Nov. 18, 2024: Colin Leach (Barnard College, Columbia University)
Racialized Sentiment at Violence & Protest

Sentiment toward racialized violence, and protest against it (like Black Lives Matter), varies a great deal over time, place, and people. Colin Leach (he/they) will discuss a transdisciplinary project that uses micro (behavioral experiments, psychophysiology) and macro (news and social media) empirical approaches to trace the psychological and social dynamics of this sentiment in the U.S.

The RCGD Seminar Series on the Social Psychology of Systemic Racism meets Mondays from 3:30 to 5 at ISR Thompson 1430. When speaker permission is given, events will be recorded and posted within a few weeks to YouTube.

The Social Psychology of Systemic Racism
What are the points of connection between structures and individuals when we think about bias? In the Fall 2024 RCGD Seminar Series “The Social Psychology of Systemic Racism,” an all-star lineup of behavioral and political psychologists will define what, in their words, makes systemic racism systemic, and how extra-individual levels of analysis could be incorporated in social psychological theories and methods.

Group Dynamics Seminar Series
The Group Dynamics Seminar series is considered one of the longest running seminar series in the social sciences. It has been running uninterruptedly since it was founded by Kurt Lewin in the 1920’s in Berlin. The seminar series runs every semester on a theme chosen by faculty organizer/s who are affiliated with the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research. A very important feature of this seminar today is its interdisciplinary nature. Recent themes have included political polarization, evolution and human behavior, and cultural psychology

Bio
Colin Wayne Leach (B.A. 1989, M.A. 1991, Boston University; Ph.D. 1995, University of Michigan) is a social and personality psychologist who studies status and morality in identity, emotion, and motivation. He is also interested in protest & resistance; Prejudice, stereotypes, ...isms; Meta-theory, methods, and statistics; and transdisciplinary approaches.

At Columbia University, Colin is Professor of Psychology & Africana Studies and Dean of Faculty Diversity & Development at Barnard College; Graduate Faculty and Senior Research Scientist, Department of Psychology, School of Arts & Sciences; and Member of the Data Science Institute.

In addition to authoring over 100 journal articles and chapters, Colin has co-edited the volumes Psychology as Politics (Political Psychology, 2001), Immigrant Life in the U.S. (Routledge, 2003), The Social Life of Emotions (Cambridge, 2004), and Societal Change (Journal of Social & Political Psychology, 2013). He is an elected fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology and is a 2017 recipient of the Kurt Lewin medal for scientific contribution from the European Association of Social Psychology. Colin is Outgoing Editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations & Group Processes.