Speaker
Ian Parker, Leicester University, England
Title
Critical and 'Applied' Psychology: Theoretical Concepts that Question the Disciplinary Community
Abstract
This paper responds to a set of problems in contemporary psychology that cluster around the notion that the discipline might be ‘applied’ to the real world, and that such application would thereby serve as the methodological and conceptual grounding for ‘political psychology’. The specific problems addressed comprise ‘interpretation’ of material in the quantitative and qualitative traditions, the notion of ‘application’ as such which rests on the prior modelling of individual and collective psychological phenomena, the conceptions of ‘politics’ that operate in disciplinary interventions, the idealisation of ‘community’ in different traditions of community psychology in the US and Europe, and finally ‘psychology’ itself as the background against which these other problems are elaborated. In response to these problems the paper describes political theoretical concepts from feminist interventions in Left practice and brings them to bear on the discipline of psychology, turning the direction of travel of concepts around so that psychology itself rather than the outside world becomes the object to which ideas are ‘applied’. The five political theoretical concepts described here are ‘performativity’, ‘standpoint’, ‘the personal as political’, the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ and ‘intersectionality’.
Bio
Ian Parker is a Professor of Management at the University of Leicester, and has held visiting Professor positions at the University of Manchester (in Education), at Birkbeck, University of London (in Psychosocial Studies), at University of Roehampton (in Psychology) and at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (in Human and Community Development). His research and writing has been primarily in the field of psychoanalysis, psychology and social theory, with a particular focus on discourse, critical psychology, mental health and political practice. These fields underscores his broad interest on how subjectivity is formed and managed in contemporary culture, and on the way organisational forms reproduce social relationships. He is currently Managing Editor of the Annual Review of Critical Psychology, as well as co-founder and co-director (with Professor Erica Burman), of the Discourse Unit. He is also a practicing psychoanalyst, trained with the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. Details of his publications in different languages can be found at his personal website.