“Inequality — The View from Manywheres” with Séamus Powers

The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention warmly invites Séamus Powers on October 1st at 18h30, along with Zed Gao (Associate Professor of Psychology at The American University of Paris) to discuss Powers' latest book: "Inequality: The View from Manywheres." 

During this lecture, Dr. Séamus Power will introduce field social psychology as a conceptual and methodological approach aimed at re-expanding the dominant social psychological paradigm, and consequently, as a way to think of psychology as ‘world-making.’ He will illustrate the utility of this approach through two examples from one line of my research concerned with social movements. The first example is based on prolonged field work in Ireland where he examined dynamics of (non)protest during an economic recession and subsequent recovery. The second example, with colleagues from Oslo, used field social psychology to understand the motivations of protesting youth in Norway who were concerned with political inaction to mitigate climate change. He will end by discussing the implications of field social psychology and the possibilities of conceptualizing social psychology as, and for, world-making.

Séamus Power is Associate Professor of Cultural Psychology at the University of Copenhagen. He has been Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University and the University of Chicago, and he is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics. He serves as President (2024–2027) of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology, a section of APA Division 5. His research examines the scopes, limits, and possibilities for accommodating diverse cultural practices within Western liberal democracies, as well as the development of more ethical forms of capitalism in an era marked by climate change and political polarization. His book "Inequality - The View from Manywheres" and his edited volume "The Psychology of Serious Everyday World Problems", co edited with Robert Sternberg (Cornell) and Fathali Moghaddam (Georgetown), are both published by Cambridge University Press.