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Organizational Psychology Summer Seminar 2022

When:
Venue: Birkbeck Clore Management Centre

No booking required

The Department of Organizational Psychology is delighted to host a range of speakers for this year’s Summer Seminar which will be taking place on Wednesday 29 June from 1pm - 5:30pm. This year's theme will be diversity and worklife balance. 

This event is open exclusively to Organizational Psychology students, alumni and staff. This event is planned to take place in person on Birkbeck Campus. 

Organizational Psychology Summer Seminar 2022 

We are delighted to welcome Professor Alexandra Beauregard of the Department of Organizational Psychology as our keynote speaker at this year's Summer Seminar. Alexandra will provide a talk on the diversity of work-life balance. 

ITINERARY

1.00pm       Welcome and departmental update - Professor Almuth McDowall

1.30pm       Keynote Presentation: The Diversity of Work-Life Balance- Professor Alexandra Beauregard

                   Discussant: Professor Gail Kinman

2.30pm       Doing ‘diversity research’ differently: Collective writing as a form of epistemic resistance - Dr Uracha Chatrakul Na Ayudhya

3.00pm       Benefiting from diversity: using agent-based models to understand possibilities and barriers- Dr Lukas Wallrich

3.30pm       Refreshment Break 

4.00pm       The lived experience of embodied occupational identity in professional ballet dancers – The tensions between three notions of the body - Paula Fitzgerald

4.30pm       Knowing in the unknown: Epistemic experiences of small hospitality business owners during the pandemic - Joanna Wiles

5.00pm       Final remarks - Professor Almuth McDowall

5:15pm       End

 

BIOGRAPHIES

Professor Alexandra Beauregard

Alexandra Beauregard is Professor of Organizational Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on the work-life interface, flexible working arrangements and diversity management, with a particular focus on gender and gender identity. Alexandra serves on the Executive Board of the international Work and Family Researchers Network, where she also co-leads the Technology, Work and Family Networking Community. She is an editor for the journal Work, Employment and Society and is currently guest-editing special issues on new ways of working for Human Resource Management Journal and on human resource management in times of turbulence for International Journal of Human Resource Management. She heads the Diversity Research Group within the School of Business, Economics and Informatics at Birkbeck and is an international affiliate member of the Peoples, Cultures, and Careers Research Cluster at James Cook University in Singapore. Alexandra also holds a fractional research position at Oslo New University College. 

Professor Gail Kinman

Dr Gail Kinman is Visiting Professor of Occupational Health Psychology at Birkbeck University of London and University of Nottingham. She is a Chartered Psychologist and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and the Academy of Social Sciences. Gail has published widely in the field of occupational health psychology, with a particular interest in improving wellbeing in people who do emotionally demanding work, such as health and social care practitioners, prison officers and educators. She is a Trustee of the Council for Work and Health and chairs the Society of Occupational Medicine’s Occupational Psychology Special Interest Group. Gail is on the editorial board of several high impact journals such as the International Journal of Stress Management, British Medical Bulletin and Occupational Medicine. She has recently been working with several bodies, such as Public Health England, the Society of Occupational Medicine, Education Support and the British Psychological Society to formulate guidelines to help organisations and individuals manage the demands posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath.  Gail has developed and delivered well received training sessions and workshops on aspects of work-related wellbeing in the private and public sectors. 

Professor Almuth McDowall 

Almuth is Professor of Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck University of London where she leads her department and is part of her school’s executive team. Her research has been funded by the Ministry of Defence, the College of Policing, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the Home Office, as well as a range of other funders.  Almuth has won awards for her research and her commitment to furthering the practice of psychology in the workplace in the UK. She is regularly contributes to the media fuelled by her belief that research needs to speak to organisations directly to have impact and contemporary relevance.

She is a Chartered Psychologist, Registered Practitioner Psychologist, Academic Fellow of the CIPD and Fellow of the International Society for Coaching Psychology. Alongside she is a practicing psychologist working with the private, public and third sector delivering bespoke assignments, often at senior levels.

Dr Uracha Chatrakul Na Ayudhya 

Uracha is a proud migrant worker. She is the Assistant Dean for Equalities and Diversity at the School of Business, Economics, and Informatics (BEI) and Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of MSc Human Resource Management in the Department of Organizational Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, UK.  

Uracha researches and writes about unequal working lives and careers. Her work focuses on workers’ lived experience at the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, immigration status, and nationality. Her research is informed by critical approaches to ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. Her latest research focuses on the practice and methodologies of ‘writing differently’ and collective writing as resistance against hegemonic norms of knowledge production. 

Paula Fitzgerald

Paula is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Organizational Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London.  She is a graduate of the MSc in Human Resources Development and Consultancy at Birkbeck, and a Chartered Member of the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development). Paula has played an active role in the Department of Organizational Psychology where she has tutored on a number of MSc programmes and participated in various departmental public events as a doctoral researcher speaker. Paula is an HR Manager and has worked in the financial sector in the City of London with both large multinational and boutique financial institutions.  Her doctoral research addresses the embodied occupational identity of professional ballet dancers with a specific focus on the ‘lived’ body, ageing in the workplace, and their implications for occupational identity construction.

Dr Lukas Wallrich

Lukas is working as a Lecturer in the Department of Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck and teaches on the HR master programmes. Lukas research focuses on how workforce diversity can be harnessed to improve organisational performance. Other research interests include the effect of intergroup contact on pro-social behaviour, the development of stereotypes and implicit associations and the influence of traditional and new media on public attitudes.

Before joining Birkbeck in 2021, Lukas finished a PhD in Social Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Beyond academia, Lukas has extensive management consultancy with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on organisational change, and work to apply understanding of intergroup relations by working with the United World Colleges movement on the design and implementation of international youth summer programmes.

Joanna Wiles

Joanna is a coach, consultant, and facilitator. She specialises in the challenges of knowing and not knowing in an era of uncertainty and “post-truth”. Her particular interests are in the power dynamics of knowing and knowledge, lived experiences of doubt and uncertainty, and the challenges of collective sense-making. She studied for her MSc in Organizational Psychology at Birkbeck, winning the departmental award for Best Overall Student in the 2021 graduating class. 

Joanna has had a very varied career, including running her own embodiment education business, and working internationally as a stand-up and character comedian. More recently she’s worked in the public sector, designing talent and leadership development programmes. She also has an MA from Birkbeck in Creative Industries (Arts and Media).  

Events Disclaimer 

This is subject to any restrictions in place with regard to the Covid pandemic. If it is not possible to hold the event in person, then it will be moved online.

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