Crossing Lines: Transdisciplinary Encounters on Mental Health and the Psychosocial

21-22 February, 2026

Minerva Han, Karaköy/İstanbul

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Stephen Frosh (University of Birkbeck, London) & Dr. Noreen Giffney (Ulster University)

We live in solemn times shaped by intensifying inequalities, environmental destruction, authoritarian populism, cultural polarization, and global precarity. The effects of these overlapping crises are not only visible in economic and political life; they are also inscribed on our bodies, minds, and relationships. The escalating mental health crisis around the world is not separate from these conditions but a symptom and expression of them.

This two-day symposium responds to a growing awareness that mental health cannot be understood in isolation from the social world, nor can it be adequately addressed by any single discipline. What we are experiencing, as social theorist Nancy Fraser has argued, may be called a crisis of “cannibal capitalism” – a system that consumes the very institutions that once made its survival possible, including care work, ecological stability, and democratic life. At the same time, thinkers like Wendy Brown highlight that our times are defined by growing trends of nihilism – a moment where the erosion of meaning, solidarity, and public trust gives rise to despair, alienation, and reactive politics.

In this environment, mental health is increasingly individualized, medicalized, and privatized, even as it becomes a terrain on which structural violence and social contradictions are played out. The very frameworks we use to understand and treat psychological suffering often exclude or flatten the lived experiences of those most affected by systemic injustice – queer, trans*, crip, racialized, ethnic, displaced, and economically marginalized communities.

This symposium invites researchers, clinicians, and activists to cross monodisciplinary, institutional, and epistemic lines in order to critically reimagine the psychosocial in our current moment. This is not simply a symposium on mental health, it is also an invitation to reframe what counts as knowledge, what counts as care, and who gets to define the terms of either.

We draw inspiration from feminist, queer,  trans*, crip, mad, decolonial, and liberationist traditions in psychology, social sciences, and humanities, which offer not only critiques of existing power structures but also tools for rethinking knowledges, care, subjectivity, and collective life. We question dominant models that devalue the lived knowledges of the oppressed. And we seek to create new alliances between the clinical and the social, the academic and the activist, the theoretical and the experiential. We call for contributions that are committed to unsettling dominant norms and imagining alternative futures of research, care, accountability, and collective life.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

●        Queer, feminist, trans*, mad, crip, and decolonial psychologies

●        Liberationist and trauma-informed psychotherapy

●        Anti-psychiatry and critiques of diagnostic regimes

●        Representations of madness, trauma, and healing in literature, film, and digital media

●        Cultural and literary narratives of suffering and survival

●        Ethics of “witnessing” and relational, situated approaches to suffering and testimony

●        Environmental crisis, eco-anxiety, and eco-grief

●        Migration, displacement, and mental health

●        Racialized, ethnic, and gendered mental health disparities

●        Participatory, insurgent and critical research methodologies

●        Autoethnography, narrative medicine, critical ethnography, and affective methods

●        Epistemic injustice, violence, and marginalization of non-dominant knowledge forms

●        Collective care, mutual aid, and grassroots healing practices

We welcome proposals from across disciplines and sub-disciplines (i.e., psychological sciences, clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, religious studies, social work, gender studies, queer studies, political science, statistics, health sciences, history, translation studies, and more) and positionalities, including early-career scholars, high-achieving undergraduate students, master’s and doctoral students, early career scholars, experienced academics, clinicians, activists, and practitioners.

●        Abstract (max 250 words)

●        Short bio (max 150 words)

●        Language of Submission and Presentation: English only.

●        Submission Deadline: November 30

●        Notification of Acceptance: December 30