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20092024

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Research Biography

I have been at Flinders since 2017 and in 2023 was appointed a Matthew Flinders Professor of Psychology. I have held academic positions at Murdoch University and the Australian National University, where I was awarded my PhD in 2009. I was an Associate Editor (2016-2019) and Consulting Editor at the British Journal of Social Psychology (2013-current).

Research Interests

Participation in protest and other forms of collective action is critical for a healthy, functioning democracy. However, political violence has enormous personal, social and economic costs. Therefore, my research focuses on understanding i) when, why and how people decide to join collective efforts to bring about a desired social change; ii) the factors that shift people towards violent extremism.

My research is primarily informed by the social identity approach to group processes and intergroup relations. It adopts quantatiative cross-sectional and experimental methods to study how exposure to different stimuli and different social contexts shapes people’s engagement (or disengagement) with social justice issues. With the advent of new forms of technology (social media: Facebook, Twitter) a lot of our analysis also focuses on how online social interactions shape people’s orientation to act to confront inequality and injustice. Our work identifies how novel groups form through (online and offline) interaction that allows people to become the change that they want to see in the world

To learn more, you can watch this clip about my work.

Supervision

  • Registered

Research Areas

  • Clinical psychology
  • Psychology

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