Oral Presentation by Zed Zhipeng Gao¹
¹ The American University of Paris, France
TIME: Wednesday, 15 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 1
Session: 9
Abstract
Applied psychology today occupies a paradoxical position: embedded in institutions that privilege measurement, efficiency, and control, yet continually animated by practitioners and scholars seeking reflexive, socially engaged, and emancipatory forms of work. This paper offers a poststructuralist interpretation of applied psychology as a critical praxis, drawing on the distinction between royal and nomad sciences to conceptualize the discipline’s competing tendencies toward standardization and transformative practice. In A Thousand Plateaus, royal science organizes knowledge through what Deleuze and Guattari describe as an arborescent epistemology that privileges prediction, order, and universal law—a model closely aligned with established methods, centralized authority, and institutional control. Nomad science, by contrast, follows a rhizomatic model of knowing that foregrounds contextual understanding, situated practice, and emergent connection. Yet the two modes are not opposites but dynamically entangled: royal science continually absorbs nomadic innovations, while nomad science cuts loose the contents of royal science to generate new perspectives and practices. This dynamic view helps situate critical and mainstream traditions within a shared, albeit uneven, field of interaction. Viewed through this lens, psychology appears as a discipline shaped by perpetual processes of what Deleuze and Guattari call capture and flight, territorialization and deterritorialization. Mainstream psychology, closely aligned with the technocratic logics of neoliberal capitalism, functions largely as a royal science that translates lived experience into measurable constructs, standardized interventions, and institutionalized norms. Critical, community, feminist, Indigenous, and qualitative psychologies enact nomadic tendencies that foreground context, participation, and relational ethics, yet these impulses are often routed back into the mainstream through professionalization, the expansion of scholarship, funding logics, and managerial discourse. This Deleuzian perspective reframes critical applied psychology’s task: not as simple resistance to dominant structures, but as a praxis of working simultaneously with and against them. In this sense, critical applied psychology becomes a practice of continual renewal, working within shifting terrains that keep emancipatory energies alive without allowing them to harden into new orthodoxies. By negotiating between reifying mains