Feeling Black Lives Matter: The Psycho-Social Dynamics of Sentiment
Not everyone “feels” Black Lives Matter. The meme and the movement are controversial because many publics are divided about whether racism exists and should be protested.
I will discuss a transdisciplinary project on everyday sentiment rooted in affect theory and science; the iconography and phenomenology of race, domination, and resistance; social and personality psychology; dynamical systems theory; and data science. I will present a series of studies in the U.S. that use micro (physiology, neuroscience, self-report) and macro (news and social media) quantitative methods to trace the dynamics of sentiment at events, over time, across individuals and groups.
About the speaker
Colin Wayne Leach (B.A. 1989, M.A. 1991, Boston University; Ph.D. 1995, University of Michigan) is a social and personality psychologist who studies status and morality in identity, emotion, and motivation. He is also interested in protest & resistance; Prejudice, stereotypes, …isms; Meta-theory, methods, and statistics; and transdisciplinary approaches. In addition to authoring over 100 articles and chapters, Prof. Leach has co-edited the volumes Psychology as Politics (Political Psychology, 2001), Immigrant Life in the U.S. (Routledge, 2003), The Social Life of Emotions (Cambridge, 2004), and Societal Change (Journal of Social & Political Psychology, 2013).
At Columbia University, he is Professor of Psychology & Africana Studies at Barnard College; Adjunct Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Psychology, School of Arts & Sciences; Graduate Faculty in Psychology, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences; Faculty Research Fellow at the Institute for Research in African American Studies; Member of the Data Science Institute; and Affiliate Member of the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute.
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