Conference Agenda

We develop David’s Armstrong contributions on the field of the ethical imagination as a psychosocial capacity that emerges in response to lived dilemmas in social, political, and ecological life. We conceptualise trust and mistrust not as individual traits but as psychosocial processes shaped by collective fantasy, social defences, and institutional and political life in a psychosocial context of precarity and epistemic instability.

Following Armstrong, we approach ethical imagination not as a personal virtue but as a field phenomenon, arising in situations characterised by:

• an emergent practical dilemma
• a developmental undertow
• an acknowledgement of human agency
• a capacity to re-imagine forms of human association
• the presence of resistance to change.

Ethical imagination names the work of creative re-imagining through which new forms of social relating can be thought and mobilised into action in the psychosocial context of the operation of power and institutional defences in the shadows of climate disaster, racialised othering and resource wars.

Ethical imagination concerns the imaginative re-configuration of social relations in the midst of uncertainty and resistance, enabling subjects and groups to remain in relation to difference and not-knowing without retreating into credulity or distrust. We distinguish the concept from moral reasoning, which abstracts from situated action, and from the Keatsian/Bionian notion of negative capability, which privileges the capacity to remain with not-knowing.

We draw upon the Conference’s identification of trust and mistrust as psychosocial phenomena operative within and between human communities to introduce the project that we are planning to develop around Armstrong’s concept of the Ethical Imagination.
We hope to open new conversations in the Conference about the possible implications for organisational life, political engagement and community formation in the New World Disorder.

The climate crisis has exacerbated our mental health crisis, particularly among young people (IPCC, 2023). A prominent experience in this phenomenon is betrayal, yet it receives little attention in both the literature on climate emotions and the psychosocial literature more broadly. This study seeks to address this gap.

An in-depth review of the literature has found different understandings of betrayal as it occurs in our widening spheres of experience. First, within the dyadic relationship between infant and primary caregiver, Erikson’s concept of basic trust is used, linked to failures in adaptation. Second, within our interpersonal relationships, betrayal is seen as collapsing the transitional space and morphing the betrayed’s object of the betrayer. Third, in the cultural relationship between individuals and institutions, betrayal is understood as the violation of societal dependency.

Employing Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, four participants, chosen through opportunistic and purposive sampling, aged 18 and 25, took part in semi-structured interviews around their experiences of climate-betrayal.

The study is ongoing and will be completed by 29th May 2026. However, analysis so far sees participants experiencing betrayal in a number of surprising ways, from feeling an obligation to dedicate their life to climate activism to believing they’ve been robbed of a future others take for granted. There’s suggestions that these betrayal experiences fracture relationships as participants wrestle with the temptations to blame and disconnect. Interestingly, despite the clear role of politicians, industries and societal systems in the climate crisis, their mythical status makes the experience of their betrayal most difficult to articulate.

Betrayal, perhaps the thing which turns trust into mistrust, is a complex and powerful experience. For the sake of these young people, struggling to face the “creeping monster” of the climate crisis, it requires our attention.

The core truth in discourses on the Anthropocene is that the current catastrophic risks and risks of catastrophe are man-made (and, yes, the archaic narrowing of the human to the male seems to the point here). In this respect, techno and environmental feminist as well as critical posthuman scholars have a strong point when they demand a turning away from and displacement of anthropocentric, i.e., human-centred, thinking. Too arrogant, too self-obsessed are humans, and too unsure of themselves to let go of their fantasies of domination with which they make themselves “lose by winning” (Powers, 2018).

However, while this demand to move away from anthropocentrism is laudable – and plausibly necessary for survival –, particularly critical posthuman approaches tend to leave the question as to how to bring about such change wide open. The very characteristics that are given as reasons for the need to abandon the focus on the human – arrogance, omnipotence, narcissism – are also the conditions that undercut the possibility of succeeding in it. Therefore, and against the background of existing advances, this paper sets out to develop the outlines of a critical anthropocentrism in a psychoanalytic key. Along the lines of psychoanalytic theories of repression, it holds that what is actively pushed out of perception, awareness and consciousness will eventually return – seemingly as an alien occupational force from the outside. In this respect, critical posthuman theories, by making themselves blind to the vicissitudes entailed in the very acts of rejecting and decentring the human, might make themselves vulnerable to even more human-centredness, not less.

I was inspired by a number of people I had met when exploring the possibility of living more sustainably. They were ‘exemplars' who had acted decisively in the world in response to ecological crisis. I had written about interdependence, interconnection, and critiqued consumerism and hyper-individualism. (Harvey, 2020). However, their actions went further and demonstrated that change is inevitable, necessary, and, importantly, within the grasp of an ordinary person if we just trust the process.

I wanted to explore how their thinking could inspire other people’s openness to a change mindset and inspire them towards a similar process. I want to tell their stories about change based on the core ecological and evolutionary ideas that there is nothing as inevitable as change. Change is incremental, natural, and also fun. or it is sudden, decisive. However, it also entails potential loss, loss of perceived status, loss of illusions about what constitutes the meaning of life, loss of convenience, loss of ego and exclusivity, loss of what we project into our status and therefore resistance is common.

The people I spoke with each had the quality of not only taking individual action to fulfil their ethical beliefs, but being exemplars in order to help, guide and inspire others. They are examples to how ‘a good life’ can be lived. There is also a common thread of permaculture ethics in their outlooks; like localism, awareness of interdependencies and inter-trophic scales, social justice, diversity, fairness and equality. The ethics seem to grow from ecological realities of the ecosystem as a whole.

They have attempted to live their lives in relationship with each other and the land. Relying on interdependencies with their own and the wider community’s capacity to grow and sell goods at a local level. They trust in the end of the world.