Format/Structure

Panel and Workshop

Long Abstract

Joanna Macy, the influential creator of The Work That Reconnects, passed away on 19 July 2025. Her death comes at a time of increasing interest in the political ecologies of healing. Her pioneering work, which synthesises deep ecology, Buddhist practice and systems thinking, has inspired scholarship and interventions that explore the intersection of ecological crisis and healing practices within social and political frameworks.

But Macy's work is just one of many efforts, some more institutionalised than others, to address today's multiple socio-environmental crises. Nowadays, environmental movements all over the world are increasingly seeking to integrate internal processes and practices for addressing emotional distress and anger amid escalations of environmental degradation, climate disruptions, ecocides and wars. At the same time, psychotherapy is called upon to politicise therapy and understand one’s problems as part of an exploitative system, and not just as unfortunate issues of one individual.

In this workshop, we invite presentations of experiences, reflections, methodologies, artistic expressions, and/or life experiences that help us understand which psychosocial, ecological, and political processes contribute – or fail to contribute – to socio-environmental healing. With socio-environmental healing, we refer to collective processes that integrate ecological and social processes in order to address the intertwined emotional harms caused by environmental degradation, colonisation, and conflict (González-Hidalgo et al., 2022).

Contributions may relate to, but are not limited to, the following subjects:

Conceptual frameworks, knowledge and wisdom systems that are related to the political ecologies of socio-environmental healing

Collective strategies for dealing with solastalgia, ecological grief and climate anxiety.

Specific practices and methodologies for collective mapping of impacts and coping strategies for socio-environmental healing

Politicized psychotherapy as a tool for collective healing in environmental and social movements.

Lessons learned from successes, failures and attempts to emotionally survive environmental injustice across the world