The 9th Congress of Community Psychology “Beyond the crisis:Building community and critical visions to achieve justice, fairness and well-being” has been organized by ECPA and held in Naples from the 6th to the 9th of November 2013.
Many have given their direct and indirect contribution to its organisation, among which we would like to mention the followings: SIPCO (Italian Society of Community Psychology), Fondazione Mediterraneo foundation, Ordine degli Psicologi della Regione Campania (Psychology Register of Campania Region), the RES project, Altri Orizzonti cooperative, NCO-Nuova cucina organizzata (New organised Cookery), EFPA Standing Committee of Community Psychology, and last but not least, the Incoparde team along with the Department of Humanities of the University of Naples Federico II.
The congress has made use of Conftool for gathering, uploading, and managing the abstracts as well as of Conf4me (http://conference4me.eu/download), a software that allowed each participant to browse the conference program directly from phones and tablets as well as to create a personal agenda of the congress.
The interaction among participants has been eased by LINKPASS (www.linkpass.com), a revolutionary Business Social Discovery APP that supported their contacting and networking.
We also set up a Facebook group “Beyond the crisis” (https://www.facebook.com/groups/156602437830036/) that has gathered over 400 participants as well as a website containing information, photos, and abstract reated to the congress. This set of information is now entirely available on www.communitypsychology.eu
The congress has enjoyed the presence of over 200 participants coming from all over Europe and overseas (Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Japan, South America (Brazil, Chile, and Peru), Mexico, Canada, and Ghana). In particular, the following countries represented Europe at the congress: Austria, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK, Hungary, along with the MENA Countries (Turkey, Egypt) and Palestine (via Skype)
The congress has lasted three days with a total of 50 sessions, included two opening workshops, one on visual methods (whose description is reported below) and one chaired by Tom Fox. The whole organization of the congress has been supported by 13 volunteers, 14 members of staff and a number of relevant guests, among which Robert Roes, elected president of EFPA.
The congress has also sponsored experiences of social economy proposed by the RES project, an exhibition by Liliana Comes, a cookery experience at the NCO (New Organised Cookery), a fashion exhibition organised by Altri orizzonti cooperative, a display of the mannequins for the promotion of welfare (a show performed by the artist Giovanni Pirozzi at NCO, see www.youreporter.it/video_Terra_dei_Fuochi_svegli… ), and the analysis of the city carried out by Tom Fox for the undergraduate students in psychology of the University of Naples Federico II.
The competence and the quality of interactions of the neapoletan organization team together with the international volunteers and the team for the revision of the abstracts have been the glue that has kept together the whole project. A massive thanks goes to all of you for that.
