Inauguration of SFU Berlin’s new English Programmes
28.10.2025, 18:00 at SFU Berlin

Featuring

Inaugural lecture by Alexandra Rutherford and Wade Pickren 
Psychology in Polycrisis: Relationality, Regeneration, Resistance

Followed by wine + pretzel reception

Speaker bios:

Dr. Alexandra Rutherford (York University, Toronto) is a multiple award-winning psychologist who uses critical historical and qualitative approaches to analyze the development and contemporary status of the human sciences. Her work explores how psychologists have used their scientific ‘expertise’ to impact society and how, in turn, social and political factors have shaped the nature of this expertise and its influence. One of her current projects constructs an intersectional history of 20th century U.S. psychology that examines how the formations of race, gender, and sexuality and their corresponding social movements have braided together in the field’s theories, practices, disciplinary evolution, and activism.

 

Dr. Wade Pickren is a psychologist, writer, and editor with a sustained commitment to the practice of environmental, racial, and social justice. For over 20 years, Dr. Pickren has sought in his scholarship and daily work to draw principles of freedom from a deep understanding of our historical/cultural context and to counter oppression, discrimination, and exploitation. His current focus is the development of a regenerative psychology that will help institutions and individuals develop social-ecological resilience and foster deep adaptation in our time of ecological crisis. His scholarly work examines the enduring impacts of coloniality of being and knowledge on human thought and practice and proposes a pluriversal approach to inquiry that may diminish the historically oppressive character of the scholarly disciplines.

 

Department Psychology
Sigmund Freud Private University Berlin
Campus Tempelhof
Columbiadamm 10, Tower 9
12101 Berlin – Tempelhof
E-Mail: psychologie@sfu-berlin.de
Web: https://psychologie.sfu-berlin.de/en/