Spotlight on Swansea

As a Psychologist, do you ever think about the Psychology of where you live and work? Are the people of your hometown in any way psychologically distinct? Does your research and/or practice extend out into the local community, and can you imagine simply transporting it to another place? Do any of these questions even make sense to you?

If not, you may find yourself a little baffled by this initiative! A while back, I was pondering how – to me at least – Psychology is often grounded in place. Its concerns, its collaborations, its commentaries, may be shaped by where it is. I thought it could be good to get out and about to experience this, on the ground.

I started in Swansea, with two days of interviews at the University of Wales Trinity St David and the University of Swansea. There were several reasons for this.

Firstly, and prosaically, my eldest son is at University there. I could tag working days onto a visit, and the BPS wouldn't incur any expense. 

Secondly, I want to mostly prioritise Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland at first, because I am the first to admit that The Psychologist could do more to reflect the British Psychological Society's status as a four-nation organisation. We don't get out and about much these days, but when we do we should try to get to new places.

Thirdly, in my visits there during my son's first year at Swansea, the place had really got under my skin. Dylan Thomas once wrote of Swansea as 'An ugly, lovely town... crawling, sprawling... by the side of a long and splendid curving shore. This sea-town was my world.' Something about it, the geography, the weather, feels distinctive; I wanted to see if the psychologists who worked there felt this too, and if so whether that was reflected in their interests and partnerships.

What I've ended up with is a lot – they were really enjoyable and productive visits to the universities, and I thank them for their hospitality. I personally think it's worth presenting in full because I believe that across the interviews there's a rich range of topics and approaches.

That's not to say that we would always take this approach from now on, or that you're going to get these features more than once or twice a year. It's going to be a gradual process of exploring new places. I'd like to do more to reflect practice in place too, alongside the more academic side.

It may well be that lots of interviewees, when I ask 'Do you think you could just take your work and transport it to a different part of the UK?', respond with 'Yes, I think so'. And maybe everyone thinks 'resilience' is what is distinctive about the people where they live. But maybe this approach will also take us to some under-explored areas, in the UK and in Psychology…

'What we do is a way to give back to the community that took me in'

'Within evolutionary psychology, you get a more mixed bag of political orientations'

'The communities have got to trust you'

'The world is starting to realise we were the missing link'

'Behaviourism is deeply misunderstood, misrepresented'

'We have to acknowledge the food system as a whole'

'To be able to have input into government is a real power'