Sussex psychologist receives lifetime achievement award
A University of Sussex psychologist has been honoured with a lifetime achievement award.
Professor Rupert Brown accepts the 'lifetime achievement' Henri Tajfel medal in July 2014 in recognition of his contributions to social psychology over five decades.
Professor Rupert Brown, a social psychologist, was awarded the Henri Tajfel medal by the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP) last Friday (11 July).
The EASP, Europe’s main scientific body for social psychology, awards the medal once every three years to a researcher who has made “a distinguished ‘lifetime achievement’ contribution” to the field.
The silver medal is named after EASP founder, the late Henri Tajfel, which has a special significance for Professor Brown; Henri Tajfel supervised his PhD at Bristol University in the 1970s.
Professor Brown says: “I was deeply moved to be awarded this prize, named as it is after my supervisor who exerted such a profound intellectual influence on generations of European social psychologists, both before and after his untimely death in 1982.
“Not only did he revolutionise the field of intergroup relations with his social identity theory in 1979, but he also played a significant role in the development of social psychology as a scientific discipline in Europe, primarily by helping to establish the European Association of Social Psychology, the organisation which has now honoured me with this award.”
Professor Brown is a world-renowned expert in the social psychology of groups, with a research career spanning five decades. His broad research interests cover: migration and the effective integration of majority and minority groups; prejudice and prejudice reduction; social identity; and team building.
He is currently researching, with Dr Mark Walters (Law, Politics and Sociology), the indirect effects of hate crime (funded by The Leverhulme Trust). And, in a separate project with Dr Mike Collyer (Global Studies) and Dr Linda Morrice (Education and Social Work), he is analysing refugee resettlement in the UK (funded by the ESRC).
Professor Brown accepted the award in front of hundreds of his peers in Amsterdam at the EASP’s 2014 conference.
He then gave the 2014 Henri Tajfel lecture, entitled 'The Dynamics of Contact and Acculturation', where he presented his research on intergroup contact and acculturation processes in majority and minority groups around the world.
In his opening remarks, he noted how Henri Tajfel, though never professionally involved with either contact or acculturation as research topics, was undoubtedly an expert in both, given his personal migration history - first from Poland to France in the late 1930s, and then from France to the UK after the Second World War.
A key theme of Professor Brown’s address was an appeal to social psychologists to recognise the importance of the temporal dynamics of intergroup relations in their analyses of acculturation and adaptation. Paying tribute to his many international collaborators, he summarised several programmes of longitudinal and experimental work on contact and acculturation in Belgium, Chile, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK.