#123 – Fiona White on Promoting Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Better Thinking

In this episode of Better Thinking, Nesh Nikolic speaks with Fiona White about the development of effective strategies to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Fiona White was awarded her PhD in 1997 by the University of Sydney. She is now a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sydney, and the Director of the Sydney University Psychology of Intergroup Relations (SUPIR) Lab. She is recognized internationally for advancing new and effective strategies such as cooperative contact, dual identity recategorization and perspective tacking to promote positive intergroup relations in the short- and long-term.

Across her career, Fiona has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications and her work has been cited over 4000 times. One of Fiona’s most significant research contributions has been the development of the E-contact intervention, a synchronous online tool that has been found to reduce anxiety, prejudice and stigma. E-contact has been shown to successfully improve intergroup relations between: Muslims and Christians in Australia; Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland; Turkish and Kurdish peoples; people who identify as homosexual vs heterosexual; people who identify as transgender vs cisgender; and mentally healthy people and people with schizophrenia.

In our technological age, and especially during a time of COVID-19 induced social distancing, Fiona’s E-contact interventions will play an increasingly significant role in advancing intergroup relations research, especially in situations where outgroup anxiety is high and/or there is continued physical intergroup separation. Her prejudice reduction research has a strong ‘intergroup’ focus, where the voices from both groups are encouraged to be expressed in an equal, cooperative interaction, that works toward achieving a common goal.

In recognition of her successes Fiona has received an Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) Excellence Award and two Vice Chancellor’s awards for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. In acknowledgement of her impact on the field of intergroup relations, she accepted a funded invitation by the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) to Washington DC, as the Australian representative, alongside nine other world leading experts, to coauthor a State of the Science paper on intergroup relations (2020). In acknowledgement of her extensive 20-years of work in the field of racism reduction, Rotary invited Fiona to give the 2022 Royce Abbey Peace Oration which was titled ‘The many forms of peace and regeneration: Promoting a prejudice-free society for all’.

Episode link at https://neshnikolic.com/podcast/fiona-white

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