Location:
Rhode Island/URI, USA
Level of Training:
(Level I – 2014) In PSY478 Kingian Nonviolence & Conflict Reconciliation Course, URI
(Level II – 2015)
Contact Information:
About:
Hello! My name is Justine and I am a Behavioral Science Psychology doctoral student at the University of Rhode Island. I also attended URI as an undergraduate and received my B.A. in Psychology and B.S. in Sociology with a concentration in Criminology back in 2010. I have always had an interest in understanding violent behaviors. However, I first took a Peace Psychology course with Dr. Collyer in Fall 2009 and that is when I became interested in nonviolence as well, specifically the interplay between violence and nonviolence. As a part of my senior honors thesis, I conducted a research study that examined individual perceptions of violent behaviors and how that impacted their actual involvement in violent behaviors.
I returned to URI for graduate school in 2011 where I furthered my study on understanding violence and nonviolence in my coursework and research. My master’s thesis focused on understanding under what conditions (i.e. different emotion states) was a person likely to deem violent behaviors as more or less severe. In my coursework, I was able to learn more about nonviolence theory and how it was utilized in research and for social change. I was able to take Dr. Paul Bueno de Mesquita’s PSY478 Special Topic: Nonviolence Conflict Reconciliation course in the Fall of 2014 which provided me with an amazing opportunity to not just learn more about Kingian nonviolence but how to apply it in my life and in my research. My goal is to use my training to teach others but also to inform psychological research. Empirical research on nonviolence and nonviolence methods (especially Kingian nonviolence) is limited, and I hope to further provide an understanding to this topic area.