News Date: Tuesday, February 4, 2025 - 10:00
Please join us on Tuesday, February 11th from Noon to 1:00 PM EST for the first in a series of free Zoom webinars on topics related to our theme for 2025: “Resisting Oppression, Pursuing Justice.” We are pleased to announce that our inaugural speaker will be Professor Johanna Ray Vollhardt from Clark University. Here is the title of her presentation and a brief description:
“The Psychology of Resistance in Violent and Repressive Contexts”
Much of what we know about the psychology of resistance is based on studies of collective action in relatively democratic conditions. More recently, however, psychologists have begun to investigate resistance in more violent and repressive contexts, such as war, ethnic persecution, genocide, settler colonialism, and authoritarian regimes. This research has revealed the importance of considering a wide range of tactics in an effort to understand how people resist oppression and violence. These tactics include everyday resistance in addition to organized collective action, covert as well as overt resistance, cultural resistance and prefigurative politics, and armed resistance.
In her webinar presentation, Professor Vollhardt will illustrate these different forms of resistance using her own research on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust (using oral testimonies from survivors archived in the Shoah Foundation Visual History archive) and research by her Ph.D. students on anti-colonial resistance in Puerto Rico and resistance among the Kurdish diaspora from Turkey. She will also discuss how the social and political context, as well as individual and group-level factors, help to explain when people opt for particular resistance tactics to counter violence and oppression.
Zoom Registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yTfBF_knSfKurnpVLfFA4Q
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