World-Making: Field social psychology and processes of social change

Abstract

I introduce the idea of social psychology as world-making. This conceptualization, illuminated by field research, aims to re-expand the dominant social psychological paradigm and create space for different ways of thinking about social psychology. I illustrate the forms and possibilities of this approach through various research projects. First, I will discuss my research on social change, protest movements, and capitalism.  Next, I will discuss how social psychology contributed to the making of new social realities, and to the study of people making these social realities, in the context of Covid-19. Third, I will present research illustrating that multiculturalism, not ethnonationalism, is the dominant cultural model in the United States. I end by outlining the big questions that motivate my current and future research and by considering the implications of viewing social psychology as world-making.

Bio

Séamus A. Power is an associate professor of cultural and political psychology at the University of Copenhagen. He is a Visiting Senior Fellow in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science and has been a visiting associate professor at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. His PhD and MA are from the transdisciplinary Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He has an MPhil in Social and Developmental Psychology at the University of Cambridge. His BSc in Applied Psychology is from University College Cork. Power researches the scopes, limits, and possibilities of cultural pluralism in Western liberal democracies and processes of economic inequality, morality, and the pursuit of human capabilities. His research has been featured in media outlets including The Guardian, Scientific American, and The Atlantic. He is President-Elect of the A.P.A. Division 5 Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology. His forthcoming book, with Cambridge University Press, is titled “Inequality – the view from manywheres.”