Global Pandemics and Epistemic Crises in Psychology A Socio-Philosophical Approach

Using COVID-19 as a base, this groundbreaking book brings together several renowned scholars to explore the concept of crisis, and how this global event has shaped the discipline of psychology. It engages directly with the challenges that psychology continues to face when theorizing societal issues of gender, race, class, history, and culture, while not disregarding "lived" experiences. This edited volume offers a set of pathways to rethink psychology beyond its current scope and history to become more apt to the conditions, needs, and demands of the 21st century. The book explores topics like resilience, interpersonal relationships, mistrust in the government, and access to healthcare. Dividing the book into three distinct sections, the contributors first examine the current crisis within psychology, then go on to explore how psychology theorizes the subject and the other in a social world of perpetual political, economic, cultural, and social crises, and lastly consider the role of crises in the creation of new theorizing. This is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of theoretical and philosophical psychology, social psychology, community psychology, and developmental psychology.

Psychology in Crisis - An Introduction (Martin Dege and Irene Strasser) Part I: The Psychology of Crises Lessons Learned the Hard Way: Crisis and the Rethinking of Psychological Assumptions About Human Altruism and Agency (Jeffrey S. Reber) Living with Vulnerability: Contemporary Social Trauma, Resilience and Indigenous History (Roger Frie) The Politics of Learning in the Face of a Crisis (Ines Langemeyer) The imaginative co-construction of past and future in times of crisis (Ignacio Brescó De Luna & Floor van Alphen) Part II: Crisis and Relationality Uncertainty – Have we ever been certain? What Pfizer, Billy Graham, Trump, and Psychology have in Common… (Michael Bamberg) The Psychology of Global Crisis through the Lens of Liminal Experience: Stuck in the middle with SARS-CoV-2 (Paul Stenner) Healing in Times of Crisis: Instrumental versus Meaningful Relationships (Brent D. Slife and Zachary Beckstead) Time, the Other, and the Collective Voice. Discernments from a Language Psychological Perspective with Three Dialoguing Voices (Marie-Cécile Bertau, Meghan Klein Toups, Antonia Larrain, and Alejandra Energici) Part III: Theorizing the Political The Coronavirus’ Two Bodies (Clint Burnham) Atmos-Fear and Semiotic Devices: How to Turn the Right to Healthcare into a War (Luca Tateo) Security as Pacification – the Trap of Psychologizing Social Phenomena (Athanasios Marvakis)

Martin Dege is assistant professor of narrative inquiry at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, USA. In his research he investigates how crisis experiences shape our everyday lives and the narratives we tell. Martin is also a scholar of the history of psychology. There he investigates how various theoretical ideas have become intertwined with political interests and power struggles to form the discipline as it stands today. Irene Strasser is assistant professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Her research focuses on lifespan development with an emphasis on adult development and aging. Her work is informed by critical gerontological perspectives, social justice studies, and qualitative approaches, particularly participatory and ethnographic research.