Professor Susan Condor

BSc Psychology (Wales), PhD (Bristol)

  • Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology

Susan Condor studied for her undergraduate degree at Cardiff University. After a period working in London with young people entering the Care system, she returned to academic life and took a PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Bristol under the supervision of Henri Tajfel and Howard Giles. She took up the post of Professor of Social Psychology at Loughborough in 2012, having previously worked at the Universities of Kent, Cardiff and Lancaster, where she was Director of the Place and Identity Research Group. She was a member of Panel A4 (Psychology, Psychiatry & Neuroscience) in the UK Research Excellence Framework, 2013.

Susan Condor’s research focuses on the related processes of self-representation and Othering. In 2015 she was awarded an MRC/Royal Society Suffrage Science prize for her pioneering work on collaborative processes in prejudice and discrimination.

Current Research Interests Include

  • Processes of self-extension, including: Social identity; Collaborative processes in social cognition; Place attachment, and temporal aspects of identity. A good deal of Susan’s research has concentrated on the formation and communication of national and European identities. Her current research focuses more specifically on people’s relation to built and natural environments, including garden design, and social and therapeutic horticulture.
  • Prejudice and discrimination, including the use of historical narratives and images of place to communicate views about ‘outsiders’. Susan’s current work focuses on environmental discrimination, and on the ways in which constructs of ecology, environmentalism, conservation and biodiversity may be drawn upon in the course of arguments about social justice.
  • The history of social psychological concepts, including prejudice, the self, and the psychology of restorative environments.

Current Grant

2016-2018 Sharing Wealth and Decisions in the EU: Identity and legitimacy (PI: Denis Sindic).

  • Prejudice and intergroup discrimination;
  • Everyday understandings of historical events and processes;
  • National consciousness and identity;
  • Public attitudes and public opinion;
  • Ambivalence and ideological dilemmas;
  • Social psychological aspects of citizenship;
  • Political inaction and apathy.
  • Research Methods in Memory Studies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013 (with Emily Keightley).
  • Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism, Berlin, Münster, London, Wien, Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2013 (with Wulf D. Hund and Anandi Ramamurthy)
  • The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 (with Emily Keightley).
  • Rhythms of Labour: The History of Music at Work in Britain, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (with Marek Korczynski and Emma Robertson).
  • Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour, ed., with Sharon Lockyer, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005/revised and updated paperback edition 2009. 
  • Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
  • Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage, 2004 (with Keith Negus).
  • Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
  • ‘Sex in the Sun: Racial Stereotypes and Tabloid News’, Social Semiotics, 18:3, September 2008, pp. 363-375.
  • ‘Trauma, Discourse and Communicative Limits’, Critical Discourse Studies, 6:4, November 2009, pp. 237-49 (with Emily Keightley).
  • ‘Communities of Memory and the Problem of Transmission’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 16:1, February 2013, pp. 115-31 (with Emily Keightley). 
  • ‘The Self-Interview: A New Method in Social Science Research’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 15:6, November 2012, pp. 507-21 (with Emily Keightley and Nicola Allett).
  • ‘Technologies of Memory: Practices of Remembering in Analogue and Digital Photography’, New Media and Society, 16:4, 2014, pp.  576-593 (with Emily Keightley).
  • ‘The Devaluation of History in Media Studies’ in Martin Conboy and John Steel eds. The Routledge Companion to British Media History, London: Bloomsbury, 2014.