Doing psychology amidst a ‘crisis’ in capitalism – The relevance of situationism and psychogeography for studying environments

New social conditions call for new theoretically informed psychology approaches to be developed. This is particularly the case with reference to the recent events held in public environments such as Occupy Wall Street, as well as recent demonstrations and riots concerning tuition fees, capitalism and the banking crisis across the globe. Focusing on towns and cities including Huddersfield, Manchester, London, New York and Thessaloniki, I will make an argument for the development of psychogeographical mobile methods of investigation such as walking, map making and photography to study social processes including consumerism, privatization and the use of surveillance in towns and cities. I will refer to the work of the situationists in relation to critical psychology, cultural geography and political architectural theory to conceptualise how to study peoples’ experiences of urban environments as well as to configure what a situationist informed methodology of environments would look like.