Unconference
Jan 7 – Jan 10, 2027.
Pune.
India.
A FOUR-day gathering exploring the remarkable patterns, questions, and possibilities hidden within everyday life.
Call for Speakers is now open!
Unconference 2027 is a four-day gathering exploring the remarkable patterns, questions, and possibilities hidden within everyday life.
Across psychology, neuroscience, mental health, art, aesthetics, creativity, education, culture, and community practice, this year’s theme, The Extraordinary Ordinary, asks:
What becomes visible when we look more closely at the ordinary?
The programme brings together students, researchers, artists, educators, practitioners, mental health organisations, community leaders, and curious minds. It begins with a research bootcamp, continues with a networking day for mental health organisations in Pune, and culminates in a two-day unconference on the neuroscience and psychology of arts, aesthetics, and creativity.
This is not a conventional conference. The unconference invites people to share research, practice, questions, and works-in-progress in unconventional ways: through conversations, workshops, demonstrations, performances, experiments, visual essays, listening sessions, movement-led explorations, walks, games, provocations, and other formats that suit the idea being explored.
Confirmed Speakers
Keynotes
Distinguished Guests
Invited Speakers
Programme
Research often begins with something ordinary: a behaviour we notice, a pattern we cannot explain, a feeling, habit, interaction, or experience that asks to be understood more deeply.
The Research Bootcamp is designed for researchers and students of psychology and the social sciences who want to build stronger foundations in research, neuroscience, and career pathways. The day will help participants move from everyday curiosity to clearer research questions, understand how evidence is built and interpreted, and explore the many directions a background in psychology or the social sciences can open.
This day is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and anyone beginning to ask: How do I turn what I notice about the world into something I can study, understand, and share?
Mental health support is shaped not only by individual practitioners or organisations, but by the relationships between them. Day 2 brings together mental health organisations, community initiatives, practitioners, researchers, educators, advocates, students, and allied groups working across Pune. It is a space to learn about one another’s work, exchange resources, discuss shared challenges, and identify possibilities for collaboration.
The aim is not simply to collect contacts. It is to strengthen the everyday networks through which care, knowledge, referral, support, and collaboration become possible.
Days 3 and 4 are dedicated to an unconference on the neuroscience and psychology of arts, aesthetics, and creativity.
Together, we will explore how ordinary experiences become aesthetically, emotionally, culturally, and scientifically meaningful. What happens in the mind and body when we encounter art? Why do some images, sounds, movements, stories, spaces, and performances hold our attention? How do creativity and aesthetic experience emerge through perception, emotion, memory, culture, training, social context, and the body?
This is a space for rigorous inquiry, creative risk, public conversation, and unusual formats. A place where the lab can meet the studio, the classroom can meet the stage, and the everyday can reveal its secret trapdoors.
Call for Speakers is now open!
We are inviting researchers, artists, practitioners, educators, students, designers, performers, writers, mental health professionals, and interdisciplinary thinkers to propose sessions for
Unconference 2027:
The Extraordinary Ordinary.
We are especially interested in sessions that explore the neuroscience, psychology, social science, cultural, artistic, or experiential dimensions of ordinary life.
Application deadlines
Priority deadline: 30 August 2026
Final deadline: 15 September 2026, subject to availability
Selected speakers will be notified after review by October 15th 2026.