Two York professors, Thomas Teo and Alexandra Rutherford, will deliver invited keynotes at an international workshop in Germany that focuses on “Territories of Critique.”
The workshop, running Sept. 14 and 15, is funded by the University of Lübeck and the German Science Foundation, and seeks to historicize multiple lines of critique in psychology from its formation as a discipline to the present day, and ask how critical perspectives can enrich current debates in psychology.
Teo and Rutherford are internationally known scholars and faculty members in the Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies of Psychology program in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health at York University. This program offers psychology students advanced study of what kinds of knowledge have come to count in psychology and why, and the ethical questions that face the discipline. It was recently included as a member of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs based out of the University of California, Berkeley.
In his presentation in Germany, Teo will offer a framework for reclaiming subjectivity as a core issue for psychology. Rutherford will historicize the relationship between feminism and psychology, exploring how this relationship has affected psychologists’ engagement with gender and gender ideologies.
Both projects are supported by Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grants. The workshop, with additional keynotes by Emily Martin of New York University and Morten Nissen of Aarhus University in Copenhagen, brings together scholars from all over North America and Europe to establish a starting point for developing a general perspective on psychological humanities as a multidisciplinary field, consisting of philosophy, ethics and history.