A blog about problems in the field of psychology and attempts to fix them.

Friday, November 2, 2012

Eco and Embodied Special Session

Continuing to try to organize interested people:
Next year ICPA will be in Lisbon and APA will be in Hawaii.

At ICPA I would love to try to work with people to put some special sessions together. I have heard some interest in putting together a session on ecological psychology and social psychology. Andrew and Sabrina (over at Two Scientific Psychologists) " have been making a compelling argument that ecological psychologists should "pull together" to attack a particular problem or set of problems, and a workshop/discussion on that might be very useful. I also think there would also be interest in a session on "allied approaches" (e.g., embodied cognition, enactivism, PCT). As many of the latter seem to have a stronger showing in Europe than in the US, Lisbon might be a particularly good opportunity.

At APA, the possibility of a massive number of official talks is slim. However, there is the possibility of doing some really innovative stuff in the Division Suit - on the scale of having in reserved for several hours each day for talks and discussion on embodiment issues, etc. This would effectively create a mini-conference. It could also be combined with some sort of formal session towards the end of the conference. Having just been teaching my class about Titchener's experimentalists and the Psychology Roundtable (both of which featured James Gibson, by the way), it would be really cool if people were interested in this.

If any of those possibilities sound interesting to you, reply below.

4 comments:

  1. We like the idea of a meeting but Sabrina and I are fairly booked up next year with conferences already. We do have an idea we may adapt to go after this information issue, though, stay tuned.

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  2. Worth noting:

    ICPA will soon make its call for papers, and will have a January 15th deadline, giving us a bit to figure things out.

    APA, in contrast, has a November 20th deadline for presentations that will be in the main conference. Division 1 Suite programming will be decided later, but if people were interested in reserving a venue for more public discussion, we would need to put a proposal together quickly. APA's call can be found here: http://www.apa.org/convention/call-for-programs.pdf
    The most logical thing to do would be to line up interested parties for a "conversation hour" about unifying psych and/or embodied cognition (and affiliated approaches).

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  3. I would welcome some kind of "allied approaches" meeting in Lisbon (if you're still checking this entry...).

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