Nonviolent psychology: Ideas and practices for addressing social inequalities and environmental catastrophes

In this presentation, we navigate the appelations of anthropocene and andropocene to pursue a vision of nonviolent psychology for a collective response to contemporary grand challenges of environmental catastrophes and social inequalities. These two appellations appear when serving for a catalyst change in front of grand challenges. This is notable not only in theoretical discussions but also implicitly in thinking, in non-academics and activists’ ideologies. On the one hand, anthropocene has appeared as the eco-critical appellation of our current epoch according to which the man is at the core of everything, and he is the one who is destroying everything (Lewis & Maslin, 2015). On the other hand, andropocene becomes widely acknowledged as the subject of inquiry, i.e., the man of anthropocene, calls for attention to the role of andros. If “the man is the measure of everything” in the antropocene, then it becomes critical to understand who is the andros in our epoch. Anthro/adropocene appears as a violent ideology and phenomenology which leads to endemic violent psychosocial elements. In anthros- terms, we consider violent that just mere concept of the man who dominates the world. In andros- terms, we consider violent the primacy of a specific man on everyone. Extending the discourses on the ideology and phenomenology of Anthro/andropocene to a discourse on violence, we entail an ideological and phenomenological work according to which nonviolence (Butler, 2019) represents a fundamental predecessor of a psychology aimed at responding to social inequalities and environmental catastrophes. In this, we advocate the concept of dignity of all the human and non-human (Bal, 2017), and we encompass the ways in which psychology, and particularly Work and Organizational Psychology, and Social Psychology, can realize a nonviolent resistance to anthro/andropocene. Precisely, we explore how nonviolence can mark our meaning-making as species, communities and organizations, and discuss ethical, theoretical and practical possibilities on how a nonviolent psychology can look like. Ambitiously, we advocate nonviolence as a form of resistance and persistence for academics and non-academics that can forge our collective response to environmental catastrophes and social inequalities.