Keynote Speakers

Get to know more about the speakers of the Social Psychology Days 2024 Conference.
Bernhard Forchtner

Dr Bernhard Forchtner is Associate Professor at the School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, UK. Before joining Leicester, he was Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences at the Humboldt University in Berlin (Germany). He works on the far right, in particular their environmental communication. His recent publications include ‘Climate change and the far right’ (in WIREs Climate Change, 2019) and the edited volume The Far Right and the Environment (Routledge, 2019).

Catia Teixeira

Dr Catia Teixeira is a social psychologist working at the Department of Work and Social Psychology of the Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Her research revolves around intergroup relations and focuses specifically on social inequality and social change attempts such as protest. She is interested in how power dynamics and threats inherent to the experience of privilege determine support or resistance to change towards more equality among advantaged group members. Catia mainly uses experimental methodologies and has recently started to study these issues using NLP and big data analyses. She has received funding from the Belgian and Dutch Science Foundations (FNRS and NWO, respectively) and the EU under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie funding scheme, among others.

Esther Papies

Dr Esther K. Papies (PhD, Utrecht University, The Netherlands) is a Reader (Associate Professor) in the School of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow, where she heads the Healthy Cognition Lab and teaches The Psychology of Climate Change. Originally trained as a social psychologist, Dr Papies is an expert in the psychological processes underlying desire for food and drink, and successful behaviour change in the domains of health and sustainability.  Her current research program focuses increasingly on the psychological and societal mechanisms to improve human wellbeing within planetary boundaries.  Her work has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Health Psychology, Appetite, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and the International Journal of Obesity, and it is currently funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK.