2nd ASN Conference: “Making Connections”
Loughborough University, U.K.
3-5 September 2012
John Cromby, Steve Brown and Steve Vallance
The session consisted of two papers followed by a discussion. The first paper set out some of the shortcomings of mainstream psychology, and surveyed some of the potentials associated with influential strands of Marxist psychology. The second drew on Deleuze and the notion of immanence to posit a possible basis for a non-foundational psychology that might, perhaps, be compatible with anarchism. Ten or so people attended the session and took part in the discussion, which uncovered some interesting tensions between US and European interpretations of psychology’s political potentials. The core message of the symposium was that psychology’s treatment of social relations as context, rather than as both constituents and as conditions of possibility, and this was well received by most. Unsurprisingly, however, no firm conclusions were reached and there remains an interesting territory to be explored here at the intersection of social science with individual experience.