Keynote Speaker

Keynote at the 20th European Congress of Psychology, ‘Psychology: Responding to the Challenges of Technology and Humanity’, Belgrade, Serbia, 7-10 September 2027

Human psychology is fundamentally temporal. We do not inhabit the present moment alone, we are always simultaneously drawing on the past and anticipating the future, and we do this not merely as individuals but as members of groups, communities, and societies. Yet psychology has historically privileged the present as its primary unit of analysis, treating attitudes, emotions, and behaviours as states to be measured and explained in the here-and-now. This keynote argues for a temporal and relational psychology: one that places the dynamic interplay between past, present, and future at the centre of how we understand human thought, feeling, and action.

Drawing on years of my own work at the intersection of psychology, history and politics, I propose that uncertainty in the present simultaneously orients groups toward the past and the future, activating shared narrative templates and culturally embedded conceptions of time. Crucially, this is not a passive process; the meaning made of the past and imagined futures loops back to shape collective agency, social action, and political participation in the present. The same historical past can mobilise transformative action in one context and foreclose it in another.

Nostalgia, one of the most prevalent and politically consequential expressions of collective temporal orientation, serves as a central case. I argue that nostalgia is not a retreat into the past but a diagnostic signal; what groups mourn reveals what they fear losing, and what kind of future they imagine possible. This framework is brought to bear on the defining challenges of technology and humanity in the present moment, with implications for how psychology can contribute to understanding and supporting societies navigating rapid and unsettling change.