Psychosocial Reflections on Fifty Years of Cultural and Political Revolution: Editors' Introduction

Fifty years after the hippie counterculture of 1967 (‘the summer of love’) and the political turbulence of 1968 (‘May 68’), the Association for Psychosocial Studies Second Biennial Conference staged a psychosocial examination of the ways in which today's world is shaped by the forces symbolised by those two moments. Held at Bournemouth University in April 2018, it explored the continuing influence of the deep social, cultural and political changes in the West, which crystallised in the events of these two years. The cultural forces and the political movements of that time aimed to change the world, and did so, though not in the ways that many of their participants expected. Their complex, multivalent legacy of ‘liberation’ is still developing and profoundly shapes the globalising world today, in the contests between what is called neo-liberalism, resurgent fundamentalisms, environmentalism, individualisms, nationalisms, and the proliferation of identity politics.

A counter-cultural and identity-based ethos now dominates much of consumer culture, and is reflected in the recent development of some populist and protest politics. A libertarian critique of politics, once at the far margins, now informs popular attitudes towards many aspects of democratic governance; revolutionary critiques have become mainstream clichés. Hedonic themes suffuse everyday life, while self-reflection and emotional literacy have also become prominent values, linked to more positive orientations towards human diversity and the international community.

In this context the conference sought to bring together psychosocial analyses of the development and legacy today of the ‘revolutions’ of the ‘Sixties’. While this included fully historical studies, other papers did not have an explicit focus on that decade as such, but approached the conference theme through explorations of contemporary issues in politics and culture. The collection of papers presented here, from the very wide range of contributio