Registration ends 07.4.2026 at 23:59 h

If your registration for this course is successful you will registered automatically for the course Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - V (Steijn Bakker, Timur Sevincer, Yuqi Ye).

Global warming has brought the bio-physical limits of our planet into the international spotlight, highlighting the urgent need for structural changes in capitalist production models, sustained by a modern-colonial gender matrix. This system functions not only as a geopolitical apparatus but also deeply influences the minds and hearts of those inhabiting these territories.
This is not a matter of science fiction, but a crisis whose consequences we are already experiencing. It is predicted that without a significant reduction in carbon emissions, global temperatures could rise by more than 2 degrees. Media outlets have repeatedly depicted the devastating consequences of climate change: hurricanes, storms, fires, floods, droughts, pandemics, and people facing starvation and the need to migrate. This apocalyptic scenario does not signal the end of the world but rather the end of the modern-colonial matrix as we know it.
This perspective generates feelings of hopelessness, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and helplessness, triggering defense mechanisms and, in more privileged sectors, a growing disconnection from the impacts affecting distant bodies and territories. The antifuturist manifesto, "dear colonizer, your future is gone," signed by an ancestor, challenges us to reflect: Why do we imagine the end of the world and not the end of colonialism?
The worlds around us shape and inhabit us. This course will explore how our perception of the environment stems from an internal representation, an inner psychic landscape co-created through interactions and interdependent relationships between human and non-human communities. Extractive actions, through which we marinate our knowledge, generate representations of nature from an individualistic and anthropocentric perspective. Capitalism not only colonizes the space we inhabit, what we consume, how we dress, and how we use time, but also deeply configures desire and lack. Civilizational paradigms such as personal success, authorship, social ascent, racial supremacy, consumption, and accumulation, form part of social imaginaries and identity construction, fostering increasingly authoritarian, segregating, and excluding forms.
We will revisit Wilhelm Reich's perspective, who proposed a psychoanalysis of fascism a century ago, as its implications remain relevant today. Colonized worlds are supported by fascist political practices that reveal the links between authoritarian forms of power and capitalist accumulation. In this context, we will delve into obedience and submission, mechanisms intertwined with psychic structures, relationships with authority, and unconscious processes that shape individual subjectivity.
The urgency of dialogue between human and non-human actors grows, focusing on how to restore conditions to guarantee justice for all living entities on the planet. This process challenges the foundations of anthropocentrism, as it decentralizes the human as central to nature—one who uses and owns it.
We will examine contemporary feelings toward nature, in a world where we have become more disconnected from it than ever, ignoring the natural cycles and interconnections that sustain the "ethics of the land," a concept emerging from ecofeminism. This ethics represents an ecological consciousness in response to overexploitation issues. We will explore social movements such as Cimarrón Antifuturism, which uses metaphors of a future already passed to propose alternatives from deep ecology, the power of interactions, dark ecology, and community feminisms. These movements invite us to rethink body-territory and pluriverse perspectives, stimulating an openness toward an ecological mental becoming that builds new representations of happiness in alignment with the other, recognizing the other, and co-existing with the other.
For Amerindian ontologies, transformation involves constructing the "ancestral future," understood as the revitalization of everyday practices that connect us with nature, within nature and as nature. From Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism to Lacanian postulates on symbolic and social reality, we will learn about situated knowledge, where both Amazonian Amerindian worldviews and critical constructivism return subjecthood to all living entities. Viveiros de Castro's call to position perspective within a bio-cultural relationship with the world comes from the desire to understand knowledge through a plurality of visions that navigate contaminated worlds. We will also explore Anna Tsing’s (2015) perspective on contamination, which in a broader sense refers to the contact and mixing between species, cultures, and ecosystems in a world of tensions. Tsing argues that when global and local dynamics intersect, friction is created, a process of interaction that is not necessarily harmonious. This friction, especially at points of contact between capitalist globalization and local forms of life and knowledge, provides fertile ground for transformation. Thus, plurality can be seen as the social glue of being, resisting neoliberal recognition technologies that aim to absorb all cultures into a single model.
Furthermore, we will analyze the critique of consumerist idealization, masking enjoyment while questioning how to ensure long-term well-being in a sustainable world. We will shift the focus from the individual as the sole creator of desire to the interactions, relational effects, and language in the production of meanings for consumption.
We will also explore narcissism, anthropocentric views, and love for nature. Capitalism, especially global neoliberalism, promotes our narcissistic identity as consumers and erodes affectionate feelings toward nature, fostering the belief that we have the right to exploit it without considering the consequences. We will critique the separation of nature-culture, learning about the concept of multinaturalism in Amerindian ontologies.
Finally, we will explore how human communities can take responsibility for the friction generated by the capitalist model and what actions can be taken. We will consider both individual and communal psychological components. This course will study psychoanalysis, social movement perspectives, Indigenous thought, and decolonial critical philosophical frameworks, focusing on how we establish relationships between our bodies and territories we inhabit, with the intention of re-signifying our bond with nature, from nature, within nature, and as nature.
From the perspective of the Naza indigenous people in Colombia, "I am because we all are," this phrase invites us to imagine a continuous process of becoming as inhabitants of the planet in community, communalized, in interdependent and cooperative relationships between humans and more-than-humans. This principle, rooted in Amerindian ontologies, informs how we understand being, doing, and knowing, where agency is intertwined with territories.
In this course, we will address the work of Arturo Escobar (2015), who argues that plurality refers not only to distinct human cultures (a relativist view) but also to non-human life forms, ecosystems, and entities that coexist in the world. The diversity of forms of existence, arising from different worldviews, should not be hierarchized or reduced to singular categories as they respond to codes and large signifiers, reflecting heterogeneous existences beyond modern universalism.
Understanding plural worlds will also lead us to reflect on how we construct subjects within this context. The framework of Paladines (2024) contributes to this discussion by developing the idea of transmodern subjects—those who inhabit colonial modernity on their own terms. Binary logics such as tradition/modernity, woman/man, young/old, indigenous/white are insufficient to understand the multiple worlds guiding the present in human communities.
Finally, we will analyze psychoanalytic contributions regarding aesthetic value and the creative process in art as a form of expression of other possible worlds. "The deepest is the skin" (Octavio Paz, 1950) will be used as an exercise to dismantle the components intervening in the enjoyment of the dissatisfied subject, suffering from disconnection with their desire. We will also explore which aesthetic mechanisms can contribute to new meanings related to a living, sustainable world. This phenomenon will be analyzed through a photographic exercise, as part of Walter Benjamin's recent past archaeology, to understand the social imaginaries transmitted in a world on fire and explore possibilities for connecting art with emotional, aesthetic processes of systemic transformation.

Main Learning Objective:

To critically examine the intersection of global warming, capitalism, and colonial gender matrices, exploring psychoanalytic, decolonial, and ecofeminist perspectives to understand the transformations needed in human-nature relationships and sustainability practices.

Secondary Learning Objectives:

- To analyze the role of psychoanalysis in understanding obedience, submission, and the dynamics of power and authority in shaping human-subjectivity and environmental behaviors.

- To explore the concept of plural worlds, examining Amerindian ontologies, the perspectives of deep ecology, and the implications of a multi-natural world in addressing global ecological challenges.

- To engage with alternative social movements and critiques of consumerism, developing new ways of thinking about well-being, sustainability, and ecological ethics in response to the dominant capitalist paradigm.

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