#PATO2021
Conference Tracks
The different tracks in our Psychology & the Other conference offers rich, yet focused, spaces to hone your learning. We offer space for returning tracks to deepen our continuing dialogue while giving way to new emergent ways to engage the Other: ranging from thinkers like Plato, Lacan, and Fanon, and topics such as narrative, technology, and the uncanny. Meet fellows scholars, clinicians, and colleagues who work at the intersection of these frameworks and practices, and join us in conversation. Regardless of the track, our hope continues to point towards the ethical, that the depth of knowledge found in these tracks, can be helpful as we face the responsibility and respond to the Other.
One week following the conference, all video content from the event will be made available to registrants until the end of 2021.
You'll find the complete schedule here.
Plato Symposium
The 20th-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously declared that the western intellectual tradition could be understood as “a series of footnotes to Plato.” But if Plato is the father of western thought, he is certainly an oedipal father -- one whose progeny remain ambivalent toward him, whose influence they both fear and revere. This symposium invites contributors to offer nuanced, non-traditional readings of Plato, readings that not only analyze but build upon the Dialogues by bringing them into conversation with psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and contemporary Continental thought more broadly.
Dante Salon
The Dante Salon returns in 2021! Building on the rousing success of 2019’s gathering and the forthcoming collection Dante & the Other, this latest convivium will respond to and go deeper into the themes of alterity, the ineffable, and how Dante can bridge contemporary philosophy, theology, and psychology to his ancient sources.
Alien Salon
No issue is more critical to contemporary society than the encounter with the other. Yet, whether in nature, culture, politics, or pathology, alterity is too-easily blanketed in banal familiarity. Where can we turn to return the sublime, the ineffable, and the unspeakable to the encounter? This gathering will examine such constructs as the uncanny of Freud or Heidegger, Kristeva’s abject, Levinas’s Other, and Miéville’s abcanny to look with fresh wonder—or horror—upon the extraterrestrials, monsters, alien landscapes, and stranded cosmic travelers of weird, horror, speculative, and science fictions.
Narrative & Psychosocial Dialogues
Whether in our larger society or particular therapeutic relations, our intertwining and dissonant narratives have the ability to heal and to harm, to (re)member or tear asunder. The intention of this track is to bring into dialogue diverse approaches in narrative, psychosocial, existential, and meaning-oriented practices - as well as conceptualizations of the human subject. In particular, attention will be given to questions of human suffering, existential vacuum, racial prejudice, spiritual transcendence, and/or ethical responsibility as it relates to the intersection of persons and larger social order.
Psychoanalytic Ideas on Technology and Subjectivity
The advent of the technological age has altered the fabric of our lives. And while the rapidly changing technological landscape has received intensive commentary in recent years, psychoanalytic ideas have rarely been deployed to conceptualize the nature of our present transformations. The purpose of this track is to create a laboratory within which psychoanalytic formulations can be brought to bear on the impact technology has had on such facets of human life as subjectivity, intimacy, political motivation, interpersonal exchange, thought, desire, attention, vulnerability, and development.
Psychological Humanities & Ethics
At a time when the practice of psychology has become defined by and beholden to the advances and strictures of modern science, many psychologists are expressing the desire for a more mature, capacious discipline. The purpose of the Psychological Humanities and Ethics track is to address that desire by bringing together voices who seek to put the psychological sciences into dialogue with the humanities in order to enrich ethical responses to and languages for human suffering, identity, and potential. We welcome proposals that open the borders of psychology to the contributions of other fields (e.g., philosophy, sociology, history, literature, art, political studies, and theological/religious studies).
Lacan & Race/Fanon & Phenomenology Track
Drawing for the scholarship of upcoming volumes Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory and Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology, this track offers dialogue on phenomenological foundations and psychoanalytic theory as they relate to race.
Lacan & Race: Featuring contributions by Lacanian scholars from diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts, presentations span a wide breadth of topics, including white nationalism and contemporary debates over confederate monuments; emergent theories of race rooted in Afropessimism and postcolonialism; analyses of racism in apartheid and American slavery; clinical reflections on Latinx and other racialized patients; and applications of Lacan’s concepts of the lamella, drive and sexuation to processes of socialization
Fanon & Phenomenology: Featuring contributions from many of the world’s leading scholars on Fanon, this section foregrounds a series of crucial phenomenological topics – inclusive of the domains of experience, structure, embodiment, and temporality – pertaining to the analysis and interrogation of racism and anti-Blackness.