Dr. Michal Pagis - Bar Ilan Unverisity
When
Where
Prefigurative Occupational Activism: How Religion-Inspired Psychologists Transform Their Profession as a Means for Social Change
Professions are usually seen as carriers of expert knowledge and occupational jurisdiction. Less attention has gone to how practitioners use their professions to pursue broader social and moral projects. This talk takes up that question through a distinctive form of occupational activism among psychologists who draw on religious traditions to reconstruct their profession as a vehicle for societal transformation. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork with two Israeli psychotherapist communities, one integrating Jewish traditions and the other Buddhist traditions into clinical practice. I introduce the concept of prefigurative occupational activism: turning a profession into a platform for social change by building alternative professional communities, relationships, identities and practices that prefigure the society practitioners envision. I show that this works through moralizing work carried out across three interconnected spheres. Among peers, practitioners build alternative moral communities while remaining anchored in established professional institutions. With patients, they adopt an inside-out approach that turns the therapeutic relationship into an exemplary space of ethical presence. In the public sphere, they use their professional status to launch demonstration projects of alternative social arrangements and spread their model across professional fields. I conclude by considering how professions can act as institutional bridges between micro-level transformation and broader social change, and what limits this mode of activism faces.
Bio: Michal Pagis is Associate Professor of Sociology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She studies how self and identity are changing in contemporary post-industrial culture, with a focus on spirituality, popular psychology and work identities. Her papers have appeared in journals such as Work and Occupations, Sociology of Religion and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. She is the author of Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self (University of Chicago Press, 2019).