Call for Papers

British Journal of Social Psychology
Submission deadline for full papers: 31st October 2021
The special issue editors (Geetha Reddy, Clare Coultas and Johanna Lukate) are seeking papers for an upcoming special issue in the British Journal of Social Psychology (BJSP) dedicated towards developing a social psychology of precarity.
Across the social sciences precarity has been advanced as a key concept for studying the social challenges that we face today: in sociology, ‘the precariat’ are conceived as a new category of people (e.g. Standing, 2011; Roy, 2019); in human geography, precarity is analysed as the production of ‘lifeworlds’ characterised by uncertainty and insecurity (Waite, 2009); and in anthropology, attention is put towards ‘collateral afterworlds’ where the redemptive promises of sociality and progress fall short (Wool & Livingston, 2017). Social psychological discussions on this topic are strikingly absent. In a 2015 keynote, Michelle Fine described precarity as a profoundly psychological idea, being “the sense of the predictability of the unpredictable, the experience of contingency and fear, (and how) the deep embodied sense of insecurity is… existential and affective, and it’s in all of our lives”. Precarity is not only something that affects the most marginalised amongst us; it underpins the way society is structured; it is not the exception but the rule (Mahmud, 2015). Nevertheless, precarity is also a ‘politically induced condition’ (Butler, 2009), it is structural (Fine, 2015), and certain populations are more affected than others. Questions remain about how we, as psychological scholars, can better acknowledge and engage with precarity when much of our theorising and methodologies hold presumptions of security, control, and consistency. The COVID-19 pandemic has only further exposed and amplified the precariousness of the lives of many individuals and communities worldwide, painfully highlighting the asymmetries and politically induced differences in people’s exposure to injury, violence and death. We view it as a matter of ethics that psychologists engage with this issue of precarity, and reflect on our own complicity in the political contexts that constitute its continued neglect. more

Workshop organized by  Hania Sobhy (MPI-MMG), Salwa Ismail (SOAS) and Nadine Abdalla (AUC) and supported by the Department Socio-Cultural Diversity, MPI-MMG
30 September – 1 October 2021, Berlin

With the first wave of the Arab Uprisings, it became apparent that new frameworks were needed for understanding the diverse experi-ences, resources and aspirations of Arab pub-lics. The unprecedented scale of collective ac-tion presented serious challenges to the status quo, and triggered major regional and global developments, including a new wave of migra-tion across the Mediterranean that remains at the forefront of European politics.  With still unfolding repercussions, 2019 witnessed a second wave of the Arab uprisings with major protests in five more countries in the region. This workshop explores new ways of thinking about the everyday experiences that shape political outcomes in the Arab region and its diasporas. While many scholars have exam-ined the causes of the uprisings and the institutional arrangement and re-arrangements that followed, little research has been carried out on how the everyday realities, transforma-tions and dislocation are lived by different cat-egories of citizens. more

Special Issue project
Editors: Dora Sampaio and Megha Amrith

Today, two thirds of the world’s older adults live in developing regions, where their numbers are growing faster than in the developed regions. In 2050, it is estimated that nearly 8 in 10 of the world’s older persons (aged 60 years old and more) will be living in developing parts of the world (UN, 2017; 2019). While existing data clearly demonstrate that the numbers of ageing individuals are expected to increase more sharply in Latin America, Caribbean, Asia, and Africa in the forthcoming decades, research agendas have remained primarily focused on ageing populations in the ‘global north’ and the socio-spatial ramifications that these demographic processes have on the ‘global south’. What is overlooked is a recognition of experiences in regions of the south that are themselves ageing and the social transformations and forms of translocal mobility that occur in conjunction. more