the Department of Defense asking for research to identify best practice methods to torture people?'

You can send your applications or well-wishings to:

Counterintelligence Field Activity
Department of Defense
251 18th Street Crystal Square 5 Suite 1200
Arlington VA 22202
Attn: Loretta Buckley (Contract Specialist, Phone (703) 699-7283, Fax (703) 699-7740, Email loretta.buckley@cifa.mil)

Mute, but wordy

2007-07-10T12:24:00.000+02:00

The online version of the magazine Mute: Culture and politics after the net is certainly worth a browse. It is filled with fascinating, wordy articles.

Baiting the capitalist lawyers...

2007-05-02T18:26:00.000+02:00

Er, in case you're interested, here's the key for unlocking high definition DVDs -

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

No I have no idea how it works either, but apparently the movie industry has been threatening legal action against anybody who publishes the key. So of course everybody is going ahead and doing exactly that, and I thought I'd better do my bit.

Don't believe the hyper...

2007-03-30T12:25:00.000+02:00

This blog has been dormant so long, we even forgot to mention the death of Jean Baudrillard. It just didn't feel real (urgh, lame joke). Many obituaries have been written over the last few weeks, and much scholarly discussion will follow, but I found this short article in the Guardian Unlimited quite good.

Slumming it in Toronto

2007-03-30T12:17:00.000+02:00

Those attending the International Society for Theoretical Psychology meetings in Toronto in June, especially those of us from 'less developed' countries who see Canada as a utopia of equality and dollars for all, this website will be instructive...

Same sex marriages in South Africa 3

2006-12-04T10:42:00.001+02:00

On Saturday, 2 December 2006, Christi van der Westhuizen attended the first legal gay wedding in a religious ceremony in South Africa (and Africa). Here is her report.

Critical psychology around the world

2006-11-29T13:25:00.000+02:00

The fifth Annual Review of Critical Psychology had just been published. It is now freely available as an online journal. This year's edition is called 'Critical psychology in a changing world: Contributions from different geo-political regions' and was edited by Manolis Dafermos, Athanasios Marvakis and Sofia Triliva from the University of Crete. They have included contributions from a broad spectrum of perspectives and locales, producing a volume that will serve as an excellent reference work and hopefully also contribute to the deepening of international or transnational networks of critical psychological thinking and practice.

Same sex marriages in South Africa 2

2006-11-15T11:03:00.000+02:00

After much public debate and some invigorating activism by gay and lesbian rights groups, the South African parliament yesterday "approved the controversial Civil Unions Bill, which provides for same-sex marriage, making South Africa the first African country to do so and one of only a few in the world. (...) The bill provides for opposite-sex and same-sex couples of 18 years or older to solemnise and register a voluntary union, either by marriage or civil partnership. (...) Same-sex couples can be married by civil marriage officers and such religious marriage officers who consider these marriages not to fall outside the tenets of their religion" (news24).

Same sex marriages in South Africa

2006-09-18T12:16:00.000+02:00

I recently got this email about same sex marriages in South Africa. If you are interested in signing their petition or participating in any other way, contact details are provided at the end of the email:

Dear Colleagues and Supporters,

Parliament has tabled a draft Civil Union Bill, which intends to grant same sex couples the right to form a 'civil partnership'. Although the same legal benefits would be accorded same sex couples, the state would not recognize these partnerships as marriage. As such, same sex couples would still be excluded from choosing to marry, through the existing Marriage Act. Instead, civil partnerships would be regulated through a separate legal institution and administered separately.

This would relegate same sex couples to a second class citizenry and perpetuate the stigmatization of our relationships. In effect, it would entrench the prejudice of some, which dictates that our relationships deserve a lower social status. And, as the Department of Home Affairs has stated, the Marriage Act "will not be tampered with". What is also worrying is that the State Legal Advisor has not signed of on the current version of the Bill as they have expressed concerns about its constitutionality on various grounds.

We do, however, commend the section of the Bill that pertains to domestic partnerships in that it extends legal protections to both heterosexual and homosexual couples who are unmarried.

Make your voice heard on this important matter, which tests our nation's commitment to the Constitution, and the principles of equality and human dignity for all.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?
1. Sign onto the petition in support of a change to the existing Marriage Act and against a new, separate act for same sex couples only.

2. Write letters to the press.

3. Join in the public participation process by participating in the public hearings, which will be held in all provinces, culminating in parliamentary deliberations on the 12-13 October. The details for the public hearings will be published in the local press shortly, and we will keep you updated.

4. Write to parliament. Parliament will be calling for written submissions on same sex marriage. You can write a submission, either personally or as an organisation. It doesn't matter how long or short it is, each one will help. We will send through details of the submission process once these have been released. For more information on the parliamentary process contact the Secretary of Home Affairs Portfolio Committee - Mr. Mathibela Mankge - at + 27 (0)21 4033826.

We will, in due course, be sending our fact sheets on the proposed Bill.

Please post this email onto your website, and forward it to other interested
parties.

Yours, in solidarity,
OUT LGBT Well-being

For more information contact Fikile Vilakazi, Melanie Judge or Dawie Nel, on
+ 27 (0)12 3445108.

OUT LGBT Well-being
Tel : + 27 (0)12 344 6501
Fax : + 27 (0)12 344 6501
Cell : 083 2712543
E-mail : programmes@out.org.za

Psychology and torture

2006-08-23T13:15:00.000+02:00

This letter, regarding the refusal of the American Psychological Association to prohibit the involvement of psychologists in military interrogations, was addressed to the President (Cheryl Foxcroft) of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) a number of weeks ago. Not sure whether it had been discussed by PsySSA or whether we will get any feedback from them... Will keep you posted about developments.

Dr. Cheryl Foxcroft
Psychological Society of South Africa

Dear Dr. Foxcroft

We are writing to you in your capacity as president of the Psychological Society of South Africa. It has come to the attention of many in the psychology profession that the American Psychological Association has steadfastly refused to prohibit its members from participating in military interrogations conducted at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Abu Ghraib, Iraq. The refusal of the APA to ban its members from such activities has serious human rights implications, as prisoners are held without trial and many are subjected to inhumane treatment, including torture.

While the APA policy requires its members to adhere to the code of ethics for psychologists, which includes a statement prohibiting torture and inhuman treatment, they may still consult to military interrogators and provide psychological advice. Psychologists consulting to military interrogators are used to break down prisoners and exploit their emotional and psychological vulnerabilities in order to extract information. Both the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have prohibited their members from participating in military interrogations. For this reason the United States military has relied on psychologists rather than psychiatrists to assist in these interrogations.

The group, Physicians for Human Rights, has called on the APA to prohibit psychologists from participating in interrogations (see their statement at this website). So far APA has refused to change its policy.

This letter is a request that PSYSSA, in view of its relationship with APA, strongly and publicly condemn APA’s policy on psychologists’ consulting to military interrogators, and its president, Dr. Gerald Koocher’s, steadfast defense of this policy. Dr. Koocher has stated repeatedly that psychologists have a special knowledge to contribute to military interrogations and have a valuable role to play in helping to protect the United States. By not expressly prohibiting its members from consulting to military interrogators, the APA appears to be condoning human rights violations. In view of our own history of oppression and human rights violations in South Africa, PSYSSA under your leadership has a duty to insist that the APA abandon its policy. We also suggest that if PSYSSA’s public condemnation of the APA’s position does not result in any change in its policy, PSYSSA should distance itself from the APA. Failure to do so may be construed as apathy or even complicity with violating the human rights of prisoners.

Yours Sincerely

Department of Psychology
Stellenbosch University

Oh, just protecting the nation...

2006-07-31T12:08:00.000+02:00

The following article recently appeared on saloon.com:

Psychological warfare

Angered that their professional organization has adopted a policy condoning psychologists' participation in "war on terror" interrogations, many psychologists are vowing to stage a battle royal at the APA's annual meeting.

By Mark Benjamin

The 150,000-member American Psychological Association is facing an internal revolt over its year-old policy that condones the participation of psychologists in the interrogations of prisoners during the Bush administration's "war on terror."
Last summer, the APA adopted new ethical principles drafted by a task force of 10 psychologists, who were selected by the organization's leadership. That controversial task-force report, which is now official APA policy, stated that psychologists participating in terror-related interrogations are fulfilling "a valuable and ethical role to assist in protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm."
But Salon has learned that six of the 10 psychologists on the task force have close ties to the military. The names and backgrounds of the task force participants were not made public by the APA; Salon obtained them from congressional sources. Four of the psychologists who crafted the permissive policy were involved with the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or served with the military in Afghanistan -- all environments where serious cases of abuse have been documented.

Uncle Critical Wants You!

2006-06-24T13:22:00.000+02:00

The following email has been circulated recently, and I hope they don't mind me posting it here. It is about the 2007 European Congress of Psychology, to be held in Prague, and the possibility of organising some Critical Psychology symposia there. Ian Parker doesn't want to fight the battle all on his own, you see, or be stuck without any friends to drink the undeniably tasty Czech beers with. If Parker's loneliness does not inspire you to go, or you don't drink beer, Prague is at least a fascinating and beautiful city. Consider it!

(For those reading the email below and who are unfamiliar with Critical Psychology, a short disclaimer: you might get the impression that 'critical' here means whining about how terrible, boring, and expensive the conference will be, how we will not get enough time to speak and won't be heard in any case, but that if it will further the Cause, we will be the least and spend some fine summer days in Prague... We promise there is more to being critical in psychology than this, although probably nothing that is quite as much fun.)

Critical Psychology: Lessons for Critical Psychology in Europe from around the world. The tenth European Congress of Psychology will be in Prague from 3 to 6 July 2007.

This will most likely be a grotesque large psychology conference, and they will probably charge the earth for the privilege of listening to the latest 'discoveries'. Those who do decide to speak at the conference will probably be allotted a few small amount of time. It is unclear exactly how
terrible the event will be, but there are first details on http://www.ecp2007.com/intro.htm

However, this could also be a space for a critical intervention. Ian Parker has been invited to speak at the conference, and would now like to ensure some friendly faces are there. So he wants to organise a symposia or two on ''Critical Psychology: Lessons for Critical Psychology in Europe from around the world'. (The organisation of this might be with the editors of the special ARCP issue on critical psychology around the world, depending on whether they will be attending the conference.) The ECP organisers have promised to put this title in their list of symposia in the second announcement for the conference which they are currently preparing for their website. It would be great if we could get together people who contributed to the Annual Review of Critical Psychology 5 on critical psychology around the world. So, if you think you may be interested in coming to Prague and being involved, look at the congress website, think about the logistics (high price, boring conference, interesting city, summer holiday etc), and email Ian (at I.A.Parker@mmu.ac.uk) and tell him if you will be coming along. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is November, but Ian wants to get the abstracts sorted out by September.

Communing in Puerto Rico

2006-06-06T09:22:00.000+02:00

One of the 'authors' of this blog is currently attending The First International Conference on Community Psychology, held in the no doubt sunny and warm Puerto Rico. The other author, stuck in somewhat cold South Africa, is jealous and just a little bit grumpy... Hopefully Martin will have some interesting things to say about this conferences and the things debated there on this site in the near future.

Norwegian gossip...

2006-06-02T11:32:00.000+02:00

My Norwegian always fails me when I need it most, but if yours is more reliable you can read one (possibly scathing, who knows?) entry about us and a lot more about what is apparently psychology at tenke.no - a blog by what seems to be two Norwegian psychologists. Not sure that it is a 'critical' psychology blog, but we don't discriminate; would be interested to know, though, if there is such a thing as a Norwegian 'critical psychology' tradition?

Thinking with nurses

2006-05-30T17:35:00.000+02:00

Thinking Nurse, a blog by a student nurse specialising in learning disabilities, is a must read. He reflects on nursing, the human rights of people with disabilities and philosophy, all from a nicely grounded socialist perspective. As the author says, nursing and philosophy had been linked since the days of Socrates. Now who would have thought.

Writing and publishing for democracy

2006-05-12T10:07:00.000+02:00

The 'democratic think tank', Demos, offers a wealth of information on their website, as well as being an interesting example of how theoretical and empirical work can be put to work and be used to inform public debate. Most importantly, almost all the reports and books published by them are available for free download on the website. Titles in their by now quite extensive catalogue are arranged according to five themes, Democracy, Learning, Global Change, Enterprise and Quality of Life.

Critical psychologists not yet extinct

2006-04-19T22:45:00.000+02:00

Sorry about being so quiet lately. We're thinking.

Theoretical Psychology Conference, 2007

2006-03-24T16:28:00.000+02:00

The International Society of Theoretical Psychology's next conference is called THEORETICAL PSYCHOLOGY BEYOND BORDERS: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND INTERNATIONALIZATION. The conference will take place from 18 - 22 June 2007 at York University in Toronto, Canada. According to the first call for papers, 'This conference is the premier opportunity for theoretical psychologists and graduate students interested in theoretical issues in psychology to present, discuss, and reflect on theoretical psychology in a transnational and transdisciplinary context. The Conference invites contributions to theoretical psychology from all scholarly approaches. Deadline for submissions will be January 1st, 2007.' These conferences are biannual events, and the previous one was hosted in Cape Town, 2005. You can visit the website of the Cape Town conference, where you will find all the abstracts and some other interesting bits of information.

Borderlands

2006-03-24T10:13:00.000+02:00

An ever increasing number of quality sites for academic publication and debate function as free access e-journals. The one that keeps me busy at the moment is the quite exciting 'borderlands'. This is its editorial statement: 'borderlands is a refereed international journal that aims to promote transdisciplinary work across the humanities, work which might also intersect with diverse practices and sites in culture, policy and everyday life. Although our beginnings are modest, we hope that over time you will be able to view writings cutting across and between politics, media, literature, history, law, science, medicine, philosophy, economics, music, film and more, along with incisive debate about contemporary culture.' their motto is from rock singer, PJ Harvey: 'speak to me of universal law…of heroin and speed, of genocide and suicide, of syphilis and greed…speak to me the language of love, the language of violence, the language of the heart...just give me something i can believe.' Enough said.

On being together

2006-03-03T10:01:00.000+02:00

The latest edition of the electronic journal Culture Machine is devoted to the topic of 'community'. There seems to be some interesting and potentially important reflections on how to conceptualise our 'being together' in the world without resorting to totalizing myths of national, ethnic, religious or racial unity. This journal appears once a year, so also check out the back issues.

Shiny happy people can be critical too

2006-02-24T14:45:00.000+02:00

The most recent lead article of the Association for Humanistic Psychology's Perspective Magazine is called 'A Critical Psychology' (by Don Eulart) and is available online. Also click on the events link and see all the shiny happy people!

A new internet journal

2006-02-24T10:25:00.000+02:00

Aydan Gulerce, from the Bogazici University in Istanbul, has launched a new internet journal called, Social Practice/Psychological Theorizing. The editorial board is loaded with the usual suspects, but also include a fair amount of scholars from places like South Africa, India, Brasil and Japan. Besides publishing formal academic articles, it seems also to envision functioning as a more interactive discussion forum. It seems like a worthwhile project, so I hope it will become a dynamic and lively space of debate.

Barcelona!

2006-02-16T09:47:00.000+02:00

I always find the relationship between international scientific/scholarly societies and their conference cities interesting. Generally, it seems that the host city is reduced to an incidental backdrop, preferably wrapped in tourist clichés. Reality should be kept at arms lenght: luckily, modern convention centres and their associated hotels make this very possible. In fact, if you have ever been caught in one of these, you will know that escaping into something resembling a real city street is quite difficult. (In this, they of course resemble much of social theory and other scientific activity, so don't blame their designers too much...) This distancing is especially ironic when the scholarly society in question is the International Society of Political Psychology... They are hosting their 2005 annual conference in Barcelona this July. I am planning to attend this conference, so I have been searching both the conference website and the web more generally for information about Barcelona and the region of which it is the capital (I think), Catalunya. Predictably, the conference website, like most tourist websites, reduces the city and region to another charming part of the kaleidoscope that is steoretypical Spain - bullfighting, payella and olives. Meanwhile, back in the bullring, there are apparently some serious and interesting political tensions around Catalonya at the moment, about its regional autonomy vis-a-vis the Spanish state, about language rights, and about its "national" status. So how sucessfull do you think a conference on political psychology will be in ignoring such interesting events? My guess: very... Any Spanish (sic?) critical psychologists out there who could say something about these current debates and events, and their implications for understanding Spain, Europe, the world, and everything else?

Our world is not for sale...

2006-02-15T15:50:00.000+02:00

Check out the Our World Is Not for Sale website. They call themselves "a worldwide network of organizations, activists and social movements committed to challenging trade and investment agreements that advance the interests of the world’s most powerful corporations at the expense of people and the environment". It is a multilingual, certainly multilateral resource, and filled with enough information, news, articles and current actions to keep you glued the screen for a while. You can also read and sign their New Statement.

Zizek Live

2006-02-15T11:52:00.000+02:00

I stumbled upon the perfect way to spend a few good hours in the office, not working, but at least learning something... Video recorded lectures (most of them are about an hour long) by famous people like Slavoj Zizek, Bhikhu Parekh, Stuart Hall, Chantelle Mouffe and others at this link. They were all presented at a conference called "Democracy Unrealized" in Vienna, 2001. From there you can also navigate to lectures by some other, equally famous speakers in Berlin - same year, same theme. Zizek comments on a "great slander" against him, namely that he had recently started writing about movies he had never seen. Not true, he says: "I have been doing this for more than ten years!"

Things go better with water

2006-02-12T20:25:00.000+02:00

The zero coke movement wants people to stop drinking coke and donate the money they save to initiatives like UNICEF's Water and Sanitation Programs. Their aim is to change the percentage of people in the world with no access to clean water from 20% to zero. Why pick on Coke? Because "waste, pollution and questionable nutrition are at the centre of Coke's business model". I am all for this sort of thing, of course, but sometimes I worry that there is some sort of unwritten rule that to be a good person one has to suffer and be serious. So my advice is to relax and have a coke. As they say - you can't beat the feeling. Life is good. It's the real thing.

Capitalism for dummies

2006-02-09T20:38:00.000+02:00

Jason McCabe Calacanis got a letter from Wiley Publishing, Inc. telling him that if he wants to use the phrase "for dummies" in the title of a web post he must include "attribution language" to the effect that FOR DUMMIES is a registered trademark of the good folks at Wiley. Maybe now we'll get a letter as well.

Any critical psychologists in the Netherlands?

2006-01-17T21:39:00.000+02:00

Somebody who reads this blog would like to know if there are any critical psychologists in the Netherlands. Are there?

MSc in critical psychology at Cardiff

2006-01-03T13:19:00.000+02:00

News from Valerie Walkerdine and Dimitris Papadopoulos is that they invite applications for an MSc in Critical Psychology in the Social Sciences at Cardiff University in the UK.

"The MSc gives you the opportunity to work with a team of internationally renowned critical psychologists and social scientists. Current research interests of the Cardiff team include psychosocial studies; poststructuralist and feminist theories; embodiment and health; socio-cultural approaches to education; social studies of psychology; theories of affect; subjectivity, neoliberalism and the transformation of labour; transnationalism, migration and social activism."

The course begins in October 2006, and can be studied full time (1 year) or part time (2 to 3 years).

[image credit: Peter Morgan]

Majority of Americans think torture is OK

2005-12-07T00:03:00.000+02:00

OK, so maybe it's not that strange that some American psychologists might be involved in torture, seeing as most Americans say torture is OK, at least in rare circumstances. This is according to an AP-Ipsos poll reported in the Guardian. And it's not only them, but also the majority of people in Britain, France and South Korea. At least in Canada, Mexico and Germany people aren't so sure, and in Spain and Italy most people are opposed to torture.

Psychologsists involved in torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib?

2005-12-02T17:50:00.000+02:00

The Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights has set up a petition calling on the American Psychological Association "to state its opposition to and condemnation of methods of coercive interrogation such as sleep deprivation and harassment focused on detainees' religious, ethnic, sexual orientation, or gender identities, and to establish a task force charged with educating policy makers about the psychological damage done to individuals by use of these and other methods that fall in the category of cruel, degrading, and inhumane treatment". This is in response to " persistent allegations that some of our colleagues in psychology and other areas of mental health may have been involved in cases of torture and/or cruel, degrading, and inhumane treatment of detainees".

Review of qualitative psychology book

2005-11-12T11:42:00.000+02:00

Kevin Durrheim has just posted a very positive review of Ian Parker's Qualitative Psychology book on the knowledge2go blog. Methods textbooks are normally extremely conservative (and, as Kevin rightly points out, boring), but they can also be a very effective way of bringing critical ways of doing into disciplines such as psychology. So I'll definitely be checking out Qualitative Psychology. (I am by the way working with Kevin on our own attempt at a critical methods book, knowledge2go, and the knowledge2go blog is intended as a way of engaging with potential readers and contributors.)

These are post-Foucauldian times we live in

2005-07-14T09:36:00.000+02:00

I have just finished reading Dimitris Papadopoulos's wonderful editorial introduction to Critical Psychology 12 - Psychology and the poltitical. Papadopoulos claims that psychology is "no longer concerned with the calibration and management of the individual", but rather aims to "dissect and dissolve individuality". I'm not really sure if he is right, but he constructs a very plausible, richly illustrated, argument to show that "these are post-Foucauldian times we live in". Highly recommended.

Nelson Mandela at Live 8

2005-07-14T09:13:00.000+02:00

Check this video of Nelson Mandela's speech at the Live 8 concert.

Updated website for the critical psychology conference

2005-04-22T13:16:00.000+02:00

Anthony Collins has updated the website for the upcoming critical psychology conference in Durban and it's great - visually striking, lots of useful info about the conference, South Africa and Durban, all delivered in a beautifully laconic style. Check it out. The conf is from 28 June to 1 July 2005 and it's not too late to sign up.

Conference on hope

2005-04-01T08:49:00.000+02:00

Here's a conference about something positive, but not in a superficial 'positive psychology' way: The 1st Global Conference on Hope is an inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference which "aims to explore contemporary definitions, meanings and expressions of hope. In particular, it will seek to examine the individual, social, national and international contexts within which hope emerges as well as its counterpart, hopelessness."

Buy nothing day

2004-11-25T09:25:00.000+02:00

$FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 26 2004 IS BUY NOTHING DAY

For 24 hours, millions of people around the world do not participate -- in the doomsday economy, the marketing mind-games, and the frantic consumer-binge that's become our culture. We pause. We make a small choice not to shop. We shrink our footprint and gain some calm. Together we say to Exxon, Nike, Coke and the rest: enough is enough. And we help build this movement to rethink our unsustainable course.

In its 13 years, BND has become a flashpoint, a day when people of all stripes come together in symbolic protest. Visit the new BND Action Pyramid for a sample of great ways to celebrate.

Need posters, clip-art, web banners, handbills, radio-clips or stickers? No problem. 2004 BND promotional goods are ready for download. We've put together a radical new tool to keep Jammers connected: JammerGroups, city-based email networks. Join now.

We've also got news and reports from previous BNDs in our archive. Be in touch as your plans come together, Happy jamming.

http://www.adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd/#

South Africa's very own anti-terrorism bill

2004-11-13T15:06:00.000+02:00

OK, so since yesterday we again have an anti-terrorism bill in South Africa. Oops, no, wait - it's the "Protection of Constitutional Democracy Against Terrorist and Related Activities Bill". Sounds much better, doesn't it? Actually, to be fair, it's not all bad news. Although the bill is a direct result of 'international pressure' in the wake of 9/11, it is nowhere near as sweeping and draconian as the equivalent pieces of legislation in places like the US and UK. But it does impose an obligation to report suspected terror-related activities. Let's hope it's not the thin edge of the wedge. More info at allafrica.com - here and here.

International Critical Psychology Conference 2005

2004-11-09T11:46:00.001+02:00

The call for papers for the International Critical Psychology Conference 2005 in Durban, South Africa, is out:

Beyond the pale -"outside the boundaries of the acceptable" - this is a defining feature of Critical Psychology. A psychology of the excluded and marginalised, both those who are socially displaced and those whose work and thought remain unacceptable to mainstream psychology.

Of course the phrase hints at another mischievous meaning: beyond the white world - the overdeveloped West with its intellectual imperialism and monopoly on academic resources. Even Critical Psychology has been guilty of lapsing into elite conversations between those who from a global perspective are in fact highly privileged, narrow in their domestic concerns, and almost as restricted in their theories and methods as those they so righteously denounce.

The conference runs from 28 June to 1 July 2005 and the deadline for submitting an abstract is 7 January 2005. More details at the Critical Psychology Conference website.

The truth will cost you

2004-11-06T09:51:00.000+02:00

I've posted a rant, Whose truth is it anyway?, on my other blog about how the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa isn't freely available. Why ever not? There's stuff about this on Brandon Hamber's blog too.

Sign the Indymedia Solidarity Statement

2004-10-17T06:32:00.000+02:00

Follow-up on a previous post about Indymedia servers in the UK being seized by the FBI: The servers have now been returned, but with no explanation from US, UK, Swiss or Italian authorities (all of whom were in one way or another involved). It is widely speculated, however, that the seizure is related to posts that were made on an Indymedia Web site that included photographs of two police officers investigating the anti-globlization riots in 2003 during the G-8 summit.

Probably the real danger of this sort of thing is not in the direct threat to free speech, but in the creation of a climate that makes it increasingly difficult to publish information freely. Indymedia will now think twice before publishing photographs of police officers. Web service providers think twice before signing up organisations such as Indymedia.

Indymedia has in the mean time put up a declaration in support of the Indymedia network, which it asks concerned people to sign.

Return of George Bush and the mad-doctors

2004-10-15T17:50:00.000+02:00

In June I mentioned the scheme to introduce mental health screening in the US. At the time most of the critical coverage related to the close links between the Bush family and drug companies who were likely to benefit greatly from the scheme. I commented that while it is important to establish who will make money from it, the broader issue was the ongoing medicalisation and psychologisation of American and world society. The Psychologists Acting with Conscience Together blog today also comments on what I think is the same initiative, which apparently goes by the wonderfully sinister name of "New Freedom Commission". Psychologists Acting with Conscience Together are of the opinion that "they are actively pursuing an expansion of the child market for psychiatric pharmaceuticals" and urge readers to sign the anti mental health screening petition provided by Ablechild.org (look for the "click to sign" link on the left of their home page). Ablechild says it consists of a "growing number of parents outraged over both the subjective labeling (ADHD, ADD, OCD, ODD) and pervasive drugging of our children".

I support what Psychologists Acting with Conscience Together and Ablechild.org are doing, but again want to emphasize that the screening thing is wrong for reasons that go beyond corporate greed. There are a number of different critical angles on this and I think it is important to give more airtime to those towards the end of this list:

Bad faith. Yes, clearly many of these sorts of initiatives are driven by motives other than helping people with "mental illness", such as making a fast buck.
Bad science I. Yes, clearly a disturbing number of drug studies appear not to be sufficiently carefully done and sufficiently honestly reported on.
Bad science II. In addition, the sort of science that tries to isolate and measure variables is often not relevant to the rich, culturally embedded, constantly unfolding lives we live. There is a lot of collective wisdom out there about the challenges and disappointments and surprises that we face every day, but it is not the sort of wisdom quantitative scientist can ever 'discover'. So the problem is perhaps not so much the "subjective labeling" that Ablechild.org complains about, but rather attempts at objective labeling in a domain which operates on very different principles.
Bad politics. Screening and treating individuals can sometimes be helpful, but it also draws attention away from social and political ills by ascribing our difficulties in living to individual psychological problems.

Intellectual property and the development agenda

2004-10-15T09:35:00.000+02:00

Asia Times online today reports on the successful efforts by Bolivia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Iran, Kenya, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, and Venezuela to push a development agemda at the recent general assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. In a supporting declaration signed by "hundreds of scientists, academics, NGOs and individuals" the WIPO is urged not to "impose global conformity" because "a one-size-fits-all approach that embraces the highest levels of intellectual property protection for everyone leads to ludicrous outcomes for countries that are struggling to meet the most basic needs of their citizens." While I support efforts to counter attempts by especially US corporations and the US government to coerce everybody else into accepting their very restrictive view of intellectual property, I'm also worried by the implication that looser forms of intellectual property rights should apply in the developing world because we need a hand up, while the developed world can afford to have the real, high-quality thing. The current intellectual property right regime in the US is bad for Americans and they need to be liberated from it as much as we do. Creative Commons has also recently started going down the "development agenda" road with the launch of their developing nations license which allows for free use but only in developing nations. Responses have been mixed, with some welcoming it while others see it as, amongst other things, paternalistic.

Creative commons license for critical psychology article

2004-10-14T23:29:00.000+02:00

Unbeknownst to most critical psychologists, there's a huge war being fought on the intellectual property front between those who seem to want corporate ownership of everything and those who want to grow the public domain. Creative commons is becoming an increasingly important weapon in this war - allowing authors to make their creative work freely available (while retaining some rights if they want to). So, to do our bit Desmond and I have slapped a creative commons license on our paper about Critical Psychology in South Africa. It's an "Attribution-NonCommercial Commons Deed", which means that anyone is free to "copy, distribute, display, and perform the work [and] to make derivative works" provided they mention that we were the original authors and don't use it for commercial purposes without first asking our permision.

Derrida and superman die

2004-10-11T10:37:00.000+02:00

Definitely a sign of getting old when one starts reading the obituaries. Christopher Reeve's death is getting a lot of coverage of course, but I was amazed at how unimportant Derrida seems to have become - just a tiny mention in the (South African) Sunday Times. The Times Online used the opportunity to try and make some witty remarks (A conceptual foundation for the deconstruction of mortality) while frontpagemag.com helpfully explains that 'deconstructionism is the nonsensical infantile "philosophy" that argues that words have no meaning'. Ah well.

Indymedia raided by FBI

2004-10-10T21:31:00.000+02:00

The Independent Media Center has had one of their servers, located in the UK, seized by the FBI, on request from government agencies in Italy and Switzerland. This sort of thing is now possible due to a series of Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) that the US has signed with other countries. By Sunday Indymedia had not been informed what the official reason for the seizure was, but it is part of a recent pattern of FBI action against independent news organizations. The Independent Media Center "is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage". Amongs other things, they support an independent radio network.

Dennis Fox has a weblog

2004-09-27T16:57:00.000+02:00

I just discovered Dennis Fox's blog. Dennis has published a great deal on critical psychology topics (such as Critical Psychology: An introduction, co-edited with Isaac Prilleltensky) and has assembled a collection of very useful resources on critical psychology.

In a recent post Dennis comments on Critical Psychology International (CPI), an intiative we recently mentioned on this blog but which is (I think) being coordinated by Louise Madden of Cardiff. Dennis was involved in launching a similar initiative in 1993, RadPsyNet, which he describes as now "somewhat moribund", and suggests that "it’s time to discuss how to maintain critical psychology organizations beyond their enthusiastic births, an issue with relevance to many kinds of politically progressive organizations".

I think in part we have to take our cue from the global political landscape where the trend seems to be towards looser, ad-hoc organizational forms that interlink and cooperate around particular issues and events, and then disappear again or become temporarily moribund. This may simply be a symptom of the the extent to which the left is in disarray and conservative forces and ideologies control everything, but there also seems to be something positive about these new styles of cooperation.

1st Annual Duquesne University Critical Psychology Graduate Conference

2004-09-17T17:56:00.000+02:00

Via PsyACT comes news of the 1st Annual Duquesne University Critical Psychology Graduate Conference (theme: "Catching Sight of Our Shadows") which will be taking place on April 1-2, 2005. Abstracts can be submitted until 1 January.

PsyACT - Psychologists Acting with Conscience Together

2004-09-17T17:17:00.000+02:00

PsyACT is a site for "psychologists, counselors, and other concerned citizens around the world [who] act together to address issues that affect individual and community well-being through letters to editors, campus actions, teach-ins, & community activities". A nice resource and, unusually for critical psychology stuff on the web, it has a site feed - which I've promptly added to the list of feeds I read via bloglines.com. Site feeds (aka webfeeds/RSS/Atom feeds) make it easy to keep track of when new stuff is added to a site without having to keep re-visiting the site. I actually discovered PsyACT because Scot Evans wrote a comment on this blog asking where our site feed is. It's near the top right of the blog and looks like this: [Atom feed].

The UK's Civil Contingencies Bill

2004-09-08T11:58:00.000+02:00

This draconian bill is soon to be debated in the UK parliament. More information from the Freedom Association.

Am I depressed?

2004-09-03T17:20:00.000+02:00

Not sure if you're depressed? Not to worry - the good people at Screening for Mental Health Inc. can give you an objective answer. They'll also help you find the right doctors, pills and stuff.

New critical psychology network

2004-08-20T07:48:00.000+02:00

Here is an interesting new initiative -

Critical Psychology International - Call for Contributions

A website is being developed to facilitate the work of Critical Psychology International. This website will provide a place to publish articles and reports of all kinds, a forum for discussions across the network, and an email list.

The CPI will be an international network of relationships and connections based on affinity (which should not be confused with uniformity, as the positive values of discrepancy, divergence and disparity are assumed), whose main aim is to promote the development of critical work within and beyond psychology. It will be multilingual and is available to all who wish to belong, no matter what their language of use. The CPI will be formed as a network of nodes (with nodes being made up of individuals, research groups, departments, collectives, teams, etc), with no hierarchy or management structure, but a collective guided by objectives proposed and developed by its members. It will aim to connect people and groups to do research or other activities, and develop and maintain exchange of knowledge, information and experience, promoting and strengthening trans-disciplinary and co-operative research.

The website will be formally launched early in the new academic year, and this is a call for contributions of all kinds. Register yourself, department, research or project group as nodes of the network, join the email list, and submit documents of all kinds such as conference papers and other grey literature, work in progress, and suggestions for the form the network should take.

Please direct all contributions, and statements of interest in becoming part of the network to Louise Madden at Maddenl@cardiff.ac.uk

A preliminary form of the website, and email list will soon become available, please email Louise Madden Maddenl@cardiff.ac.uk for updates as these develop.

In the true spirit of the games

2004-08-18T00:33:00.000+02:00

Like everything else, the olympic games have fallen prey to the dual scourge of lawyers and corporate greed. To see the lunacy that lawyers can goad otherwise sane people into, check out the idiotic hyperlink policy page of the Athens 2004 site. The policy kindly informs me that "by introducing a link to the ATHENS 2004 official Website on your site" (as I have just done) "you are agreeing to comply with the ATHENS 2004 Website General Terms and Conditions". Well no, actually I don't. Not at all. So sue me. The General Terms and Conditions (note those imposing caps) state that I may "use the term ATHENS 2004 only, and no other term as the text referent". So if I link like this: Stupid, lawyer-befuddled olympics site I'm in violation. Also, I'm supposed to send a request letter to their Internet Department asking for permission to link to them, including goofy info such as "reason for linking" and "publishing period". This sort of thing happens because most corporate lawyers thrive on further stoking up the paranoid tendencies already inherent in most corporations, and because they know from experience that bullying language, no matter how devoid of any basis in law, will scare most people into submission.

Item 2 for today's "true spirit of the games" rant is the warning that the organizers have issued to spectators that they may be refused admission if they carry food or drink from companies that did not sponsor the games. So it has to be Coke - no Pepsi. And if you pitch up in a t-shirt carrying a non-sponsor's logo you can be made to wear it inside out.

All of this to "protect" those poor sponsors...

More from the better than (critical) psychology department...

2004-08-03T13:21:00.000+02:00

Today John Walkenbach mentioned Afri-Can guitars from South Africa on his popular J-Walk blog, saying that he's probably going to buy one. They sound good, are sort-of environmentally friendly (being partly made from old oil cans and all), and are being sold for up to $525 (that's R3000 plus) in the US. The website that sells them has a "hall of fame" where all the artists have surnames except for Vusi Mahlasela, who is billed simply as "South African Artist Vusi". Not sure why that is. But they do have nice free sample mp3s of people playing Afri-Can guitars. So rush over, take a listen, and get your very own guitar now. Or if you don't have that kind of money listen to short samples of Vusi Mahlasela's songs over at Calabash Music and buy a CD for only $15 or so.

Critical Methods Nine: Trauma in context

2004-08-02T13:12:00.000+02:00

This year's South African critical methods conference - Critical Methods Nine: Trauma in context - will be in Durban from 31 August to 2 September 2004.

A softer world

2004-07-23T13:57:00.000+02:00

A softer world is a three panel photo-cartoon that appears every Friday. Tells you more about the human condition than all the (critical) psychology textbooks in the world.

National Barbie-in-a-Blender Day

2004-07-19T13:59:00.000+02:00

July 27 is National Barbie-in-a-Blender Day. Send freeculture.org a picture of your Barbie (or Ken) in a blender and they will add it to their gallery. The day is being organised to celebrate the court victory of artist Tom Forsythe who was sued by Mattel for his series of Barbie pics. Only pity is that freeculture.org fell into the US-centric trap of calling it the National (rather than International) Barbie-in-a-Blender Day. Barbie belongs to all of us.

George Bush and the mad-doctors

2004-06-18T19:55:00.000+02:00

There is a story in today's edition of BMJ (British Medical Journal) on a "sweeping mental health initiative" to be unveiled by George Bush in July. The plan involves mental health screening for "all consumers" linked to a "state of the art" medication treatment plan. BMJ itself, as well as other more radical commentators such as Mark Frauenfelder, draw attention to the close links between the Bush family and drug companies, particularly Eli Lilly, who stand to make further billions out of the scheme.

Clearly there are elements of conspiracy and corruption here, but that is endemic to the American political system in any case (oops, there goes my chance of ever getting a US visa again). Of more interest I think is the continuing medicalisation and psychologisation of American and world society that is signalled by this. And as usual it is all being done in the name of human rights. For example, the president's commission who recommended the new system say they are concerned because "each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviours and emotional disorders" - and hopefully now many more of these disruptive kids will be put on rational treatment regimes "based on efficacy data from clinical trials" (to quote Darrel Regier, director of research at the American Psychiatric Association).

I guess soon Americans will be able to sleep more soundly at night, since, as Dr Graham Emslie, who helped develop a Texas project on which the new nation-wide system is to be modelled, explains: "There are good data showing that if you identify kids at an earlier age who are aggressive, you can intervene... and change their trajectory."

I am trying not to be naive about this. Of course there are kids who are uncaring and violent and make their own and others' lives a misery, and of course society has every right to protect itself from such kids and to try and help them. For whatever reasons, there may even be many more such kids in America than there are in most other countries. But to pretend that violent, disruptive behaviour is simply a property inherent in individuals and not also in the political fabric of society as a whole and that it can be fixed by screening out and medicating (or therapising) individuals - that is madness.

Nancy White on conference design

2004-06-03T08:25:00.000+02:00

I see Nancy White has also responded to Clay Shirky's post on the backchannel at conferences. Among other useful ideas, she suggests that pre and post conference online work ("for agenda creation and relationship creation/deepening and post for reflection") can help a lot to make a conference more participatory. She also points to Open Space, an approach to organising meetings where there is no pre-formed agenda but participants simply post topics they are willing to facilitate a discussion about on an Agenda Wall (together with a time and venue) and report-backs from discussions are posted on a News Wall. If like me you get frustrated by all the stuff on the Open Space site about its benefits and can't find the bottom-line about how it works - try the two page primer.

Who owns a conference?

2004-06-02T17:01:00.000+02:00

There is an interesting post on "the backchannel and conference design" by Clay Shirky (on the many2many group weblog). A backchannel at a conference presentation or other talk occurs when people in the audience text-chat via their laptops or PDAs while the presentation is in progress. The good part is that a presentation becomes a lot less of a one-to-many affair; the bad part is that some people experience it as disrespectful of the speaker. Clay's post touches on this (something which has been hotly debated elsewhere) and relates it to the broader issue of how the conventional form of academic conferences may be changing in a hyper-networked world. For example, at the 2004 Planetwork conference the backchannel is being formally co-opted to allow attenders to create the conference schedule (suggesting topics and voting on them).

Clay identifies various types of risk involved in this: people "gaming the system" to push their agenda, group prejudices being amplified so that unusual papers becoming even less likely to be accepted for presentation. But, says Clay, irrespective of whether more democratic ways of running conferences will do more harm than good "it won’t matter, because the real change here is not that technology is allowing new forms of participation, but rather that it is allowing new forms of creation — a conference has heretofore been an artifact, crafted by a small group for a large group, and as usual, the small group has found many ways to justify its existence (and I say this as a veteran of conference planning.)"

There are two interesting international psychology conferences happing in South Africa next year - the Critical Psychology Conference and Theoretical Psychology Conference. Given that the attendees will be a whole lot less tech-savvy than those who go to the sorts of conferences that Clay frequents, I wonder to what extent we will be able to get away from the "crafted by a small group for a large group" syndrome. In my experience critical psychologists, like most left-leaning academics, are good at critical analysis but a lot less good at doing participatory democracy.

Milestones of democracy

2004-05-26T14:20:00.000+02:00

OK, so I went to the vending machine near my office, put in R4 (that's about 60 US cents in case you were wondering), and got out a can of coke. It was #2 in the "milestones of democracy" series, explaining how in April 1994 "long queues were embraced with enthusiasm as South Africans prepared to make their voices heard". Also, they'll donate R1 million (about 150 thousand US dollars) to the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. Groovy! Must collect the whole set. Kind of reminds me of how McDonalds has now trademarked the phrase "I am Asian" - check it out at http://www.i-am-asian.com. Maybe Coke could ask Thabo Mbeki if he'd mind if they trademarked his "I am an African" phrase?

Trauma in context conference

2004-05-24T11:57:00.000+02:00

The call for papers for the 9th Critical Methods Conference in September in Durban is out. The theme is "Trauma in context" and
the deadline is 4 June 2004. The call for papers is at http://www.criticalmethods.org/cmc2004.htm

New critical psychology blog

2004-05-18T09:36:00.000+02:00

This is a new blog started by Desmond Painter and Martin Terre Blanche, but hopefully additional authors will join us in due course. The idea for the blog arose while writing a paper on critical psychology in South Africa. In writing the paper we became aware of the wealth of resources on critical psychology on the web, including much from other disciplines (such as gender studies and media studies) and thought that it would be useful to create additional pointers to it. We don't really have the capacity to try and set up a full-blown portal to critical psychology stuff (and anyway there are q few other sites already doing that), so the informal and ad-hoc nature of a blog seemed just right.

Another reason for starting this blog is to get some enthusiasm going for the 2005 international critical psychology conference in South Africa. More about that later...