International Collaboration and the Environmental Psychology Research Group, School of Psychology
Monday 5 November 2012
The University of Surrey was one of the first and remains one of the principal international centres of research and teaching in environmental psychology. Consequently it has established extensive international networks of colleagues and collaborations. We have two current international research projects.
The first, funded under the EU FP7 programme and called LOCAW: Low Carbon at Work: Modelling agents and organisations to achieve transition to a low carbon Europe is investigating six large-scale organizations in six European countries to understand the social macro and micro-level conditions which act as drivers for and constraints upon sustainable practices in production processes. Surrey is working with research teams in Italy, The Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and Sweden.
A second project, funded by Vetenskapsrådet/Swedish Research Council is the Moments of danger, moments of opportunity: the role of individuals as change agents in Trade Unions, is studying the role individuals play in transforming trade unions in order to cope with the new challenges posed by climate change, globalisation, and restructuring. David Uzzell is jointly managing researchers in Brazil (Federal University of Uberlândia), South Africa (University of Witwatersrand) and India (University of Kolkata), as well as undertaking research in Sweden and Spain.
Both of these projects have followed an initial collaborative project between the Universities of Surrey and Umeå funded by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research which investigated trade union policies oriented towards the environment and climate change and the relations between unions of the global South and North, and involved research across Europe and in Brazil, South Africa, India and Malaysia.
Finally, we have just concluded another EU project led by the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and investigating Identity and Conflict: Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict. David Uzzell was one of the three international advisers working with research teams in Spain, France, Bosnia, Cyprus, and Germany. There have also been strong collaborative research and publishing ties over many years with the University of Queensland in the area of heritage, museums, learning and identity. This has involved many visits to Surrey by with Professor Roy Ballantyne and David Uzzell being awarded a W James Whyte Visiting Research Fellowship in early 2012.
International collaboration has extended into teaching. Dr Birgitta Gatersleben has taught for a number of years on the Environmental Psychology Summer School in Groningen. From 2013, David Uzzell will be contributing to an MSc course on 'Labour Policies and Globalisation' at Germany (Kassel University), which it is anticipated will be supported by an EARSMUS Agreement. The teaching programme is part of the Global Labour University, which offers labour Masters’ programmes at the University of the Witwatersrand, University of Campinas (UNICAMP, Brazil) and (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai); it is hoped to extend the Surrey contribution to these other centres in future years.
Professor David Uzzell holds the position of Visiting Professor at the University of Umeå, Sweden. He is also the British Psychological Society representative on European Federation of Psychologists’ Association Task Force on Environmental Psychology. In 2011 he was invited to be a Panel Chair for the Research Council of Norway's Centres of Excellence Scheme to establish a Centre on Transformation in a Changing Climate. He is also a member of the Board of Experts, Committee for Research Evaluation (CIVR - Comitato di Indirizzo per la Valutazione della Ricerca - CIVR), Italian Ministry of Education