May 14th, 2012 —
How Free Is Academic Freedom?: An op-ed in the Toronto Globe and Mail
Canada desperately needs a broad and vigorous public discussion about why academic freedom is important, what might threaten it and how it should be protected.
Welcome.
At this web site you’ll find information about my background, teaching, research, and writing. The site includes some of my writings as well as a Forum where we can discuss issues of common interest. If you’d like to receive my newsletter, just enter your email address in the box at the bottom of the page. Enjoy your visit.
Featured
ABUSE OF POWER
CAUT is wrong about CIGI and the Balsillie school.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers has presented an entirely one-sided and self-serving narrative regarding Jim Balsillie’s alleged interference in academic affairs. Read the other side of the story here.
What's New:
May 1st, 2012 —
Exploring the Climate “Mindscape”: an interview in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
The climate change problem might ultimately reside as much in our heads as in the external world. Researchers need to map the “mindscape,” a virtual space within which most of the world’s people are clustered in a few ideologically polarized groups. Vast, unexplored regions of the mindscape, he says, may offer new ways of thinking about problems such as climate change and new ways of living together successfully in the future.”
Research Talk
Catastrophe Response Surface
Catastrophic Dehumanization: the Psychological Dynamics of Severe Conflict
A presentation at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, April 17, 2012.
Dehumanization is arguably a defining feature of the most brutal acts of human violence, such as saturation bombardment of civilian populations, terrorist attacks on urban centers, intense battlefield combat, and genocide. I propose a psychological explanation of this phenomenon that uses a catastrophe manifold to describe a set of psychological states in an individual’s mind and the possible pathways of movement between these states. The manifold exists in a three-dimensional phase space defined by the variables identity, justice, and structural constraint. It specifies five hypotheses about the causes and dynamics of dehumanization. Taken together, these hypotheses represent an overarching theory of the nonlinear collapse of identification at the level of the individual.