SEPCP 2020 Webinar Series: Improving Our Science and Increasing Our Impact
Throughout 2020, Div. 34 will offer a monthly webinar series covering a wide range of topics and issues that impact our effectiveness and reach as researchers, practitioners and advocates—everything from how to conduct mixed-methods research projects in field settings to pursuing effective advocacy with policymakers and nonprofits, to incorporating 21st century statistical practices into our everyday research. Topics covered will be of interest and use to researchers, students, practitioners and others from a wide diversity of fields, including but not limited to environmental, population, conservation and applied social psychology.
Each talk in the webinar series will take place at 12-1 p.m. EST on the second Tuesday of each month (see below for full list of dates). All sessions will be recorded and made available via a link posted on this site. The entire series is free, and participants do not need to be members of Div. 34 or APA in order to participate. Please let your colleagues and collaborators who may be interested in the series know about the webinar and encourage them to participate. Early career researchers, including undergraduate and graduate students, are particularly encouraged to participate in this year’s events.
Information about speakers, topics and event dates is provided below. This page will be updated throughout 2020 as new details become available. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to any member of the Division 34 executive committee.
To register and participate, visit the webinar registration page.
Webinars
Speaker: Sander van der Linden (University of Cambridge)
Sander van der Linden will focus on how to publish high-quality research in environmental psychology, drawing on his experience as editor-in-chief at Journal of Environmental Psychology (JEP). As one of the premier journals in the field, JEP receives over 600 submissions a year, most of which are desk rejected. What makes for a good manuscript and top research in our field? JEP’s new journal policies are focused on ensuring reproducibility of key findings in environmental psychology, open science, transparency, methodological innovation and diversity of scholarship. Want to learn more and get involved in improving the science of environmental psychology? Join the conversation and share your thoughts!
Watch the recorded webinar.
Speaker: Sonya Sachdeva (U.S. Forest Service)
Socio-ecological systems, within which human-nature relationships are embedded, are inherently complex and require a rich toolset to study. Forest Service social scientist Sonya Sachdeva will discuss the agency’s focus on use-inspired research, which aims to create science that is grounded in and informed by the real world. She describes her multi-method approach, combining behavioral experiments with field research and computational social science with relevance for scientists, practitioners and land managers.
Watch the recorded webinar.
Speaker: Reuven Sussman (American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy)
Psychologists studying human behavior and sustainability do an excellent job of isolating important concepts, testing them and drawing conclusions, but focus less on how to leverage their work to achieve real world impact. How can researchers ensure that their work is put into action? In this webinar, Reuven Sussman of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy explains how to maximize the impact of work in the psychology of sustainability and how to work as an expert in the field of psychology to influence governments, businesses and nonprofits to make their sustainability policies and programs more effective.
Speaker: Linda Silka (University of Maine)
Policymakers, community leaders and funders of environmental research are increasingly calling for community-engaged environmental scholarship and are seeing great need for the involvement of psychologists. So, how do we practice effective engaged scholarship? What are the challenges and opportunities? This webinar will highlight some of the exciting new work that scholars in psychology are doing with communities to tackle complex environmental issues. Emerging opportunities will be explored.
Speakers: Christian Klöckner and Erica Löfström (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Christian A. Klöckner will first introduce the concept of disruptive environmental communication and set it into a more general perspective of environmental communication, before he presents some findings on the power of art for communicating environmental issues from the climart project. Afterwards, Erica Löfström will present some insights into the first application of the disruptive communication approach on reducing marine plastic waste in a Norwegian coastal community.
Disclaimer
Our webinar series is intended to broaden access to the many ways members of our community and partners are interpreting the work and future of environmental, population and conservation psychology. The webinar presenters' opinions and approaches are their own or those of the organizations where they work. Their opinions and approaches do not necessarily reflect the policies or practices of the Society, nor should any specific webinar be considered the accepted orthodoxy of the fields we support. Of necessity, each webinar touches on a specific topic rather than the whole of the discipline.