The application period for Working Groups, Workshops and artistic-creative Proposals has ended.

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Deadline: April 12, 2024

The organizing team of the 10th International Conference of Community Psychology (ICCP) and the Meeting of Socio-community experiences in Universitary Extension, calls teachers, professionals, social organizations and public in general to participate in this event with the motto:

Logo Reinventing life together

The themes that will organize the exchange are the following

Faced with the intensification of the destructive power of capitalism, forms of collective action and resistance are renewed and reinvented. We are witnessing new expressions that challenge traditional forms of organization and forms of politics: they build horizontal, reticular, multicentric relationships, with diffuse and flexible limits; they resist the search for homogeneity, unity and identity, supporting heterogeneity, plurality and dispersion; They accommodate tension and contradiction and deal with differences. Social networks and technology make them up. They challenge the notions of social movement, collective action and community; and academics and professionals in the link with them. We intend to exchange about the collective and the common as practices of reproduction of life, identifying their conditioning, limits and potential. ¿What type of political subjectivity do these modalities of collective expression construct? ¿What is its transformative potential? ¿What bonds do we weave with them? ¿What challenges do they pose for university extension and community psychology?
Territorial transformations in environmental, urban and rural terms invite us to reflect on the collective processes linked to them in their disputes for life. We propose to exchange conceptual approaches to the environmental, territorial and spatial (socio-environmental justice, political ecology, rurality, right to the city) and on the collective action linked to it. Capitalist city, new forms of accumulation and urban life; discourses, uses and appropriations of public spaces; neighborhood territorialities; migration and human mobility; territorial conflicts; access to urban and rural land; agroecology and food sovereignty; human-nature-machine link, are some problems that this axis involves. ¿What implications does the community, the common and the public have in the city and in rural areas? ¿How do groups deploy their actions in contexts of commercialization, privatization and dispossession of the means of existence? ¿How has Community Environmental Psychology contributed to understanding and intervening in relation to them? ¿How does the University contribute through its extension actions?
Participatory intervention and research methodologies have a long history and have been a fundamental contribution to community work and university extension taking into account their commitments to social transformation. They have been nourished by the advances and developments of qualitative methodologies and more recently, by feminist epistemology, without abandoning the contributions of Participatory Action Research and Popular Education. At the same time, the notion of social intervention has been problematized and challenged by its risks of reproducing colonial relations and domination. We are interested in exchanging experiences that show other forms of connection with organizations and groups and that enable ethical-political articulations aimed at the construction of solidarity practices and alternative imaginaries. ¿What epistemological and methodological tools contribute to the reinvention of the common in the link between academics/professionals and groups? ¿What are we learning from the experiences in which we participate?
The achievements of the social states of progressive governments to operate on structural inequalities are necessary but insufficient to ensure a dignified life. The crisis of legitimacy of democratic governments in contexts of economic recessions, clientelistic practices, corruption and collusion with repressive or criminal groups, calls into question the meaning of collective construction, prioritizing a conservative project that appeals to individual capacity and promises a society of “privileges for all.” In this context, ¿how do we think about the role of the State in relation to the reproduction of life in common, from community psychology and university extension practices? ¿How do we work from and with community networks, maintaining their autonomy and capacity to demand, and in coordination with the State? ¿How do we work from institutions and teams that operationalize public policy tasks in contexts of suffering and precariousness of life? ¿Is it possible to think about forms of public affairs and politics that enable the expression of conflict, differences, and accommodate the inventive capacity and collective action? Is it possible to communalize the public?
The emergence of care issues challenges public policies and occupies the academic field in a context that has been defined as a “care crisis” (Montes Ruiz, Moreno Pérez, 2023), taking on new dimensions after the Covid pandemic. We invite the exchange of experience and the production of knowledge, considering that the organization of care involves practices and conceptions about what it means to care and who should do it; ¿What is the experience and life trajectory of both those who care and those who require care? ¿how care is linked to the notion of interdependence?; ¿how it is thought from the perspective of community health?. Care tasks are feminized, which makes invisible the so-called informal care and its place in the reproduction of life in everyday life, knowing that they do not imply the same thing for everyone depending on the social place occupied and the different territorial realities. ¿What place does the collective dimension of care have? ¿What does the knowledge produced in university extension processes contribute to us in this sense? ¿How is community psychology addressing this field of problems?
With capitalism, a patriarchal worldview became hegemonic, a rationality of exclusion that entails unprecedented violence on people and life. We are witnessing expressions of colonialism, predatory logics where difference and otherness is subjected, dynamics of polarization that are expressed not only explosively in open conflicts (femicides, extermination practices, discrimination, criminalization, confinements) and the persistence of structural violence (economic, gender, ethnic-racial, stages of the life cycle and territorial), but what Waquant (2007) names as “silent or slow disturbances” that can go unnoticed. ¿What challenges does everyday violence pose to socio-community practices of university extension in the current situation? ¿How is it put into play, how is it faced and resisted? ¿How does it impact subjective productions and the dynamics of sociability from the perspective of community psychology? ¿How to recreate other relational rationalities?
Community psychology is a field of knowledge and action that has managed to consolidate itself worldwide with heterogeneous developments according to regional particularities. The validity of the postulates that gave rise to it is undeniable, since the inequalities and social injustices that founded its need remain, have deepened and adopted new forms. The critical nature of community psychology in relation to social phenomena, to the ways of producing knowledge and working with groups to generate other possible worlds, means that it is constantly under review. Currently, dialogues with feminist epistemology, decolonial approaches and perspectives on the common are promising for reinventing a community psychology that widely goes beyond its disciplinary limits. ¿What and how are the paths in this reinvention? ¿What demands do current realities and practices place on us and how to respond to them? ¿How does community psychology contribute to the reinvention of the common?
The current scenario invites us to rethink the frameworks of training proposals for professionals and academics, the production of knowledge and its dissemination and the link with society. University institutions are permeated by cognitive capitalism, by commercialization and privatization, which threatens the democratization of knowledge and ethical and political responsibility for social problems. The capacities of teachers and students are the object of capitalist exploitation and co-option, prioritizing discourses of quality and productivity that affect the specific conditions of work and study. We invite you to reflect on the challenges that this poses for training in community work and for the link between the university and social actors, including pedagogical devices within the framework of socio-community experiences of university extension. ¿How can we provoke in educational scenarios, knowledge co-production and extension, events capable of generating encounters and producing social ties between students, teachers and groups with which we work?

The planned format of sessions contemplates the following

1. Round Tables

They will last an hour and a half, with no more than three members. They will function as a conversation between national and foreign guests to address key thematic axes. The moderator will ask questions to guide the exchange and then open it to the rest of the participants. It is intended that they function as input for the Working Groups

2. Work groups

This format involves two moments in the call:

2a. Presentation of proposals for Working Groups (WG).

The WGs are collective spaces to exchange on the central theme of the event or one of its thematic axes. They are proposed by previously formed teams and may have more than one work session during the event, distributing the contributions they receive. Each session will have a maximum duration of two hours. The proposing team of each WG will evaluate the summaries of those who apply to participate in it.

Teams applying for this modality must present a summary that contains: presentation of the proposing team, rationale for the proposal, questions that will guide the exchange and discussion, and methodology. Once their proposal is accepted by the organizing team, they must designate a reference to communicate with.

2b. Call for participation in Working Groups.
After the WG proposals are approved, the presentation of summaries will be called to participate in each of them. Those who wish to participate in any of the WG must present a summary that contains the way in which, through their research, extension, professional, activist, etc. experience, they will contribute to the reflections and responses to the questions formulated by the proposing team of the WG to which you are applying. 

Clarification: At the end of February, the Working Groups that were approved will be published on the website. In March the call for contributions will be opened to participate in them.

3. Human libraries

They are spaces for close conversation between the public and academic, professional or invited social organization leaders. Based on an orienting guide, they will share their experiences and aspects that allow them to reflect on the central theme of the event and its thematic axes.

4. Workshops

They are spaces of collective production in which common techniques in social-community work will be used, enabling diverse expressive languages. Those who apply to coordinate a workshop must present a summary with the objectives and rationale of the proposal, as well as the methodology and the maximum number of participants.

5. Artistic-creative proposals

It consists of the presentation of experiences and themes through artistic-creative resources such as performances, installations, interventions in public spaces, audiovisual productions, literary rounds, or others. Those who apply for the presentation of these proposals must present a summary with the objectives and rationale, the methodology, the characteristics of the space(s) and resources required, and the maximum number of participants (if applicable).

6. Tours and/or exchange spaces with community experiences

Instances of meeting with members of community experiences of university extension, the professional field and/or social organizations. These proposals will be coordinated with the organizing team.

7. Pre-congress activities

On Monday 9/9 and Tuesday 9/10 in the morning, pre-conference workshops or courses will be held by invitation.

8. Central conferences

Proposals

Contributions to participate in the Work Groups

Deadline: April 12, 2024

Note: The modality of Round Tables, Human Libraries, Tours and/or exchange spaces with community experiences, Central Conferences and pre-congress activities will be in charge of the organizing team.