Susan Saegert

Last updated
Susan Saegert
Born
Susan Camille Saegert

(1946-10-12) 12 October 1946 (age 77)
Alma mater University of Michigan
Institutions City University of New York, Graduate Center
Main interests
Environmental psychology
Website Official website

Susan Camille Saegert (born 12 October 1946), Guadalupe, Texas [1] is Professor of Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She was previously Professor of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University (Peabody College) in Nashville, TN.

Contents

Prior to her current appointment in 2008, Dr. Saegert was Director of the Center for Human Environments (CHE) and Professor of Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center where she has worked since receiving her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1974. She was also the first director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. [2]

Early life

Susan Camille Saegert was born on 12 October 1946, she is the daughter of Albert Saegert and Patricia Camille McIntyre. [1]

Education

Saegert gained her degree from the University of Texas in 1968, and her doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1974. [3] [4]

Career

Her early research focused on crowding and environmental stressors. She then began to study the relationship between housing and human development and well-being, as well as women and environments. These interests involved her with a team of architects, planners and housing finance experts in developing a plan for Downtown Denver that increased residential uses and amenities, which is evidenced in the cityscape of Denver today.

Her research in inner city communities led her to focus less on how housing conditions can affect residents and more on how communities can affect housing conditions. With colleagues at CHE in the Housing Environments Research Group (HERG), [5] she and Gary Winkel have worked in partnership with community organizations and coalitions to understand how to successfully improve distressed housing and neighborhoods in New York City. This work has also resulted in a book on social capital co-edited with two political scientists: S. Saegert, J.P. Thompson, & M. R. Warren (Eds) Social capital and poor communities. New York: Russell Sage, 2001.

In 2007 she was quoted in David Gonzalez's New York Times' article "Risky loans help build ghost town of new homes" noting that in New York a trend is developing where “whole neighborhoods are wiped out, crime increases, the neighborhood’s reputation goes down, quality of life is undermined, and people can’t sell their houses,” due to the accessibility of adjustable rate loans and bad mortgages. [6]

Her professional activities have included serving as president of Division 34 on Population and Environment of the American Psychological Association, co-chairing the Environmental Design Research Association, and more recently serving on the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Urban Psychology. She also chaired the American Psychological Association Task Force on Social and Economic Status (SES)which then became a standing committee of APA. She has served on the editorial boards of Environment & Behavior and the Journal of Environmental Psychology for most of the last 20 years. With Gary Winkel, she wrote the Annual Review of Environmental Psychology for 1990. [7]

Bibliography

Books

Chapters in books

Journal articles

Papers

Related Research Articles

The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York is a public research institution and postgraduate university in New York City. Serving as the principal doctorate-granting institution of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, The CUNY Graduate Center is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity". The school is situated in the landmark B. Altman and Company Building at 365 Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, opposite the Empire State Building. The CUNY Graduate Center has 4,600 students, 31 doctoral programs, 14 master's programs, and 30 research centers and institutes. A core faculty of approximately 140 is supplemented by over 1,800 additional faculty members from CUNY's eleven senior colleges and New York City's cultural and scientific institutions.

Community psychology is concerned with the community as the unit of study. This contrasts with most psychology which focuses on the individual. Community psychology also studies the community as a context for the individuals within it, and the relationships of the individual to communities and society. Community psychologists seek to understand the functioning of the community, including the quality of life of persons within groups, organizations and institutions, communities, and society. They aim to enhance the quality of life through collaborative research and action.

Environmental psychology is a branch of psychology that explores the relationship between humans and the external world. It examines the way in which the natural environment and our built environments shape us as individuals. Environmental psychology emphasizes how humans change the environment and how the environment changes humans' experiences and behaviors. The field defines the term environment broadly, encompassing natural environments, social settings, built environments, learning environments, and informational environments. According to an article on APA Psychnet, environmental psychology is when a person thinks of a plan, travels to a certain place, and follows through with the plan throughout their behavior.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russell Sage Foundation</span> Philanthropic foundation that primarily funds research relating to income inequality

The Russell Sage Foundation is an American non-profit organisation established by Margaret Olivia Sage in 1907 for “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States.” It was named after her recently deceased husband, railroad executive Russell Sage. The foundation dedicates itself to strengthening the methods, data, and theoretical core of the social sciences in order to better understand societal problems and develop informed responses. It supports visiting scholars in residence and publishes books and a journal under its own imprint. It also funds researchers at other institutions and supports programs intended to develop new generations of social scientists. The foundation focuses on labor markets, immigration and ethnicity, and social inequality in the United States, as well as behavioral economics.

Gary Winkel is an environmental psychologist noted for his contribution to the establishment of the Environment and Behavior, a journal seen as an indication of the recent growth of Environmental Psychology as a field. He is a professor of Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Socio-ecological models were developed to further the understanding of the dynamic interrelations among various personal and environmental factors. Socioecological models were introduced to urban studies by sociologists associated with the Chicago School after the First World War as a reaction to the narrow scope of most research conducted by developmental psychologists. These models bridge the gap between behavioral theories that focus on small settings and anthropological theories.

Shelley Elizabeth Taylor is an American psychologist. She serves as a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University, and was formerly on the faculty at Harvard University. A prolific author of books and scholarly journal articles, Taylor has long been a leading figure in two subfields related to her primary discipline of social psychology: social cognition and health psychology. Her books include The Tending Instinct and Social Cognition, the latter by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sharon E. Sutton</span> American architect

Sharon Egretta Sutton, is an American architect, educator, visual artist, and author. Her work is focused on community-based participatory research and design. She is a professor emerita at the University of Washington. In 1984, she became the first African American woman to become a full professor in an accredited architectural degree program while teaching at the University of Michigan. She has also taught at Parsons School of Design, and Columbia University.

Leanne Rivlin is an originator of the Environmental Psychology Doctoral Program at the CUNY Graduate Center in the late 1960s.

Conservation psychology is the scientific study of the reciprocal relationships between humans and the rest of nature, with a particular focus on how to encourage conservation of the natural world. Rather than a specialty area within psychology itself, it is a growing field for scientists, researchers, and practitioners of all disciplines to come together and better understand the Earth and what can be done to preserve it. This network seeks to understand why humans hurt or help the environment and what can be done to change such behavior. The term "conservation psychology" refers to any fields of psychology that have understandable knowledge about the environment and the effects humans have on the natural world. Conservation psychologists use their abilities in "greening" psychology and make society ecologically sustainable. The science of conservation psychology is oriented toward environmental sustainability, which includes concerns like the conservation of resources, conservation of ecosystems, and quality of life issues for humans and other species.

Cindi Katz, a geographer, is Professor in Environmental Psychology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place and nature; children and the environment; the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life; the privatization of the public environment, the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination, and the intertwined spatialities of homeland and home-based security. She is known for her work on social reproduction and everyday life, research on children's geographies, her intervention on "minor theory", and the notion of counter-topography, which is a means of recognizing the historical and geographical specificities of particular places while inferring their analytic connections to specific material social practices.

Alexandra W. Logue is an academic and behavioral scientist. She is currently a research professor in CASE of the Graduate Center of The City University of New York She is also a member of the Graduate Center's Behavior Analysis Training Area in the Psychology Ph.D. Program. From 2008 to 2014, she was the Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost of CUNY, the CUNY system's Chief Academic Officer. She also served as provost and a professor at NYIT.

Katherine Nelson was an American developmental psychologist, and professor.

Leith Patricia Mullings was a Jamaican-born author, anthropologist and professor. She was president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011–2013, and was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Mullings was involved in organizing for progressive social justice, racial equality and economic justice as one of the founding members of the Black Radical Congress and in her role as President of the AAA. Under her leadership, the American Anthropological Association took up the issue of academic labor rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Place attachment</span> Environmental psychology concept

Place attachment is the emotional bond between person and place, and one way of describing the relationship between people and spatial settings. It is highly influenced by an individual and his or her personal experiences. There is a considerable amount of research dedicated to defining what makes a place "meaningful" enough for place attachment to occur. Schroeder (1991) notably discussed the difference between "meaning" and "preference," defining meaning as "the thoughts, feelings, memories and interpretations evoked by a landscape" and preference as "the degree of liking for one landscape compared to another."

Roberta Feldman is an American architect and educator. She holds the title of Professor Emerita at the School of Architecture, University of Illinois Chicago. She has worked with Chicago housing and community organizations to revitalize and preserve low-income neighborhoods.

Jalie A Tucker is a professor of Health Education and Behavior at the University of Florida. She is known for her research on impulsive and harmful behaviors, such as alcohol and substance use, the effect of the environment on addiction, and natural resolutions to risky behavior including alcohol misuse. She has received numerous awards for excellence in clinical psychology and addiction research, including the 2015 Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology from the Society of Clinical Psychology. She was honored by APA, Division 50 with the Presidential Award for Service to the Division in 2010 and 2012.

Ethel Tobach was an American psychologist known for her work in comparative and peace psychology.

Frances Degen Horowitz was an American developmental psychologist who served as President of the Graduate Center, City University of New York from 1991 to 2005. She was instrumental in raising the stature of the institution and moving it to its current location in the B. Altman and Company Building on Fifth Avenue of New York City.

Tracey A. Revenson is a health psychologist known for her research on how people cope with chronic illness and how people's lifestyles can affect their health and influence their coping mechanisms. She holds the position of Professor of Psychology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and directs the Coping and health in context (CHiC) lab.

References

  1. 1 2 "Guadalupe County Births 1946". Rootsweb Ancestry. USGenWeb. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  2. "Susan Saegert". Rudy Bruner Award. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
  3. "Susan Saegert: Curriculum Vitae". City University of New York, the Graduate Center: Environmental psychology. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  4. Gürkaynak, Mehmet R.; LeCompte, W. Ayhan, eds. (1979). Human Consequences of Crowding. Boston, MA: Springer US. p. 312. doi:10.1007/978-1-4684-3599-3. ISBN   9781468436013.
  5. Kennedy, Shawn G. (24 September 1994). "Working to End Landlord Role, New York Faces Hurdles". The New York Times. p. 21. Retrieved 2 May 2011.
  6. Gonzalez, David (24 September 2007). "CITYWIDE; Risky Loans Help Build Ghost Town of New Homes". The New York Times. p. 1. Retrieved 2 May 2011.
  7. "Susan Saegert". City University of New York, the Graduate Center: Environmental psychology. 20 August 2012. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  8. Kay, Jane Holtz (23 February 1989). "Design notebook: the once and future kitchenless house". The New York Times. p. 1. Retrieved 2 May 2011.