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The Psych Student is basically the blog for my studies as a psychology student, currently converting a BA in media studies into a BSc in Psychology and then launching into graduate studies.
Since I blog my professional life and my social/activisty life, I figured I may as well blog my return to student life as well.
I’ve been interested in psychology for some time, inspired by work with The International Trauma Trauma Treatment Program and Gaza Community Mental Health Programme among others either as a freelancer or volunteer and by the subject my workplace, Teacher Support Network, handles.
I’ve been keen to return to school and study a science for some time. My career in media has turned into one centered around computers and that’s started to brush closer to technology and its cousin, science. Meanwhile, my interest in psychology is also informed by my previous studies and work in the humanities.
I’ve not developed a specific a specific niche in the subject yet, but this blog will generally be related to and revolving around studies, which will start though Open University here in UK.
General interests
Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung. Back row: Abraham Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi. Photo courtesy of Wikidpedia
Part of the reason for making this blog is to keep on ongoing open log into what areas of the subject are interesting and to find others who think so as well, so if you’re a pych student yourself, or a psychologist or just really interested in the subject, this has being put here for you to find and respond to. Because me work over the last few years has been in technology and online media, I’m interested in:
Online identity and experience. How people interact online from Twitter to Facebook to Second Life to buying stuff on Amazon, and the emerging new persona of an online or virtual self.
Interfaces. How a website or application’s user experience can determine how much it gets used or if it gets used at all.
Changes in memory and the use of knowledge. As the web becomes more embedded in life, how is it changing what people know and how they access knowledge or remember things. It’s been widely said that we remember less, but do we recall where to find what we need more? How much collective human knowledge has been uploaded and is accessible to the point where we don’t bother remembering it for ourselves? What is the impact of this? Other aspects of this include the burgeoning rise in wikis, group blogs, online citizen journalism, Google, and and the online accessibility of most types of reference publications.
Due to my life as an activist and human rights worker, I’ve been able to work with a few organizations that have shaped my understanding on the mind under extreme circumstances. Being associated with the International Trauma Treatment Program and occasionally with Gaza Community mental Health programme on different projects through the Rachel Corrie Foundation, Rebuilding Alliance and the Olympia+Rafah Sister city Project, I’ve become more interested in issues around mental health and trauma from war, torutre and other extreme events. In this areas, I’m not just interested in the causes and the results, but also in solutions that groups such as the above mentioned provide. Also, through my work for Teacher Support Network, my interests have been stretched to mental wellbeing under the rigors of what could be described as the everyday stresses. So interests here would include…
Impact of trauma inflicted by torture, war, and natural disasters.
Impact of living under conditions of constant oppression, whether it’s governmental, religious or that of an occupation force. Here I’m hoping to look into, among others, the writing of Frantz Fanon and his analysis of “the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation.”
Psychological effect from committing violence. What happens when people are pressed to do things they morally disagree with. This comes from meeting people from a Ugandan project involved in ITTP, and the work they do with integrating former child soldiers back into their communities.
Workplace Impact of daily stresses. Because of my job with TSN i get to see a lot of statistics about teachers and mental health. School systems are great naturally occuring psych labs in our society where we see adults and kids interacting with each other and among themselves in all sorts of different settings.
Having lived in places where some in the community are vehemently religious and act in some extreme ways (Fundemental Christianity, Juudaism and Islam; I’ve journeyed through the some lands in Israel, Palestine, the United States and Morocco among others, places like many where the three main branches of the Abrahamic faiths are expressed sometimes vehemately) I’m interested in how and why extreme religious belief is expressed and how it effects those living under it and those living around those people. This has led to curiosity about…
The psychology of religion. Here I’m looking forward to reading more in depth on William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience and other research that’s drawn from his work. I’m also looking forward to getting a better understanding of Carl Jung, who I happen to think is misquoted quite a lot by both supporters and detractors.
Evolutionary psychology. It might seem like a strange place to categorize this one, but I’m interested in a certain area of this one. We are all here as a result of nonrandom natural selection. That said, religous tendency has shown itself to be a particularly sturdy in surviving it all. Still today, we here of the dwindling standing that religion has in life. Is this true and if so, what does it mean both short term and long term for adherents and those around them?
Memes. These go far beyond religion, but a lot of memes have to do with faith and the subject also delves into the evolutionary, and it’s interesting to see how ideas that pass along through the ages seem to touch on the “evolutionary buttons” of danger, food and sex and basic survival, and adapt throughout time.
Obviously these are some entirely disparate lines of study. Over the course of time i’m expecting to narrow it down some as a sliver of any of these subjects could be an entire career’s work on its own.
The free and fair use of research
As an open source and public license geek, I’m also into the open access of information, research and raw data. Scientific research across the board moves forward when work is free to share and build upon. This model could work in other areas of art, commerce and proves particularly productive in web and software development, but its bedrock is in the realm of research. While studying psychology as my chosen scientific discipline, I’ll also be exploring emerging ways of sharing research papers, data, software, applications and methods for conducting research through Creative Commons and GPL and GNU.
About the psych site
This site is built on WordPress, using a design theme called Ambiru, originally designed by Phu, modified by Adam and then slightly altered again by me. The header image at top was created using PhotoShop brushes by Kirsty. The wallpaper pattern swaddling this blog’s content area comes from a copy of the Mandigo theme I used to use at drew3000.net.
I’m hosting it on a subdomain of my main site, drew3000.net which is more general interest, but about things involving the crossroads of technology, activism and society as well as a mish-mash of mostly nerdy topics. While I can’t promise that you’ll find anything all that useful at my psych. site, if you do, feel free to use it, build upon it or share it.
Content
The only requirement is that you attribute the work and also share it under the same conditions with everyone else. For details, check out the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Creative Commons license. Science is built around sharing, and this license is in that spirit. If only the rest of the world would catch on.
I’ll also be posting links and lots of content from other sources on the subjects discussed here. Using those sources or building upon their works is of course subject to their own permissions.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
