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EASP – European Association of Social Psychology

Travel Grant Report by Dr Anouk Smeekes

13.10.2016, by Sibylle Classen in grant report

Utrecht University, The Netherlands; Visit to University of Queensland, Australia, with Prof Jolanda Jetten

The EASP travel grant gave me the opportunity to visit Prof. Jolanda Jetten at the Centre for Research in Psychology (CRiSP) at the University of Queensland (Australia). I had attended the SASP (Society of Australasian Social Psychologists) summer school in 2012 (organized by UQ) as a PhD student, during which I got to know various people of the CRiSP group. I was very happy to see many of them again when visiting UQ.

I was able to combine my visit at UQ with my honeymoon (to Japan and Australia). My husband (also an academic) also joined me when visiting UQ and worked on finalizing his PhD thesis. We are very grateful for the hospitality of the people at the School of Psychology. We felt very welcome as visitors!

The main reason I wanted to visit Jolanda is because we have been working on multiple projects together about national nostalgia and intergroup relations. During my stay at UQ Jolanda and I exchanged ideas for two new papers on this topic and I worked on the analysis of a big cross-national dataset that was gathered by Jolanda and colleagues in various countries. In addition, I gave a presentation for the CRiSP group about my ongoing research on national nostalgia. This resulted in interesting discussions and ideas for further studies.

I also attended a workshop organized by the Social Identity and Groups Network (SIGN) and listened to various interesting talks by honors students and post-docs. The SIGN group is a smaller group at the School of Psychology at UQ led by Alex Haslam, which consists of people working on the subject of social identity. As my work is also based on the Social Identity Perspective, I felt very much at home with this group and the research topics they are working on.

A very nice and unexpected part of my visit was that, together with my husband, I was able to join the SIGN group on their writing retreat of 4 days at Tamborine Mountain. This was a wonderful experience. We stayed in a beautiful place on the mountain, where we worked very hard on our research and exchanged ideas during the day, and got together in the evening to have dinner and play games (Avalon!). This was so much fun and it was wonderful getting to know the people of the group better this way. My husband and I felt very sad when leaving UQ after 3,5 weeks. We would have liked to stay much longer! We will hopefully be able to pay another visit to UQ in the future.
All in all, we had a fantastic time and I want to thank EASP for making this possible.