A social psychology of mass gathering participation: Evidence from a mass pilgrimage event in north India

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Time: 4.00pm
Venue: Room JG0001, John Galsworthy building, Penrhyn Road campus, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE
Price: free
Speaker(s): Nick Hopkins, University of Dundee

The talk draws upon research conducted at one of the largest collective events in the world - the annual month-long gathering of Hindu pilgrims at Prayag (Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, north India). It will report qualitative (interview and ethnographic) data and quantitative (survey) data concerning pilgrims' experience of their social relations with others at the event and how these social relations are consequential for pilgrims' abilities to enact their Hindu identity. It will also report quantitative data obtained before, during and after the event concerning the degree to which pilgrims' social relations with each other at the event impacted upon participants' well-being and social identification as a Hindu. Taken together these analyses point to the ways in which social psychology can contribute to understanding the ways in which participating in collective events is psychologically and socially consequential.

Nick Hopkins is a Social Psychologist at the University of Dundee and co-editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology. He is interested in identities associated with group membership (particularly national and religious identities). One strand of his research concerns the social construction of such social identities, especially the ways in which they are argued over so as to organise different forms of collective behaviour. Another strand concerns the experience of minority group members and how the attitudes and behaviours of majority group members impact upon minority group members' abilities to act in terms of their own understandings of their social identities. A third strand concerns the social processes that make co-ordinated group behaviour possible.

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Contact: Adrian Coyle
Email: a.coyle@kingston.ac.uk