Oral Presentation by Laya Hooshyari¹
¹ University of Manchester, United Kingdom
TIME: Wednesday, 15 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 1
Session: 9
Abstract
Since its emergence, critical psychology has insisted on the inseparability of theory and practice. Drawing on traditions such as historical materialism, dialectical analysis, feminism, and critical theory, it has persistently challenged mainstream psychology for individualising suffering, naturalising capitalist social relations, and erasing the material conditions of life (Holzkamp, 1983; Fox et al., 2009; Parker, 2015). Yet this paper argues that, despite its analytical richness and political commitment, critical psychology currently faces a profound crisis at the level of program and praxis: critique has expanded, while the development of concrete, sustainable, and transferable forms of collective intervention has remained limited. In many cases, critical engagement is confined to exposing dominant clinical, therapeutic, or psychoanalytic frameworks—an intervention that is often necessary and justified. However, critique frequently becomes an end in itself rather than a point of departure for constructing alternatives. The result is a form of “critique without program”: theoretically radical but practically insufficient for addressing the urgent psycho-social needs of communities living under conditions of exploitation, displacement, racism, precarity, and structural violence. This situation risks reproducing precisely the separation between theory and practice that critical psychology originally sought to overcome. Collective Memory Work (CMW) represents one of the more systematic attempts to bridge this divide, linking lived experience, social analysis, and collective reflection, particularly within feminist contexts (Haug, 1987; Haug et al., 2007). Nevertheless, this paper argues that CMW also encounters structural limitations, including uneven accessibility, reliance on high levels of cultural capital, and a tendency to circulate primarily within white, middle-class, and academic spaces. These limitations are not incidental but symptomatic of a broader problem within critical psychology: the absence of diverse, context-specific, and struggle-oriented psycho-political programs capable of translating critical analysis into sustained collective action. The paper contends that the future of critical psychology depends on an explicit shift from critique as an endpoint to critique as a moment within a constructive political project. Moving beyond critique requires the deliberate development of psycho-political programs that integrate critical consciousne