International

The future has never been as present as it is today. Orientation toward the future can be conceptualized in simplified terms as positive or negative attitudes (optimism or pessimism), but also in utopian and dystopian fictions. In our time, technological, environmental, political, and social changes coincide in ways that are difficult for people to predict and imagine. Old familiar stories, patterns, and certainties begin to falter. For psychology and the social sciences, this requires complex engagement with the products of human, material, and ecological interaction, and the drivers of global change.

How can we anticipate future challenges, develop and implement sustainable concepts, and contribute ideas on how to resist dystopian political visions and warnings?

The two-week international Summer School “The Future Now?! Interdisciplinary Psychological Perspectives on Global Ruptures, Challenges, and Actions” of the IPU Berlin addressed these questions from sociological, psychological and psychoanalytic perspectives. In a multifaceted program consisting of lectures, workshops, discussion and reflection groups, and field trips, international scholars and students engaged with the following topics: