2nd Innsbruck Conference on Critical Applied Psychology
Capitalism, Crisis, Critique & Change – July 13-16 2026
University of Innsbruck, Campus Universitätsstraße (Grauer Bär/SOWI)
Call for Contributions
The aim of this conference is to mobilize, connect, and reinforce the community of critical scholars in applied psychology and allied social science disciplines. Rooted in critical work and organizational psychology, we also invite critical contributions from social, political, environmental, and other areas of psychology as well as from sociology, management and organization studies, social philosophy, geography, heterodox economics, and ecology, among others. Specifically, we seek contributions from scholars who identify with a fundamentally critical scientific paradigm, drawing on various traditions of critical theory and social critique, socio-historical and dialectical analysis, deconstructionist and reflexive approaches, but, most importantly, are guided by radical humanist ethics and emancipatory epistemological interest. Living our commitment to criticalizing research, we encourage academics who are aiming to move their research into a more radical socio-critical direction to engage with the community of scholars at the conference. Practitioners, social and political activists, union and other worker representatives, and advocates of democratic and alternative organizations and economic models are invited to enrich our debate. To facilitate diversity, the conference will feature different types of contributions from keynote speeches and full-length presentations to shorter talks and poster presentations, themed symposia, panel discussions, workshops, and special sessions. The final mode of the contributions will be decided by the organizing committee based on relevance, development, and constraints in time and space.
The motto of the conference expresses our intentions: Capitalism, Crisis, Critique, and Change. The current incarnation of neoliberal capitalism has catapulted the world into a devastating economic, social, political, and ecological polycrisis, which necessitates not only theory-based dialectic analysis and critique, but also concrete proposals and actions for change to initiate and guide the necessary socio-ecological transformation of the economy, organizations, and society. Starting out from the sphere of production or labor process and the psychology of subjects, our vision is to concentrically expand our horizon to subsume meso- and macro-psychological and sociological perspectives towards an interdisciplinary understanding of work, organizations, economy, society, and transformational social movements. Exemplary topics involve issues of power and control, ideologies, inequalities and injustice, oppression and resistance, feminist and post-colonial perspectives, marginalized and precarious groups and identities, alternative organizations and post-capitalist economic models, socio-ecological crisis and transformation, ecosocialism, radical humanist ethics, and critical philosophy of science. Within the core focus on socio-critical approaches, the conference seeks to be a pluralist and inclusive space for critical perspectives from different disciplines and traditions to engage in dialogue and freely associate.
This is the second conference organized by the Innsbruck Group on Critical Research in Work and Organizational Psychology (I-CROP), supported by the international network for the Future of Work and Organizational Psychology (FoWOP). Highlights from the first conference in 2022 were summarized in a special issue of the Journal Psychology of Everyday Activity and can be downloaded here (http://www.allgemeine-psychologie.info/wp/journal-volume-16-number-1/). This time, a proceedings volume will be published (projected with Innsbruck University Press) and all authors presenting at the conference will be approached for short manuscripts of their contributions.
Submission will be accepted starting in late August 2025
Early Submission Deadline: 25.10.2025 (acceptance late December 2025)
Final Submission Deadline: 26.01.2026 (acceptance early March 2026)
Registration and participation will be free of charge.
Download Call for Contributions: [.pdf]