Dear Colleagues and Division 24 Members,
As your 2026 Division 24 APA Convention co-chairs, we’re excited to share the Division 24 Call for Proposals for the 2026 APA Convention (August in Washington, D.C).
For the APA Convention, we hope to build on the conversations we’ll begin at the 2026 Spring Meeting, and the Presidential Theme: Madness, Mysticism, and the Reenchantment of Psychology.
So if you are already developing your proposal for the Division 24 conference (at York U in May), we would like to explicitly invite you to submit an extension of that submission to APA. This will allow our community to hold sustained conversation on these topics over the course of the year. Below are links to the two submission portals with their relevant submission deadlines:
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Division 24 Conference
May 14-16, 2026
York University, Toronto
Submission Due December 4th
Submit Proposalopens in new window -
APA Convention
August 6-8, 2026
Washington, DC
Submission Due January January 14th
Submit Proposalopens in new window
Madness, Mysticism, and the Reenchantment of Psychology
To live today is to sense that something essential is slipping from our grasp. We can predict behaviors, quantify symptoms, and map neural activity with unprecedented precision—yet many of us feel dislocated, flattened, alienated from meaning. Our models grow more complex even as our worlds grow thinner.
Psychology, once a study of the soul, has often participated in this shrinking of human life. In Husserl’s terms, we substituted lived experience with abstractions—statistical ghosts that obscure the very phenomena they claim to illuminate. Love becomes circuitry. Suffering becomes a diagnostic code. The self becomes a computational cluster of biases and evolutionary drives.
And yet—other traditions have always resisted this narrowing. Phenomenology, depth psychology, psychoanalysis, humanistic and existential thought, Indigenous and land-based epistemologies: all insist that experience is irreducible, relational, embodied, and historical. They remind us that reenchantment is not nostalgia but critique—an insistence that we confront the forces that have drained our disciplines of wonder: capitalism, coloniality, positivism, and the institutional demand for control.
Madness exposes the fragility of our epistemic order. Mysticism unsettles assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Both remind us that meaning emerges in relation, not domination.
To re-enchant psychology is not to abandon science—it is to revitalize our interpretive, ethical, and poetic capacities. It is to remember that ambiguity is not a failure of method but a truth of existence. It is to let persons and worlds appear again in their depth, their strangeness, and their claim upon us.
We invite proposals that engage with this presidential theme, including (but not limited to):
Mad Studies & the Politics of Sanity
How do experiences of madness challenge prevailing norms of rationality, pathology, and social order? What might a psychology look like that takes mad knowledge seriously?
Critical Psychology & Neoliberal Subjectivity
How do demands for optimization, productivity, and resilience shape the modern psyche? What forms of resistance surface when we question the psychologization of structural injustice?
Indigenous Epistemologies & Ways of Knowing
How might psychology learn from traditions that refuse the separation of mind from land, world, and community? What does relational and ecological knowing reveal about healing and responsibility?
Mysticism, Theology & the Edges of Explanation
Where do psychological explanations falter? How might contemplative or spiritual traditions expand our understanding of perception, suffering, and the self?
Historical, Cultural & Decolonial Critiques of Psychology
How have histories of colonialism, gendered power, and normativity shaped psychological knowledge? How might feminist, queer, postcolonial, and depth perspectives illuminate our current blind spots?
Psychological Humanities & the Poetics of Experience
What can literature, philosophy, or the arts reveal about the symbolic, imaginative, and aesthetic dimensions of psychological life?
Clinical Implications of Reenchantment
How might phenomenological, humanistic, psychoanalytic, or spiritually informed approaches reorient clinical practice? What does it mean to make space for the sacred, the symbolic, or the inexplicable in therapeutic work?
Critical Mental Health Policy & Praxis
How do political economies, legislation, and institutional systems shape lived experience? We welcome work linking theory, activism, and policy reform in mental health care.
Intersectionality & Lived Experience
How do race, class, gender, disability, migration, queerness, and other positionalities shape how psychological distress is lived, named, or silenced? We welcome narrative, participatory, arts-based, and community-engaged approaches.
Critical Methodologies
Phenomenology, critical race theory, feminist and decolonial methods, co-created inquiry, and reflexive approaches that open new ways of seeing what dominant paradigms overlook.
Accepted Formats
- Critical Conversations
Flash Talks
Posters
Skill-Building Sessions
Symposia
We warmly encourage submissions from graduate students, early-career scholars, activists, clinicians, artists, and community researchers. Interdisciplinary and creative work is especially welcome.
Submit Your Proposal
Proposals can be submitted through the APA Convention websiteopens in new window.
On behalf of Division 24, we look forward to reading your imaginative and rigorous submissions—and to gathering in Washington, D.C. to explore what a re-enchanted psychology might make possible.
Sincerely,
Sophia Shieh, MSc
Duquesne University
Program Co-Chair, APA 2026
Ashley Bobak, PsyD
Point Park University
Program Co-Chair, APA 2026