Doing Psychology in Unsettled Times

This paper proposes new key ways to thinking about self-organisation in cities in what, I suggest, are increasingly unsettled and turbulent times. The importance of thinking about self-organisation in cities is all the more salient in the current economic and social context where in many parts of the world there is a withdrawal by the state from public involvement and expenditure, which is impacting on urban citizens, particularly those who are vulnerable, in increasing negative ways. Self-organisation is thus an important and key direction for the future, if cities are to remain inclusive, just and responsive to local needs. Yet such self-organisation can only be truly meaningful and effective if it is conducted collaboratively and democratically, involving as many people as possible, particularly those whose voices are not often heard. In so doing, it is also important to recognise that such involvement and democratic participation is not always consensual; rather conflict is inevitable and potentially positive, as people learnt to recognises their differences which are often implicated in power, and to negotiate solutions together.

Back to table of contents Next article APA & MeetingsFull AccessAn Online Approach to ‘Finding Equity Through Advances in Mind and Brain in Unsettled Times’Jacqueline Maus Feldman, M.D.Jacqueline Maus FeldmanSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Mar 2021https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2021.3.28AbstractNo corners have been cut to provide you with an online meeting experience as rich as a live one.Oh, what a splendid APA Annual Meeting program we have planned for you! Because of the unpredictable nature of COVID-19 and out of an abundance of caution, your 2021 APA Annual Meeting is going to be online as well as a “little bit live.” Our “unsettled times” are reflected in the challenges of the pandemic, structural racism, and health inequities resulting in trauma and isolation for our patients and for ourselves. Your Scientific Program Committee (SPC) has developed a meeting that utilizes creative engagement to respond to these challenges. Here is what’s in store for our faculty and attendees:LogisticsAttendees are inivted to participate in the Pre-Conference Expo a day before the meeting to get early access to the Virtual Exhibit Gallery and APA Publishing Bookstore, create a profile, bookmark and add sessions to their calendar, and learn how to navigate the meeting platform.Each day will begin with a plenary session featuring a keynote address on a key topic related to our meeting theme. Anthony Fauci, M.D., will be speaking at the Convocation plenary (see Psychiatric News), and we are now finalizing contracts with other superb speakers.Each plenary session will be followed by three 90-minute blocks of 15 sessions, for a total of 135 sessions over the three days. Attendees will be able to claim up to 13.5 CME credits for attending the live meeting.Each session will begin with a prerecorded 75-minute video played in real time, and attendees will be able to use a chat box to communicate with the presenters. The sessions will end with a live 15-minute Q&A session with the presenters.In the virtual Poster Hall, attendees will be able to interact with more than 1,300 poster presenters.An additional 75 CME credits will be available by purchasing the APA Annual Meeting On Demand 2021 product. It will include over 260 prerecorded 75-minute sessions, as well as the 135 prerecorded sessions held during the online Annual Meeting. More information on APA on Demand will appear in a future issue.For even more CME credit hours, APA’s Division of Education is developing an eight-credit, ABPN- approved MOC-2 self-assessment activity.The ProgramAs noted before, each day begins with a plenary session with a keynote presenter, followed by three blocks of 15 scientific sessions—thus, attendees can view up to four sessions a day. As we have all seen this past year, our country has had to deal with two very challenging issues that will be well represented in sessions at the meeting: diversity and health equity (8% of sessions) and COVID-19 (6% of sessions).Participants will find a breadth of topic areas covering a variety of domains in psychiatry: global, political, and social issues; climate change, community psychiatry, women’s health, telemedicine, psychopharmacology, resident training, emergency psychiatry, ethics, child and adolescent psychiatry, psychedelics and cannabis, and emergency psychiatry. There will also be two presidential town halls on initiatives begun by APA President Jeffrey Geller, M.D., M.P.H., structural racism in psychiatry (see Psychiatric News) and defining the number of hospital beds needed in communities (see Psychiatric News).Just FYI: This year 10 courses will be offered virtually during the summer. The courses will be specifically designed to maximize interaction between faculty and registrants through small learning communities. More information will be available soon.APA’s online 2021 Annual Meeting will be a perfect opportunity to further your understanding of a broad number of issues while earning CME credits and to have live interactions with colleagues in real time during the scientific sessions, Poster Hall, and Virtual Exhibit Gallery. Register now. We look forward to “seeing” you there. ■Jacqueline Maus Feldman, M.D., is chair of APA’s Scientific Program Committee. ISSUES NewArchived

The COVID-19 pandemic has created restrictions on Canadian minor ice hockey that have transformed its social landscape. By conducting online interviews and surveys of hockey parents, we identified how families have struggled and adapted to these 'unsettled' times in the hockey community. Parents emphasized that minor hockey restrictions have negatively affected the psychological and physical well-being of their children as well as their hockey development. While a small minority of parents addressed these concerns by transgressing protocols to keep their children engaged in hockey, most parents responded by finding other activities for their children to participate in, often ones that can strengthen family bonds. The ability of parents to protect the well-being and hockey development of their children was significantly influenced by their socioeconomic status, which may have resulted in financial inequality in child health and minor hockey. Our findings can potentially inform future pandemic restrictions relevant to minor hockey.

This article revisits the case for paying more attention to agency and strategy in theories of post-communist politics and society. The author ana- lyses two trends of major social and political signifi cance in Central and East- ern Europe between 1989 and 2007: the apparent political inconsequentiality of rising unemployment and the causes and consequences of the dramatic decline of organised labour, across a wide variety of political and institutional settings. While the prevailing explanations have emphasised the institutional and ideological legacies of the communist past, the author points to theoreti- cal reasons for why the 'unsettled times' of transformation may have been particularly conducive to elite agency. Looking beyond legacies can shed light on the degree to which elites have channelled the expression of workers' re- form grievances towards socially peaceful but, possibly, politically illiberal repertoires of expression. Pointing to past developments across a number of advanced and developing democracies, the author situates the post-commu- nist labour decline within a larger comparative and historical context. Lastly, the author indicates how the erosion of labour power has infl uenced the par- ticular models of democracy and the varieties of capitalism that have been emerging in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989.

Church, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettled Times. Edited by David A. Roozen and James R. Nieman. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005. viii + 656 pp. $36.00 paper. - Volume 76 Issue 3

This article aims at reflecting on the alleged ‘unsettling times’ of international economic law. To do so, it uses some methodological tools of feminist approaches to international law. With this particular perspective, it aims at voicing the criticisms addressed to this particular branch of international law: its mechanisms of domination, its biases and its unjust character. After an assessment of these problems, the article concludes that what a feminist deconstruction shows is the need for clearer, more transparent and better balanced rules shaping this field.

This research draws on the theory of culture in action, which explains how consumers selectively mobilize their cultural repertoires to understand and solve daily problems. Contemporary life, however, is increasingly unsettled, challenging the adequacy of consumers’ repertoires and how they use existing institutional cultural resources. This qualitative study identifies four ways in which consumers use their cultural repertoires and institutional resources during unsettled times. Formulaic uses are when consumers mobilize familiar cultural tools and existing resources to resettle. Versatile uses are when consumers develop new cultural tools to transform while working within demanding institutional resources. Freewheeling uses are when consumers mobilize familiar cultural tools for play but rework institutional resources to be less demanding. Finally, troubleshooting uses are when consumers extend their existing cultural tools to suffice but reject institutional resources. These varied uses of culture capture how consumers either mobilize or develop their cultural repertoires and institutional resources to serve different ends. This study provides a more dynamic, pragmatic, and nuanced explanation of how consumers summon culture to solve problems during unsettled times. A conceptual model explains this process, and the discussion highlights the theoretical contributions.

* Critical Educational Theory in Unsettling Times Dennis Carlson and Michael W. Apple. State Educational Policy And Curriculum Reform In Unsettling Times * Education in Unsettling Times: Public Intellectuals and the Promise of Cultural Studies Henry Giroux. * Pulp Fictions: Education, Markets, and the Information Superhighway Jane Kenway with Chris Bigum, Lindsay Fitzclarence, and Janine Collier. * Citizens or Consumers? Continuity and Change in Contemporary Education Policy Geoff Whitty. * Respondent: Distressed Worlds: Social Justice Through Educational Transformations Madeleine Arnot. Education, Identity, And The Other * Becoming Right: Education and the Formation of Conservative Movements M. W. Apple and Anita Oliver. * On Shaky Grounds: Constructing White Working-Class Masculinities in the Late Twentieth Century Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, and Judi Addelston. * Self and Education: Reversals and Cycles Philip Wexler. * Respondent: Self Education: Identity, Self, and the New Politics of Education D. Carlson. Reading Curriculum Texts * Danger in the Safety Zone: Notes on Race, Resentment, and the Discourse of Crime, Violence, and Suburban Security Cameron McCarthy, Alicia P. Rodriguez, Stephen David, Shuaib Meecham, Heriberto Godina, K. E. Supriya, and Carrie Wilson-Brown. * Fiction, Fantasy, and Femininities: Popular Texts and Young Womens Literacies Linda Christian-Smith. * Image Is Nothing: Struggling to Unsettle Basal Readers and More Patrick Shannon and Patricia Crawford. * Respondent: Loose Change: The Production of Texts William G. Tierney. Pedagogy And Empowerment * On the Limits to Empowerment Through Critical and Feminist Pedagogies Jennifer M. Gore. * Who Will Survive America? Pedagogy as Cultural Preservation Gloria Ladson-Billings. * Global Politics and Local Antagonisms: Research and Practice as Dissent and Possibility Peter McLaren and Kris Gutierrez. * Respondent: Pedagogy for an Oppositional Community Kathleen Weiler

<p style="text-align:justify">During the second decade of the 21st century families and schools world-wide have been affected by several critical events, with economic recession, the refugee crisis, and lately the COVID-19 pandemic being the most prominent. Pertaining to the school community (students, educators, administration, parents, school personnel etc.), evidence-based interventions for improving mental health and supporting psychosocial adjustment are necessary. In this paper the development, implementation, and evaluation of the international WeCARE (We Connect, Accept, Respect, Empower) program, an online multilevel intervention for promoting well-being and resilience in the school community during unsettling times, is presented. The Program has a multicultural perspective and provides the opportunity to students from different countries to cooperate and develop multicultural skills. The intervention is based on a conceptual model for enhancing positive development, resilience, social and emotional skills, and competence. The interventions were implemented on individual and system levels over four consecutive years, including web-based teachers’ training and supervision, seminars for parents, and classroom implementation. Furthermore, collaboration amongst schools and educational settings was highlighted, in the form of networking at national and international level. Based on the evaluation results, the necessity for further development and implementation of programs for the promotion of resilience and well-being during unsettling times is discussed.</p>

How do autocracies use nationalism to normalize and contain unsettled times? The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked a decisive point in Russia’s politics from which there could be no return to an antebellum normality. Rather than attempt to mobilize the Russian public to war, state-run television sought to normalize the war as a banal reality for domestic audiences. Drawing on a content analysis of 1,575 reports from the state-run First Channel [Pervyi Kanal] from 2022 to 2024, this article argues that the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia — the so-called “new regions” — are crucial to this strategy through their incorporation into banal nationalist depictions of Russia. In turn, televised depictions of residents in the “new regions” confer emotional weight and moral examples for ordinary Russians through their everyday practices: their fortitude in voting for Putin despite ongoing attacks; through their shared excitement in acquiring routine aspects of daily life from passports to pensions; and through their embodiment of Russia’s future. In the process, media depictions normalize imperial nationalist justifications for Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory in terms of the distinctiveness of the Russian people, Russia’s civilizing mission, and presentation of its war as defensive.

11 – An unsettling time during the war years

Russia Gets the Blues: Music, Culture, and Community in Unsettled Times. By Michael Urban, with the assistance of Andrei Evdokimov. Culture and Society after Socialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xx, 179 pp. Notes. Index. Photographs. Figures. 17.95, paper. - Volume 64 Issue 4

Pandemics and other crisis situations result in unsettled times, or ontologically insecure moments when social and political institutions are in flux. During such crises, the ordinary and unnoticed routines that structure everyday life are thrust into the spotlight as people struggle to maintain or recreate a sense of normalcy. Drawing on a range of cases including China, Russia, the UK, and USA, we examine three categories of everyday practice during the COVID-19 pandemic that respond to disruptions in daily routines and seek a return to national normality: performing national solidarities and exclusions by wearing face masks; consuming the nation in the form of panic buying and conspiracy theories; and enforcing foreign policies through social media and embodiment. This analysis thus breaks with existing works on everyday nationalism and banal nationalism that typically focus on pervasively unnoticed forms of nationalism during settled times, and it challenges approaches to contentious politics that predict protest mobilization for change rather than restoration of the status quo ante. In highlighting the ways that unsettled times disrupt domestic and international structures, this work also presents a first attempt to link everyday nationalism with growing work on international practices.

How do individuals form new health beliefs and act in the context of unprecedented uncertainty? Drawing on a unique data set of registered California voters collected a month into stay-at-home orders that allows for an individual-level analysis, we examine the impact of political worldviews on trust in public health institutions and beliefs about the threat of COVID-19, effective methods for preventing the disease, and leaving home during the pandemic. Although all measures of political worldviews are strongly associated with trust in public health institutions and perceptions of threat, beliefs about effective prevention measures, and behavior, we find that Trump approval is particularly associated with COVID-19 risk perception and beliefs, beyond political party affiliation or life circumstances that shape exposure to COVID-19. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for understanding how political worldviews bear on embodied practices and shape the relationship between beliefs and action in unsettled times.

Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), was a student and fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, a centre of Puritan thought in the early seventeenth century. Known for his religious rationalism, he was tutored by Anthony Tuckney and subsequently formed his own circle including John Smith, John Worthington, Ralph Cudworth, Peter Sterry, and Nathaniel Culver‐well – the so‐called Cambridge Platonists. This group incorporated members of Whichcote's family – his niece Mary (married to Worthington), his sister Elizabeth Foxcroft, and her husband and son. In 1645, Whichcote was appointed provost of King's College and, in 1650, vice‐chancellor of Cambridge University. His influential weekly lectures at Trinity Church were considered dangerous by his former tutor Tuckney, while others admired his moral energy in ‘those wild and unsettled times’, when he was said by archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson to have brought more students ‘to a sober sense of religion than any man in that age’ (Tillotson 1683).