The more ISPP members I get to know, the more privileged I feel, so I will address you as:
Dear Friends,
Along with, I presume, your own papers, our July conference will have several lovely features, prompted by the program chairs, the Governing Council (GC), and ISPP Ambassadors:
1) The conference will be held in 3 time zones. Despite our spread (for example, Russia alone having 11 time zones), we are striving for making the hours reasonably convenient to everyone. Also, remember that with registration you can still view talks after the conference if they happened to be presented when you are speaking, at another presentation, or asleep in bed.
2) Social hours: Everyday there will be at least one “chat room” for people who would like to meet related others (e.g., ISPP parents, Arab scholars) informally. Some of these will also be hosted by GC members, in case you have questions or suggestions for us. You could even ask your friends to “meet up” with you in these. We hope this does help with the networking, idea-sharing, and collaboration possibilities that many of you said can be missing from online conferences. (I’d bet money that these meet-ups will be more organized than when I ask several people to meet in the lobby at X o’clock to go to dinner, and they invite people, and then some people are late (self-included), and then we inevitably go much later, and split into different groups anyway to be able to get a table. Meeting random people is part of the fun and grace of conferences and we are trying to enable that if only you won’t be shy about popping in!)
3) Due to popular demand, in the symposia and roundtables, the audience will be able to identify themselves by name or email so that the speakers and audience can “see” who is in the room and connect with them.
4) To more senior scholars: many of our other members have asked especially that you attend the conference, because your presence and the chance to hear you and interact with you is one reason that people want to go to conferences.
5) Methods workshops will be presented using several of the innovative techniques for research that members have invented.
6) Awards ceremonies (for some amazing people, I promise!) and tributes to members who have passed on.
7) Chat sessions with the Editors of Political Psychology and Advances in Political Psychology.
8) Three imminent keynote speakers, each of whose research and life’s work speak to issues of inclusivity and interdisciplinary diversity that have been among ISPP’s priorities for the past several years: Dr. Waikaremoana Waitoki from the University of Waikato in New Zealand has worked on how psychology should be a positive rather than an oppressive tool for Indigenous People (particularly Kaupapa Maori). Dr. Jeffrey Ansloos from the University of Toronto in Canada promotes and conducts Indigenous-led education, health, and justice initiatives. Dr. Paula McCain of Duke University in the US has run a very successful summer program encouraging students into political psychology, in addition to her scholarly work on (broadly) US race politics and policies. We are truly honored that each of these three will share their wisdom and inspirations with us.
9) Pursuant to the conference theme Recognition and (Re) Claiming Spaces: Marginalization, Colonization, and Privilege, I will personally enable Indigenous students with interests in political psychology and who have limited means to attend. If you know of such students, please email me about them.
10) Several members from around the world will inform us about the trouble for their regions and also the situation of colleagues there in some roundtable discussions.
I encourage you to register and participate! I’m no less excited to see you than I am in years I have to buy a plane ticket for ISPP! (My ongoing thanks to our program chairs, Dr. Carla Houkamau and Dr. Allison Harrell, for their care, wisdom, and responsibility, and to the Section Chairs who did their work under difficult circumstances!)
The Nominations Committee worked very hard to develop a slate of candidates for the GC of people who are not only accomplished scholars, but committed to and familiar with ISPP; we will be well-served by any of them. Please vote when you receive the e-mail that voting is open. Please also know that many members who are not on the GC do help our organization in other important ways. Should you want to get involved yourself, please email me.
Other works in progress:
Thanks to the brilliant contract-writing abilities of Sev Bennett, we were able to forward the deposit we had paid (when there was a big financial exchange rate advantage to ISPP) with the Omni Hotel in Montreal (originally for 2021) for 2023. As of now, we are still planning to be in Athens for ISPP in 2022, and in Santiago in 2024 (which was delayed due to political unrest). The GC and ISPP Central Office (CO) continue to monitor the state of the world re-traveling and pandemics, and so of course economies and travel remain uncertain, and seem likely to be uneven for several years. At present, it remains twice as expensive to plan a conference that is both in-person and virtual, so that is cost-prohibitive. However, we continue to monitor what our members need, the cost of technological options and their ease of use, and we will continue to be creative in figuring out ways we can function as a friendly, useful society while trying to accommodate the varied travel and financial and family and political situations of our members.
Since ISPP has been committed to diversity and inclusion and developed a number of studies, programs, and policies to improve this in our society, we’ve realized that we need better information about our members. As such, whenever you renew your membership, you will be asked to complete a few more basic questions about yourself. It is very helpful in inviting people to serve on committees, for example, to know more about their areas of expertise. Of course, you opt-in about what information you would like to provide, but it would be useful if you could answer the few new questions. Separately, you’ll be sent a completely anonymous questionnaire in April by which we hope to document the many types of diversity in our members and former members.
Like many of you, GC and committee members have also been struggling with fall-out from the pandemic, including the unenviable fear for (older) relatives and/or trying to care for toddlers while lecturing! Thus, we are a little slower with some of the year’s initiatives, but you should know that VP Joanne Miller is working hard with Hannah Nam, Tereza Capelos, and others to develop a range of new content for our website. The ISPP Ambassadors and long-time members have suggested and provided content. There are a number of materials that would be useful for students to have in non-English languages so we may be seeking such materials from you and/or possibly your translation services. Several other GC committees are working on how to make conferences more welcoming and family-friendly and to assess members’ needs. The Scholars Under Threat Committee continues to monitor situations of our colleagues in Turkey and in Myanmar, and I know many colleagues are concerned about Myanmar, and trying to stay in contact with their friends there (you may show your support for a democratic Myanmar by signing this petition). Please contact the CO or Yasemin Acar if you know of colleagues in difficult situations. The Editors and Editorial Board of the journal have been thinking hard and discussing the vast diversity of recent trends in different disciplines’ notions of best how science should be done, cognizant that the diversity of work we do is not going to conform to a one-size-fits-all prescription. And here in Gizem Arikan’s first year of organizing the ISPP Academy, there have been more than 150 people who applied to be Fellows! I’m very pleased that Hermann Swart and Desmond Painter in South Africa have also become ISPP Ambassadors, as we need more connections in Africa, as we do in South America. I’m happy to talk with anyone who would like to know more about the ISPP Ambassadors outreach programs and would be delighted to share what the current ones are up to and to include even more.
In difficult circumstances, getting through the day is, in my opinion, plenty of achievement. I hope in these difficult times that you are able to have some peace and even joy, even if the present is not the way you thought your life would go. I salute all of you for what you’ve been able to do and share, and I do hope to see you online in a few months!
Felicia Pratto
ISPP President
P.S. Some of you might be interested in this piece by our member, Thomas Craemer, about reparations for slavery: https://theconversation.com/there-was-a-time-reparations-were-actually-paid-out-just-not-to-formerly-enslaved-people-152522
Our 2025 Annual Meeting is expected to be held in Prague, Czech Republic. If you are interested in hosting a future conference of ISPP, please contact the Central Office to obtain the necessary guidelines and materials.
Call for the Twinning Program
Call for the Twinning Program in English [see below for the call in Arabic, French, Spanish and Turkish]
We are happy to announce that we are still accepting applications for our New Twinning Program among Scholars under Threat (ISPP members who lost their academic positions or their income in direct connection with political persecution and/or to members who have been displaced as a result of political persecution). The New Twinning Program has been set up with the aim of facilitating scholarly collaborations between threatened political psychologists and program partners. These collaborations can offer the opportunity for threatened scholars to continue their academic activities, maintain and advance their careers, and integrate into international political psychology; furthermore, partners can engage in political advocacy on behalf of threatened scholar. We are grateful to the 24 scholars who have already expressed their interest to work together with a scholar under threat as partners. We would kindly like to ask our members to reach out to those scholars within their networks around the world who may benefit from participating.
You can find more information about the Twinning Program here.
ISPP is committed to the protection of its members whose academic freedom is at risk anywhere in the world due to the political context where they work and/or live. Therefore, we offer emergency funds to members who lost their academic positions or their income in direct connection with political persecution and/or to members who have been displaced as a result of political persecution and are without an official affiliation or income in their current location. You can help by donating to the ISPP Scholars under Threat fund through this link.
ISPP has recently supported 17 scholars from Turkey. Therefore, at the moment we cannot accept applications for emergency funds. We are currently collecting donations in order to be able to reopen the emergency fund.
PhD Research Fellow - Incorporating decision-making in environmental emergencies into behavioural computational models for crisis planning, University of Edinburgh
This PhD project will identify how and why citizens respond to evacuation guidance in climate-related evacuations. The student will explore decision-making by focusing on how and why citizens make decisions, such as the source of information that is judged to be most trustworthy, and what barriers and avenues exist to citizens following guidance. In Work Package 1, the student will conduct a systematic review to identify ways that previous models have formalised group behaviour in emergency response and identify key variables for their research. In Work Package 2, the student will conduct an online map-based evacuation route choice study to explore the effects of these variables on decision-making and compliance. Finally, they will develop an ABM which defines and operationalises these variables. The resulting model will serve as a hypothesis testing environment to identify how citizens react to climate-related emergencies based on empirical evidence.
We are looking to appoint a Lecturer in Psychology to strengthen our position as a School dedicated to research and teaching excellence. We particularly welcome applications from those with strengths in qualitative research methodologies working in areas related to health, developmental or social psychology who can complement and extend our existing areas of research. Quantitative and mixed-methods researchers in these areas will also be considered.
Applications are invited for the post of Lecturer in Social Psychology. In particular, we are keen to hear from candidates who take an experimental approach to social psychology. We are especially keen to hear from candidates who can demonstrate that they have considered how their work translates beyond the laboratory.
Assistant Professor in Social Psychology, University of Cyprus
The University of Cyprus invites applications for one (1) tenure–track academic position at the rank of Lecturer or Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, in the field of «Social Psychology».
Candidates are invited to submit their applications electronically by uploading the following documents (in English, in PDF form) at the following link: https://applications.ucy.ac.cy/recruitment
1. Cover Letter
2. Curriculum Vitae
3. Copy of ID/Passport
4. Copies of Degree certificates
5. Summary of previous research work and a statement of plans for future research (up to 3 pages)
6. List of publications
7. Representative publications (up to 3 publications which should be individually uploaded). The submission of representative publications is non-mandatory for the rank of Lecturer
8. The names and e-mails of three academic referees, who, upon submission of the application, will be automatically notified to provide recommendation letters (in the English language) up to seven days past the submission application deadline
Instructor position(s), Catholic University of America
The Department of Psychology at the Catholic University of America is seeking instructors for the
following undergraduate courses in Fall, 2021: Introduction to Biological Psychology and Brain and
Behavior (those are similar courses, with one taught at a somewhat more intensive level than the other),
Social Psychology, Abnormal Child Psychology, Psychology of Terrorism, and Psychology of Memory. We
also seek an instructor for a graduate course entitled Biological and Cognitive Aspects of Behavior. A
doctoral degree in psychology is required, and at this time we are planning for in-person classes. If you
are interested in teaching any of those courses and would like more information, please contact Dr.
Barry Wagner as soon as possible, wagnerb@cua.edu and attach a CV. Please forward this to anyone
else who might be interested or might know interested applicants.
Call for submissions
Call for data: Intergroup contact, threat, and discrimination and outgroup orientations
Dear colleagues,
We are conducting a study on intergroup contact, threat, discrimination, and outgroup orientations. We are interested in data, published or unpublished, that meets our inclusion criteria.
In order to be included in our analysis, the study needs to include:
1. One or more measures of intergroup contact (e.g., quantity, quality, outgroup friendships, positive and/or negative contact experiences).
2. A measure of outgroup threat (e.g., general, symbolic, realistic, group esteem threat) and/or a measure of perceived discrimination (e.g., personal discrimination, group discrimination).
3. One or more measures of attitudes/outgroup orientations (e.g., a feeling thermometer, warmth, affect, social distance, subtle prejudice, outgroup trust [I changed the order sl.] etc.).
4. The sample should consist of adults (either ethnic/religious majority or minority samples, or both).
5. Data can be cross-sectional and/or longitudinal.
6. Finally, there should be at least 600 individuals per (sub)sample.
If you have any (un)published work that fits these criteria, we would very much appreciate if you could send it to Jasper Van Assche by March 17, 2021, so we can include it in our analysis. We will be grateful if you could make the (relevant part of the) data available to us, along with a brief description of the sample (sample type/target outgroup/mode and year of data collection, background information).
Call for data: Methods and results of situational activation of global social identities (global human identity, global citizenship identity, etc.)
Paulina Górska, Marta Penczek and I (Katarzyna Hamer) would like to would appreciate references to any published data on this issue to make sure we have included them in our meta-analysis. More importantly, we are especially interested in any relevant unpublished manuscripts or unpublished data that cannot be found through a regular literature search.
If you have unfinished or unpublished manuscripts, we would appreciate a copy. These will be kept confidential and will not be used for any other purpose other than inclusion in the meta-analysis (with a reference).
If you only have raw data that has not yet been analyzed, then we would be happy to help analyze it in exchange for inclusion. In such a case, please send us the dataset and a description of the key variables, relevant for the analysis. Please send all relevant information and/or data to us at this email by the end of April 2021. If you have doubts, whether your study meets the criteria, please contact us as well.
Special Issue of the Journal Sustainability on "What Influences an Individual's Pro-environmental Behavior"
Climate change is one of the most important threats facing humankind. The challenge of sustainability lies in human hands by minimizing environmental impact or benefitting the environment through human behavior. Thus, pro-environmental behavior is increasingly becoming a vital factor in psychology. This special issue is interested in determinants that are positively related to pro-environmental behavior, and determinants that hinder people from behaving pro-environmentally.
EJSP (European Journal of Social Psychology) invites proposals for a Special Issue to appear in 2022
Through this open call, we encourage potential Guest Editors to submit Special Issues proposals to our editorial office (ejsp@easp.eu) by March 31, 2021. On the basis of a comparative evaluation, the editorial team will then select one proposal as the Special Issue for 2022.
Special issue proposals should contain the following information:
• Proposed title of the Special Issue
• Name(s) and contact details of Guest Editor(s).
• A brief description of aims and topics covered, and a case made for the interest in the topic among the readership of EJSP (300-500 words).
• A case made that there will be sufficient interest in terms of submissions on the topic, including any indication of authors who may be willing to submit work on the issue (e.g., people who have contributed to relevant recent symposia or thematic volumes) (max 300 words).
• A brief explanation of what each Guest Editor will bring to the editorial process (e.g., theoretical/methodological expertise, previous editorial experience, etc.) (max 200 words)
• A brief CV (max 2 pages) for each Guest Editor.
Call for book chapters: Social Unrest in Latin America: Social Psychological Perspectives
This edited volume seeks to understand the social, psychological, and political factors underlying the similarities and differences of this turmoil across the continent and beyond through the lens of diverse research traditions, methods, and researchers. The primary aim of this edited volume will be to address the overall lack of representative knowledge from this continent and on this widespread phenomenon by bringing together novel research findings on all aspects of this turbulent period in the region and make them available to an international audience of scholars, activists, and intellectuals.
We encourage submissions from a variety of theoretical perspectives on social unrest (collective action, intergroup contact, social identity, relative deprivation, intergroup emotions, or any other relevant theoretical framework) based on a variety of methods (quantitative and qualitative) and disciplines. These might include but are not limited to:
• Collective action and change
• Perceptions of disadvantage and emotions
• Indigenous rights
• Mental Health & Well-being Dimensions of Disadvantage
• Social cognition (attitudes, stereotypes, prejudice)
• Political divisions and prejudice
• Liberation Theory
• Fostering cooperative and harmonious intergroup relationships
• Social identities and disadvantage
• Respect and tolerance
• Political ideologies and mobilization
• Grassroots movements and citizen initiatives
• Intergenerational mobilization
The Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace Psychology invites
applications for small grants for research in peace psychology, development of peace psychology
education programs, or community projects involving the application of peace psychology.
The purpose of this grant program is to foster the development of the field of peace psychology
worldwide through research, education, and the application of peace psychology in community
projects.
- Grant awards this year are between $300 and $3,000. At least half of the grants are awarded to
graduate students or persons in the early stages of their careers.
- Applications will be accepted through June 1, 2021, with decisions announced July 15, 2021.
- Awardees must be members of Division 48 (but APA membership is not required) | More information
Reflections on the past and future of Political Psychology in the Netherlands from the Dutch Political Psychology meeting on January 28, 2021
Approximately 30 years ago, a number of scholars became active contributors to the field and left their academic footprint on national and international debates. The work of the contributors of “then” can be taken as benchmarks to assess the state of affairs in political psychology of “now”. A reflection on the “then” and the “now” provides guidance for meaningful future directions of political psychology in The Netherlands: Are we progressing as a field, or are we reinventing wheels and repeating the questions for which there is already an answer? Has there been true innovation? What has remained the same over the past decades? During this symposium, moderated by Mark Dechesne, three scholars that have been active for at least three decades in the field of political psychology (Henk Dekker, Bert Klandermans, Chris’l Landsheer) reflected on these issues together with scholars that only recently made their appearance in the field (Maarten van Bezouw and Laura Mulder), watch the recordings here.
Member Spotlight: James L. Gibson
James L. Gibson, the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government in Arts & Sciences, has been elected to the Academy of Science of South Africa as an Honorary Foreign Associate.
In South Africa, Gibson holds the position of Professor Extraordinary in Political Science at Stellenbosch University. He has studied and written extensively about South African politics. Gibson’s three award-winning books – Overcoming Apartheid, Overcoming Historical Injustices and Overcoming Intolerance (co-authored with Amanda Gouws) – collectively trace the evolution of South Africa’s democracy in the post-apartheid era.
Honorary Foreign Associates are outstanding scientists and scholars, currently based in a foreign country, whose work has contributed significantly to science and scholarship in South Africa, which in turn as benefited the public. To qualify, Associates must either have been born in South Africa or have performed a significant part of their work there. |More information
The next ISPPNews will be published in April 2021.
To submit your contributions for ISPPNews please send an email to the ISPP Central Office.
Benefits of your ISPP Membership
Six issues per year of the journal Political Psychology; online access to the journal of Political Psychology and Advances in Political Psychology; issues of ISPPNews; ISPP's Teacher's Corner; reduced registration fees at ISPP's Annual Scientific Meetings; discount on selected publications; access to ISPP's Members-only Portal; access to the online member directory; voting rights for ISPP leadership
Your ideas for further improvements or additions to ISPPNews are welcome! Please let us know what you would like to see here in the future by sending us an email.
ISPP
P.O. Box 1213 Columbus, NC 28722 USA
1+828-894-5422 www.ispp.org
