A Brief History

ISTP was founded in 1985 in Plymouth, UK. The first conference brought together a wide range of perspectives, from more traditional lines of thought to more critical, historical, cultural, and discursive directions. One of the focal points of the discussion was Kurt Lewin’s formulation (going back to Kant), There is nothing more practical than a good theory. This was a harbinger of meetings to come. Initially, ISTP was dominated by psychologists from northern Europe and North America. Not surprisingly, there was a concentration of formal academic programs in theoretical psychology in this part of the world. But as formal theory programs became scarce, the Society became more truly international. Since the late 1990s, the conferences have been held all over the world, including Berlin, Sydney, Calgary, Istanbul, Cape Town, Toronto, Nanjing, Thessaloniki, Santiago de Chile, Coventry, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Sacramento, and Belgrade (see “Conferences” for more information). The meetings have attracted a great many local participants, cultivating the Society’s openness to a multiplicity of perspectives, approaches, and orientations.  In the words of one of ISTP’s founding members, Henderikus J. Stam: “It is in the fine-grained analyses of life on the ground that we find a psychology detailed enough to be worthy of the name, while at the same time we address those larger claims as are embedded in the problems of language, activity, culture … that make the local studies possible” (2017, p. 7).