On the evening of October 28, the SFU Berlin celebrated the inauguration of its new English-language programmes in Psychology. Alumni, lecturers, and members of the public joined Bachelor/Masters students from over 20 different countries to celebrate, to get to know one another, and to begin critical conversations about how to build the kind of psychology we need to respond to the intensifying crises of our time.  Dr. Kate Sheese opened the event with warm words of welcome and reflected on the simultaneously thrilling and daunting task of launching psychology programmes committed to scientific rigour and integrity, critical pedagogy, justice, and equality at this particular moment in global history.  Dr. Sheese expressed the hope that – together in this place – we might build what Josh Clegg (2022) calls a committed pedagogical/research praxis by, as he puts it:

Asking questions.
Together.
In a place.

The celebration featured a critical visionary lecture by Dr. Alexandra Rutherford and Dr. Wade Pickren, Psychology in Polycrisis: Relationality, Regeneration, Resistance.  Dr. Rutherford and Dr. Pickren invited us to reflect on psychology’s role in the current moment of polycrisis.  They constructively invited us to consider how the discipline has contributed to creating and sustaining this polycrisis and where – if dramatically reconfigured – it might help us navigate through and beyond it. Ana Flávia Bonito and Ilayda Tangil, students specializing in Clinical Psychology and Public Mental Health, offered a commentary on the talk, reflecting on the invisibilization of critical, liberatory, decolonial perspectives in mainstream psychology education.  They discussed the new ideas, complicated emotions, thorny questions, and hopeful horizons that have surfaced as they engage more deeply these perspectives in their Masters education, particularly in their course on Ecopsychology taught by Dr. Pickren. 

Lively discussions carried on throughout the following wine and pretzel reception and will continue to evolve as students, faculty, alumni, and community members return to the question of how we can contribute to building, in the words of Rutherford and Pickren, “a new kind of psychology – one that resists and de-links from its collusion with modernity/coloniality, embraces relationality, and sets its sights on regeneration, can play a role in helping us navigate through the polycrisis and what may lie beyond it.”

References
Clegg, J. W. (2022). Good science: Psychological inquiry as everyday moral practice. Cambridge University Press.

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