ENPA 2025 Conference

This year’s theme explores the emerging intersections of psychological anthropologies and anthropological psychologies, fostering dialogue on the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. We seek contributions from anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars from related disciplines who wish to present their research, share reflections, and imagine future collaborations at the crossroads of these fields.

We aim to catalyze innovations in interdisciplinary engagements, particularly regarding: Methodological, theoretical, and conceptual reflections/Challenges to universalizing theories and interventions in the face of power asymmetries and critical epistemologies/Decolonizing and diversifying research methods, infrastructures, and curricula/Retrospective, current, and forward-looking perspectives on interdisciplinary work in academic and non-academic contexts. 

The conference invites research papers and contributions on methodological, theoretical, and conceptual innovations and reflections on the potential of anthropologies and psychologies that are increasingly concerned with power asymmetries, critical epistemologies, and the effects of universalizing theories and interventions. In the face of growing human and non-human interconnectedness, psychological anthropology fosters insights into new forms of inequality, violence, and human subjectivity. The assumption that psychological and bio-psychiatric insights are to be imposed on human experience and behavior is itself open to question, creating tensions between universalizing and relativizing understandings of the human condition that collaborations between anthropology and psychology are uniquely positioned to address.

In addition to exploring current interdisciplinary engagements, the conference highlights perspectives on diversifying and decolonizing research methods, infrastructures, and curricula. Such self-reflexive and collaborative lenses seem paramount as they challenge hegemonic key assumptions on feeling, thinking, interacting, or learning.

Founded more than 1200 years ago, the city of Münster looks back on plenty of history. In 1648, Münster became a city of peace when the Treaty of Westphalia was signed here. After the Napoleonic era, the city became the capital of the Province of Westphalia. Severely damaged in World War II, Münster was rapidly rebuilt in the 1950s. Today, the combination of old street network and modern buildings attracts a large number of tourists from all over the world. Nationally, Münster is known for its high quality of life and for being the unofficial “bicycle capital” of Germany, with a rich environmentalist culture and innovative infrastructure designed to accommodate cyclists. 

With more than 300 000 inhabitants, of which nearly twenty percent are students, Münster is an important economic and scientific centre in the northwestern part of Germany. It can easily be reached by car, train and plane (for more details, see travel information). The city hosts the University of Münster, including the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, which focuses on transregional studies of Africa and South-East-Asia. Through interdisciplinary exchange, the institute aims to broaden understandings of social, socioeconomic and affective phenomena across cultures.