The International Psychologist Newsletter – Spring 2023

ICP 2022 Conference: Student Poster Award Winners

ICP Student News

Report from ICP Representatives at the UN: Call for Action from the Committee on Migration

Eva Sandis

Eva Sandis is one of ICP’s representatives at the United Nations. These representatives participate in UN NGO Committees, and join with other psychology organizations in the Psychology Coalition at the United Nations (PCUN). 

 A CALL TO STOP STEALING CHILDREN’S LIVES

The NGO Committee on Migration calls on world leaders to accelerate their efforts to end child labor by 2025, as the pace of reducing child labor has slowed worldwide. In 2020, 160 million children were engaged in child labor or 1 in 10 children worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and conflicts, including the invasion of Ukraine, have dramatically exacerbated global inequalities in the labor market and gaps between those who have and those who are left behind.  Addressing child labor is essential to attain social justice and protecting children’s lives worldwide.

 Child labor thrives where families are poor and excluded, women and girls are discriminated against, institutions are weak or corrupted, and children have no access to fundamental services, such as physical and mental health, nutrition, child protection, and social protection, education, including Early Childhood Education and Care, and where child labor is considered as a solution for development. Child labor is not only a rights issue, but it is also an economic issue; putting children to work delays economic development, and without economic development, more children find themselves put to work. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty.

Particularly at risk are child migrants, vulnerable to exploitation, discrimination, and violence. Migrant and refugee children in mixed migration situations are amongst the most vulnerable because of the dangers they face crossing borders, being separated from family members, being exposed to trafficking, exploitation, and harm, in addition to having to cope in a foreign country with issues of language, documentation, access to justice, etc.

To stop stealing children’s lives, it is essential to prevent the psycho-social burdens that affect children’s development. It is imperative to increase safe, orderly, and regular channels of migration and admission for refugees and other forced migrants. When families migrate together and are allowed to stay together in the immigration/asylum process, the risk for children is reduced.

International human and labor rights normative standards set legal boundaries for child labor and provide grounds for national and international actions to end it. But we know that most governments have failed to develop effective policy responses to assist and protect child laborers.

Without accelerated action, the international community’s commitment to eradicating child labor by 2025 is practically out of reach, limiting progress on many other SDGs.

The time to act is now, with special attention to prevention-based approaches.

International Psychology Textbooks from PCUN

Harold Takooshian & Elaine P. Congress

“How can professors internationalize their psychology courses?” The Psychology Coalition at the United Nations (PCUN) now offers a series of three diverse new volumes, featuring over 80 chapter authors from a dozen nations—including many ICP members among them. More details appear at the series website: www.infoagepub.com/series/International-Psychology

Member Announcements

Call for Abstracts: ICOPE 2023
The deadline for abstracts is April 30th, 2023. ICOPE is the premier international conference for Psychology educators in Universities, Colleges, and High Schools to present their research. The 2023 ICOPE Conference will be held in Mexicali, Mexico, from October 27-28, 2023, at Universidad Autonoma De Baja California (UABC). The conference theme is: “Tuning Psychology Education to Serve Humanity and Habitat.” For queries regarding submissions, please contact Frances Martin Frances.Martin@newcastle.edu.au. For more information: http://www.psychliteracy.com/icope-inc

Call for Papers: Special topic on vulnerability and resilience in Small Island Developing States
Frontiers in Psychiatry (multidisciplinary, open access) is calling for contributions to a Frontiers Research Topic.  This Research Topic invites empirical research, commentary, and systematic reviews concerning challenges to mental health and health systems in SIDS, as well as interventions (broadly defined) that promote resilience. We are particularly interested in papers that examine interconnections between mental health and vulnerable physical, social, and economic environments. Letter of interest deadline May 20, 2023. Please see https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/53383/vulnerability-and-resilience-in-small-island-developing-states#overview for details.

Call for Papers: Environmental Justice and Psychology: Alternative Ideas on Environmental Issues
A Topical Issue of International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation
Guest Editors: Erinn Cameron, Luca Tateo, and Gonzalo BacigalupeSubmit 1-page, single-spaced descriptions of the proposed manuscript to the guest editors by August 31, 2023. Selected authors will be contacted by October 15, 2023, and invited to develop their manuscripts. Completed manuscripts are due April 15, 2024. Submit proposals via email as Word attachments to: ecameron@email.fielding.edu, lucatateo@gmail.com, and gonzalo.bacigalupe@umb.edu. More information can be found here: IPP Call for Papers

Call for Book Chapters: Global Feminist Perspectives on Climate Change
This volume will feature the work of women climate scholars from across the globe from intersecting disciplines. The idea is to feature the work of scientists who identify as women, and thus the first author must identify as such. If this topic and vision align with your work, you are invited to contribute a chapter to this edited volume. Diverse representations of work are welcome. Contributions do not need to be original research but may be an overview of your body of work or approach to research in this area. For more information, please contact: Erinn Cameron ecameron@email.fielding.edu

Member Publications

CANREC Bulletin (annual publication of the CARIBBEAN NETWORK OF RESEARCH ETHICS COMMITTEES) is online with great articles about research collaboration, research ethics, and creating undergraduate research experiences online.  Forwarded by ICP member and CANREC Bulletin Editor, Mike Campbell (Barbados) https://www.carpha.org/Portals/0/Publications/CANREC_BulletinVol4No1.pdf

Member Awards & Honors

• Nancy Marie Sidun, PsyD, ABPP, ATR was awarded The Division of Women’s Issues New York State Association The Margaret Floy Washburn Award, presented in recognition of her extensive and exceptional work through her lectures, writing, and research advocating for women’s issues, her outstanding leadership, exceptional service to psychology, and dedication to women’s issues.
• Erinn C. Cameron was awarded a Feminist Africa research and publishing award for 2022-2025 for her work investigating the feminist struggles regarding climate change and violence against women in Sub-Saharan Africa. https://feministafrica.net/

Climate moment or Climate time?
Climate chaos or Climate crisis?
Climate injustice or Climate opportunity?
Climate fears or Climate jeers?

Humankind’s moment or humankind’s time?
Humankind’s chaos or humankind’s crisis?
Humankind’s injustice or humankind’s opportunity?
Humankind’s fears or humankind’s jeers? 

What are humans making of a most precious gift
The gift of life,
The gift of living on this magnificent earth? 

How are we acting, behaving, defining, what it is to be human?
How are we re-creating, redesigning, making earth into a humane or inhumane space?
How are we appropriating, using, earth’s bounteous offerings?

Protecting them? Appreciative, grateful, excited and responsible stewards?
Celebrating, sharing abundance with each other, and with fellow creatures and species?

And treating our less animate environmental  features
Such as our oceans, our forests, our soil,
Our air, with care,
Or ravaging them way beyond
What we should, even dare? 

Are we succumbing to the dark desires of a Capitalocene age
Where life-wrecking leaders, a source of much death and destruction
sometimes called presidents of nations,
Or CEOs of corporations, or controllers of powerful covert organizations…
 Who love sending their “thoughts and prayers”
when they have been and
Are, the architects of so much of the suffering? 

Bloated, blinded with excess,
With reckless greed, lasciviousness
They defame, corrupt the dream, the history,
the measurable tracks of what we’ve
With pride, have called humanity.

Humankind have arguably, sometime, in the last century
Arrived at, are now in, an Anthropocene age,
An era in which humankind, demonstrably
Is able to effect and is affecting
Many of the major cycles, structures,
functions, resources, and events
That unfortunately, instead of contributing to
And supporting the lives of most or all living beings,
Manifests its presence in identifiable and now observable harmful effects,
 That result in significant destruction, irreplaceable critical extractions
As well as, unnecessary, widespread and increasing
 Human, animal and ecological displacement and suffering… 

And what is the role of professionals, academics,
And specifically psychologists here,
In responding to these repeated choices of actions,
To this very evidently, increasingly disastrous
But human-made situation? 

Does this climate crisis elicit passions in psychologists for climate action and justice?
Is sufficient attention being paid to the gravity of this existential crisis?
Are presentations, research, publications, being used,
To avoid engaging in needed, critical actions?
Bold actions without which, no presentations, no further research
no unsupported political proclamations,
Can lead to alleviation of the widespread
The increasing suffering,
Or the reversal of, not, slowly moving, observable destructive movements and motions. 

Some academicians are unable to agree about whether we have a climate crisis,
Some argue that increased CO2 leads to increased greening of trees
And increases their protective abilities in times of drought…
While there is ongoing destruction of rain forests
Dubbed the lungs of the earth!
Forests that took generations, not a few years,
to grow from seeded birth…

These specious arguments and foolhardy contradictions
Provide concepts, ideas, beliefs for millions of supporters
Led by special interest organizations and corporations
Whose commitments to huge profit margins,
Trumps all else
Including the gift of life
As humans have known it,
Yes, it trumps not possibilities
But encroaching probabilities
of destroying us, humankind! 

What  goals are we  achieving at this conference,
Beyond meeting and sharing with each other ideas and observations|
Related to our commitment
To research and science?
What are some of the indicated actions,
Big and small, supported by not just science
But also by astute observations and common sense,
That we can engage in strategic places,
Sometimes in political spaces
That can reduce the destructive consequences
That are already affecting many, if not all of us? 

This is the challenge that in this moment, poetry poses
To this ICP conference as the year 2022 closes… 

As psychologists, the poet implores us to leave here,
with greater determinations to respond more vigorously,
More practically, to the climate crisis,
To adopt a strategy that also focuses on climate justice,
To become effective collective, international activists
before it is too late,
before we will have lost the special, the many unique opportunities
To make significant contributions
In helping to make a sustainable future for our next generation,
To delay or avoid a premature death of humankind… 

Sometimes excessive research and analysis become excuses to avoid or delay solutions
Hiding in plain sight,
Intentional blindness is not always only unconscious,
As psychologists, researching, responding to these concerns:
Shouldn’t they be ?
Must they, not be a must?

Humankind’s injustice or humankind’s opportunity?

Our home, our planet will continue to rotate in place,
In space, in time, and restore itself, if humans,
Recklessly at some time, choose to self-destruct,
To reject signs that point to warnings that
we are destroying the elements that support
the gift and the fragility of human life,
supported by our earthly clime. 

COVID restrictions on behaviors of humankind
Led to some restorative environmental processes of important kinds…
Meanwhile after the UN’s
27^th Conference of the Parties in 2022, COP 27,
Significant progress by 197 countries was minimal:
Reduction of harmful emissions was more a matter of discussion than of commitment and action:
Expensive conferences “ full of sound and fury signifying nothing”?

Conferences may be and are helpful,
But they can be a dangerously slow strategy to adopt
While we wind up a planetary clock,
That may be ticking exponentially…
But only with respect to the ominous,
Omnicide,  goals of humanity. 

Humankind’s injustice? or humankind’s opportunity?
Psychologists’ moment! Psychologists’ time!
To respond with new strategies
Brilliance, vigor and urgency!

©Elaine Henry Olaoye,  November 10, 2022

I want to thank the editorial team for their hard work putting together the current issue. The Spring 2023 issue of The International Psychologist highlights the many exciting activities and hard work of ICP and its members over the last several months. We want to continue to hear from our members, so please reach out to share your personal announcements and accomplishments for inclusion in the next newsletter.

One of the themes of the ICP 2022 conference was health equity. The World Health Organization reports that the inequitable distribution of health resources can largely be attributed to social and environmental conditions. Promoting and protecting human rights is closely associated with human health, and psychologists play a role in promoting human rights and global health equity. The Summer 2023 issue of The International Psychologist will continue to highlight the activities of ICP and its members and will include a special focus on global health equity. We invite you to submit your work for the Summer 2023 issue, including research in the form of article briefs (3000 words), testimonials, opinions, informational pieces (1500 words), artwork, and poetry. Please submit your work for consideration to Erinn Cameron at ecameron@email.fielding.edu