The Psychology Department’s first staff seminar of the 2019 series was presented on Friday, 2 August. It was presented by Dr Zahra Tizro, originally from Iran and currently based at the 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 of East London, UK. Her PhD was completed at the 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 of York, in Gender Studies; and her earlier degrees were in educational psychology. Dr Tizro’s areas of interest focus on gender and violence from cross-cultural perspectives. She has been hosted as a visitor to the department by Prof. Jacqui Akhurst.
The title of the seminar was ‘Gender dynamics in a cross-cultural context: the impact of socio-political violence’. This was a cross-cultural study to investigate the formation, re-formation and transformation of violence through exploring the multiple and diverse relations between sexuality, death, and socio-political violence at micro, meso and macro levels. The participants in the study were 20 people of the Iranian diaspora (10 men and 10 women) resident in the UK; and 20 non-Iranian British citizens (10 men and 10 women). Participants of the Iranian diaspora expressed confused and divided identities; and cognitive dissonance in their lived experiences of embodiment and sexuality due to their state of belated ‘inbetweenness’. In comparison, the non-Iranian British participants demonstrated more consistency in their identities (due to their engagement in a form of cynical and playful postmodernism in theory but an immersion to modernity in practice, although there were some expressions of liminality in female British participants).