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Professor Ben Bradley

BA Human Sciences (Oxford) 1974
MA Human Sciences (Oxford) 1977
PhD Psychology (Edinburgh) 1980

Ben Bradley
Charles Sturt University School of Social Sciences and Liberal Studies
Building C6
Bathurst Campus NSW 2640 Australia
Ph:(02) 6338 4482
Fax:(02) 6338 4401
Bio

Ben Bradley holds the Foundation Chair in Psychology at Charles Sturt University . He was Head of Psychology at CSU from 1998 to 2006. After a period acting as Dean of Arts, Ben was elected Deputy Presiding Officer of Academic Senate and appointed Director of the CSU Degree Initiative. His early research interests were in the foundations of human communication, targeting the question: what do infants bring to their communication with others? He completed his PhD on infancy at the University of Edinburgh in 1980. His book Visions of Infancy (Polity Press, 1989) shows how infancy has served as a tabula rasa for psychological theorizing, the greatest psychologists using infancy as a screen upon which to project their own basic assumptions about the adult mind while paying only secondary attention to babies' first-hand experiences. Visions of Infancy has been translated into Spanish, French and Italian. Ben's most recent book Psychology and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2005) redresses the tendency for psychology to ignore the experiences of the people they teach and study, arguing that psychologists have overlooked a crucial dimension of experience: the synchronic (which structures experience independently of time). Currently Ben is in the midst of three projects. One is on the historical origins of psychological discourse about ‘the mind', with particular reference to the effects of Darwin 's writings. He has recently been funded to produce a documentary for the Cambridge Darwin Festival (July 2009) on Darwin 's Babies, including a reconstruction of Charles Darwin's seminal observations of early infant development (with Matt Olsen). The second is on the developmental origins of group mind, through the observation of babies in all-infant groups (with Jennifer Sumsion, Jane Selby, Cathy Urwin and others – funded through ARC Linkage and the British Academy ). Thirdly through the Curriculum Renewal embodied in the CSU Degree Initiative, Ben is promoting experience-based teaching in higher education, (including psychology), as argued for in Psychology and Experience . He has recently been awarded a RIPPLE Research Fellowship for the second half of 2009.

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