How can I help?
How can I help?

Dr Conrad Russell

Senior Lecturer

Conrad Russell is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology, who teaches on the BA Social degree and on MA Interdisciplinary Psychology. He is also Course Leader for the MA programme.

Orcid Logo 0000-0003-2746-0480
Leeds Beckett Logo

About

Conrad Russell is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology, who teaches on the BA Social degree and on MA Interdisciplinary Psychology. He is also Course Leader for the MA programme.

Conrad Russell is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology, who teaches on the BA Social degree and on MA Interdisciplinary Psychology. He is also Course Leader for the MA programme.

Conrad's background is in Sociology and Social Theory. Now teaching in Social Psychology, he has expanded his previous interests in memory and time, to encompass constructionist approaches to memory in Psychology and debates around the nature of consciousness. Conrad also teaches on research methods and methodology at Undergraduate and Postgraduate level, and has research interests in Science studies, especially around the nature of scientific facts and psychology's status as a science. He also has interests around Psychology and culture and the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.

Research interests

Conrad is currently undertaking research around place and memory, and the impact of shifting borders on collective remembering. This is interdisciplinary work spanning Psychology, Memory Studies, Philosophy and Cultural Geography.

Ask Me About

Publications (4)

Sort By:

Journal article

Fictive Time - Bachelard on Duration, Memory and Consciousness

Featured 01 September 2005 KronoScope5(1):3-20 (18 Pages) Brill

I am concerned here with an analysis of time and memory as human creations. Drawing on the work of Bachelard, but also on Guyau and Janet, I argue that time and memory can be thought of as "fictive", as a work of human imagination and creativity. Temporal rhythms are not simple repetitions, but acts of will, marked by an attempt to perfect earlier repetitions. Memory is not simply a photographic record of the past accessed by intuition, but rather a cinematic act of narration. Time is a human creative act, as is the self, with which it is closely bound up. The very nature of reasoning and of our engagement with the world, imply that both time and the self are discontinuous and open. Thought and creation involve negations and ruptures. As such, Bachelardian time is at odds with Bergsonian duration. This paper follows Bachelard as he develops his own understanding of time and memory through a "subversive" critique of Bergson's thought.

Journal article
Second culture and second nature: Fact, post-fact, and the social construction of scientific objects
Featured 22 October 2017 Socologija. Mintis ir Veiksmas/Sociology: Thought and Action40(1):11-25 Vilnius University Press

The use of constructionism by climate change deniers and ‘9-11 truthers’ to support ‘post-fact’ arguments in recent political and social debates has created controversy within science studies. Here, I seek to re-evaluate what constructionists actually say about facts in science. Through revisiting Gaston Bachelard – a key influence on scientific constructionism – I argue that science can penetrate to the ‘noumenal core’ of the phenomena it studies because it constructs them. This, however, need not imply that facts can be whatever we want them to be.

Journal article

Against dead time

Featured September 2002 TIME & SOCIETY11(2-3):193-208 SAGE Publications

This article connects Virilio's critique of speed with Surrealist and Situationist writings attacking the homogeneous time of the commodity, which themselves echo Benjamin and Bergson. I suggest here that these authors can all be seen as taking a Romantic stance against the perceived reification and abstraction inherent in modernity and its dominant time. Further, they share a concern with interrupting modernity's homogeneous time, to usher in more authentic forms of duration. I suggest, however, that the displacement of Newtonian time by other times, increasingly homogeneous and abstract, but constituted precisely by interruption, poses a problem for this strategy.

Journal article
Special Issue: Sociology and Contemporary Critical Theory
Featured November 2017 Sociologija. Mintis ir Veiksmas/Sociology: Thought and Action40(1):1-180 (180 Pages)
AuthorsAuthors: Salem A, Backhouse-Barber J, Chkhaidze I, Coe S, Driver T, Hazeldine G, Morgan D, Russell C, Till C, Editors: Salem A, Till C

Sociologija. Mintis ir veiksmas (Sociology: Thought and Action) is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal published in Lithuania and dedicated to the critical study of contemporary social and cultural change – including the shifting status of sociology itself – from a variety of perspectives. It covers subjects such as social theory, social research and research methodology, political sociology, gender issues, nationalism, sociology of art, social stratification and social identities. In addition, the journal is open to contributions that engage with wider debates within and across social psychology, philosophy, history, political science and anthropology, and provides a forum for reviews of recently published or translated sociological texts.

Current teaching

  • Mind, Self and Culture (BA Social Psychology Year 1)
  • Parapsychology (BA Social Psychology Year 2)
  • Researching Psychology (BA Social Psychology Year 2)
  • Radical Psychology (BA Social Psychology Year 3)
  • Central Problems in Psychology (MA Interdisciplinary Psychology)
  • Critical Methodologies (MA Interdisciplinary Psychology)
  • Dissertation Co-ordinator - BA Social Psychology
  • Project Co-ordinator - MA Interdisciplinary Psychology
{"nodes": [{"id": "9187","name": "Dr Conrad Russell","jobtitle": "Senior Lecturer","profileimage": "/-/media/images/staff/default.jpg","profilelink": "/staff/dr-conrad-russell/","department": "School of Humanities and Social Sciences","numberofpublications": "4","numberofcollaborations": "4"},{"id": "17964","name": "Dr Chris Till","jobtitle": "Reader","profileimage": "/-/media/images/staff/lbu-approved/lsss/chris-till.jpg","profilelink": "/staff/dr-chris-till/","department": "School of Humanities and Social Sciences","numberofpublications": "24","numberofcollaborations": "1"}],"links": [{"source": "9187","target": "17964"}]}
Dr Conrad Russell
9187