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PubHD – July
27 July 2022 @ 19:00 - 20:00
PubHD offers students in Sheffield an opportunity to try their hands at public engagement by explaining their PhDs in 10-15 minutes and facing questions from a varied and diverse audience.
There’s no boring PowerPoints here, just words and a flipchart. The sessions are back in person in the Old Queen’s Head down by the train station. So come and join in from 1900 on Wednesday 25 May. The organisers recommend bringing some change to buy a round or 2 for the speakers and some friends to get the conversation flowing.
There are 2 exciting talks lined up for July …
Landon Peck
Empirical Approaches to the Psychology of Musical Awe
Many people describe strong emotional reactions when listening to music at festivals, concert halls, and even at home. A curious category among these strong emotions is one that moves us into emotional spaces similar to those magnificent, and sometimes terrifying, feelings associated with experiences of the sublime — these are the accounts of musical awe. There is a long history of theoretical and philosophical ideas proposing what may contribute to these experiences in the mind of the music listener, but few empirical studies have investigated these claims. This PhD project tested these theoretical claims through multiple psychological studies exploring personal accounts of how we listen to awe-related music, what kinds of emotional associations we make, and analysing commonalities in sonic and musical features found in awe-related music. From the results of these studies, we now have some of the first empirical evidence supporting many of the theoretical claims. These findings not only enhance our understanding of the nature of musical awe but also lay a foundation for future research into new and exciting studies that explore our experiences of the sublime.
Muneer N Al-Hadhrami
Rub Aladdin’s magic lamp and the genie takes you to Oman, you are among Bedouin Arabs with their camels in the desert trying to teach them English – what happens?
This qualitative research explores foreign teachers’ (American and British) perceptions of and interactions with the cultural context at a distinct university in the Middle East. Teaching in a different cultural context can be challenging and entails understanding the complexity of the local cultural context which is a mixture of religion, cultures, politics, and international influence. Failing to do so may result in unexpected consequences. In-depth interviews with these teachers and observing their classes physically and being in a new cultural online context (during the Covid-19 pandemic) have revealed some interesting findings that are worth sharing.