Tim Kurz
Biographic Data
| ID | 167113 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tim Kurz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tim |
| FAMILY NAME | Kurz |
| SIGNATURE | KURZ T |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Western Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2037-0995 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 250 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Is trauma isolating, or does isolation traumatize? Loneliness and posttraumatic stress mutually reinforce one another in the aftermath of environmental disaster
These results speak to the importance of early response efforts that encourage collective recovery and community engagement in disaster management. This may support the long-term goal of preventing the onset of harmful cycles of loneliness and PTSD in the wake of traumatic experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Yarning sessions to facilitate cultural responsiveness and decolonising the curriculum in a university psychology setting
Psychology higher education providers play a critical role in growing a culturally safe psychology workforce by engaging in culturally responsive practices, embedding Indigenous perspectives, and decolonising curricula. We describe yarning sessions that aimed to facilitate collective learning, reflexivity, and decolonising praxis. They were led through relationship and governance from the Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project (AIPEP)…
Overcoming (vegan) burnout
Moralized minority actors can play important roles in social change processes by rejecting majority social norms and modeling alternative societal pathways. However, being a minority actor can be difficult, often resulting in stigma, derogation, and hostility from the majority group. For actions intrinsically linked with daily life (e.g., eating), such social obstacles might become so great that individuals acting alone experience activist burnou…
The Brief Solastalgia Scale
Witnessing degradation and loss to one’s home environment can cause the negative emotional experience of solastalgia. We review the psychometric properties of the 9-item Solastalgia subscale from the Environmental Distress Scale (Higginbotham et al. (EcoHealth 3:245–254, 2006)). Using data collected from three large, independent, adult samples ( N = 4229), who were surveyed soon after the 2019/20 Australian bushfires, factor analyses confirmed th…
Bringing identities to the table
Although vegetarian and vegan (veg*an) diets can produce various health, environmental and animal welfare benefits, they remain socially contentious. Despite the fundamentally social nature of eating, in-situ investigations of the social-interactional elements of dietary identities have so far been lacking. Using a recently developed remotely-moderated focus group design, we explore (across 25 discussions involving 122 participants) the discursiv…
The presence of laws and mandates is associated with increased social norm enforcement
Policy makers often implement laws or mandates to attempt to change people’s behavior. Such policies act not only as deterrents, but also as societal signposts for what is considered morally right and wrong within a society. In this paper we argue that the presence of laws and mandates may be associated with citizens’ inclination to engage in social norm enforcement within their own network. We studied this using four different datasets in differ…
Talk amongst yourselves’
The use of a moderator has become ubiquitous when using focus groups for social science research.While a skilled moderator can facilitate discussion, we argue that, in some instances, moderators can potentially hinder the generation of the types of group discussions that academic researchers may seek to access.In this paper we outline some of the challenges associated with moderated focus groups and propose a complimentary methodology: a remotely…
Gendered ageism and gray hair
Aging women frequently use hair dye to disguise their age in order to avoid being stigmatized as “old”. Recently, however, some have chosen naturally gray hair. Informed by Goffman’s theory of stigma, we investigated why they would do so in the face of age-discrimination, and their experiences of the process. We identified two major, oppositional themes, competence and authenticity. Despite wanting to avoid perceptions of old-thus-incompetent, wo…
Communication strategies for moral rebels
Current carbon‐intensive lifestyles are unsustainable and drastic social changes are required to combat climate change. To achieve such change, moral rebels (i.e., individuals who deviate from current behavioral norms based on ethical considerations) may be crucial catalyzers. However, the current literature holds that moral rebels may do more harm than good. By deviating from what most people do, based on a moral concern, moral rebels pose a thr…
The nuances of “the social cure” for people who experience psychosis
People can derive health benefits from social group memberships. However, joining groups can be difficult for people experiencing psychosis due to the social impacts of the condition and public and internalised stigma. We interviewed a diverse group of 26 people experiencing psychosis and explored through thematic analysis their perceptions of how psychosis influenced social identity processes. Participants confirmed both the impact of psychosis …
A comparison of prebunking and debunking interventions for implied versus explicit misinformation
Psychological research has offered valuable insights into how to combat misinformation. The studies conducted to date, however, have three limitations. First, pre-emptive ("prebunking") and retroactive ("debunking") interventions have mostly been examined in parallel, and thus it is unclear which of these two predominant approaches is more effective. Second, there has been a focus on misinformation that is explicitly false, but implied misinforma…
Could Vegans and Lycra Cyclists be Bad for the Planet? Theorizing the Role of Moralized Minority Practice Identities in Processes of Societal‐Level Change
Shifting society to more sustainable modes of consumption poses significant challenges to the way people live their lives. Many everyday practices commensurate with addressing sustainability goals are currently minority pursuits, especially in highly industrialized countries. Such minority practices often come to form the basis of social identities (e.g., as “vegans” or “cyclists”). These moralized minority practice identities (MMPIs) represent t…
Towards a Psychology of the Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus
Scholars, government scientific research institutions, and public policy‐making entities are increasingly focusing on environmental issues from a food‐energy‐water (FEW) nexus perspective. This nexus represents the interconnection of these three systems, which are essential to human life. The FEW nexus is inherently and inescapably interdisciplinary. However, to date, there have been relatively few academic contributions to understanding the nexu…
Public views of the Sustainable Development Goals across countries
On the Relation Between Social Dominance Orientation and Environmentalism
Approval of hierarchy and inequality in society indexed by social dominance orientation (SDO) extends to support for human dominance over the natural world. We tested this negative association between SDO and environmentalism and the validity of the new Short Social Dominance Orientation Scale in two cross-cultural samples of students ( N = 4,163, k = 25) and the general population ( N = 1,237, k = 10). As expected, the higher people were on SDO,…
Identity Mediators
We explore the nature and evolution of the role of candidates' spouses in U.S. presidential election campaigns through a lens of social psychological theorizing that sees leadership as emerging from activities of identity construction of leaders and followers. Our discursive analysis examines how aspiring First Lady speeches at party national conventions construct both their husbands and the particular national identity construction most presentl…
The norms associated with climate change
Co-benefits of addressing climate change can motivate action around the world
Network analysis reveals open forums and echo chambers in social media discussions of climate change
Action to tackle the complex and divisive issue of climate change will be strongly influenced by public perception. Online social media and associated social networks are an increasingly important forum for public debate and are known to influence individual attitudes and behaviours – yet online discussions and social networks related to climate change are not well understood. Here we construct several forms of social network for users communicat…
Too hot to handle
Habitual behaviors or patterns of practice? Explaining and changing repetitive climate‐relevant actions
Understanding human behavior lies at the heart of responses to climate change. Many environmentally relevant behavior patterns are frequent, stable, and persistent. There is an increasing focus on understanding these patterns less in terms of deliberative processes and more in terms of habits and routines embedded in everyday life. Examinations of the ‘habitual’ nature of environmentally consequential activities have been approached from two theo…
A fine is a more effective financial deterrent when framed retributively and extracted publicly
Discursive constructions of infant feeding
Recent feminist and sociological scholarship has problematised the underlying medical assumptions in the established literature on infant feeding by attending to the social and discursive construction of breastfeeding practice. Such work has suggested that the pervasive cultural discourse around breastfeeding as the ‘morally correct’ choice has implications for actual decisions and practices as well as subjective judgements and feelings, particul…
Giving Guilt the Flick”
Manuals offering advice to new parents on the topic of infant feeding have recently begun to attend to the possible implications of pro-breast-feeding discourses for mothers’ subjective experiences, particularly with respect to guilt. In this article, we present a discursive analysis of focus groups with 35 Australian mothers in which we examine how mothers discuss their infant-feeding practices and their related subjective experiences. We focus …
Damned if You Do and Damned if You Don't
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record
Network analysis reveals open forums and echo chambers in social media discussions of climate change
Action to tackle the complex and divisive issue of climate change will be strongly influenced by public perception. Online social media and associated social networks are an increasingly important forum for public debate and are known to influence individual attitudes and behaviours – yet online discussions and social networks related to climate change are not well understood. Here we construct several forms of social network for users communicat…
Habitual behaviors or patterns of practice? Explaining and changing repetitive climate‐relevant actions
Understanding human behavior lies at the heart of responses to climate change. Many environmentally relevant behavior patterns are frequent, stable, and persistent. There is an increasing focus on understanding these patterns less in terms of deliberative processes and more in terms of habits and routines embedded in everyday life. Examinations of the ‘habitual’ nature of environmentally consequential activities have been approached from two theo…
Empowerment' and the Pole
The activity of `pole dancing' has recently been transformed from an act performed exclusively in strip clubs to one currently marketed as a form of aerobic exercise. While much feminist academic work has investigated aspects of the sex industry, such as stripping, very little research has been conducted into this recent social phenomenon of pole dancing as a recreational activity. This study takes a feminist poststructuralist approach to the inv…
Too hot to handle
Could Vegans and Lycra Cyclists be Bad for the Planet? Theorizing the Role of Moralized Minority Practice Identities in Processes of Societal‐Level Change
Shifting society to more sustainable modes of consumption poses significant challenges to the way people live their lives. Many everyday practices commensurate with addressing sustainability goals are currently minority pursuits, especially in highly industrialized countries. Such minority practices often come to form the basis of social identities (e.g., as “vegans” or “cyclists”). These moralized minority practice identities (MMPIs) represent t…
Spinning the pole
Pole dancing is an activity that came to prominence in strip clubs. Despite its widespread reinvention as a fitness activity for women, pole dancing is still strongly associated with, and indeed trades on, its exotic, erotic and sexual connotations. In this article, we examine how the pole dancing industry portrays itself to potential participants via a discursive analysis of the websites of 15 major pole dancing studios in Australia. In particul…
A comparison of prebunking and debunking interventions for implied versus explicit misinformation
Psychological research has offered valuable insights into how to combat misinformation. The studies conducted to date, however, have three limitations. First, pre-emptive ("prebunking") and retroactive ("debunking") interventions have mostly been examined in parallel, and thus it is unclear which of these two predominant approaches is more effective. Second, there has been a focus on misinformation that is explicitly false, but implied misinforma…
Identity Mediators
We explore the nature and evolution of the role of candidates' spouses in U.S. presidential election campaigns through a lens of social psychological theorizing that sees leadership as emerging from activities of identity construction of leaders and followers. Our discursive analysis examines how aspiring First Lady speeches at party national conventions construct both their husbands and the particular national identity construction most presentl…
Giving Guilt the Flick”
Manuals offering advice to new parents on the topic of infant feeding have recently begun to attend to the possible implications of pro-breast-feeding discourses for mothers’ subjective experiences, particularly with respect to guilt. In this article, we present a discursive analysis of focus groups with 35 Australian mothers in which we examine how mothers discuss their infant-feeding practices and their related subjective experiences. We focus …
Damned if You Do and Damned if You Don't
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record
The norms associated with climate change
Discursive constructions of infant feeding
Recent feminist and sociological scholarship has problematised the underlying medical assumptions in the established literature on infant feeding by attending to the social and discursive construction of breastfeeding practice. Such work has suggested that the pervasive cultural discourse around breastfeeding as the ‘morally correct’ choice has implications for actual decisions and practices as well as subjective judgements and feelings, particul…
Saints, sinners and standards of femininity
It has been suggested that women are encouraged, particularly by the popular media, to gain ‘feminine’ power through the pursuit of a ‘suitably’ petite figure. The current project investigated, from a feminist poststructuralist perspective, the construction of female obesity and female anorexia in 20 popular magazine articles (10 anorexia and 10 obesity articles). Of interest was the extent to which the two states, despite both being physically u…
Overcoming (vegan) burnout
Moralized minority actors can play important roles in social change processes by rejecting majority social norms and modeling alternative societal pathways. However, being a minority actor can be difficult, often resulting in stigma, derogation, and hostility from the majority group. For actions intrinsically linked with daily life (e.g., eating), such social obstacles might become so great that individuals acting alone experience activist burnou…
Talk amongst yourselves’
The use of a moderator has become ubiquitous when using focus groups for social science research.While a skilled moderator can facilitate discussion, we argue that, in some instances, moderators can potentially hinder the generation of the types of group discussions that academic researchers may seek to access.In this paper we outline some of the challenges associated with moderated focus groups and propose a complimentary methodology: a remotely…
Towards a Psychology of the Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus
Scholars, government scientific research institutions, and public policy‐making entities are increasingly focusing on environmental issues from a food‐energy‐water (FEW) nexus perspective. This nexus represents the interconnection of these three systems, which are essential to human life. The FEW nexus is inherently and inescapably interdisciplinary. However, to date, there have been relatively few academic contributions to understanding the nexu…
Yarning sessions to facilitate cultural responsiveness and decolonising the curriculum in a university psychology setting
Psychology higher education providers play a critical role in growing a culturally safe psychology workforce by engaging in culturally responsive practices, embedding Indigenous perspectives, and decolonising curricula. We describe yarning sessions that aimed to facilitate collective learning, reflexivity, and decolonising praxis. They were led through relationship and governance from the Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project (AIPEP)…
The presence of laws and mandates is associated with increased social norm enforcement
Policy makers often implement laws or mandates to attempt to change people’s behavior. Such policies act not only as deterrents, but also as societal signposts for what is considered morally right and wrong within a society. In this paper we argue that the presence of laws and mandates may be associated with citizens’ inclination to engage in social norm enforcement within their own network. We studied this using four different datasets in differ…
Communication strategies for moral rebels
Current carbon‐intensive lifestyles are unsustainable and drastic social changes are required to combat climate change. To achieve such change, moral rebels (i.e., individuals who deviate from current behavioral norms based on ethical considerations) may be crucial catalyzers. However, the current literature holds that moral rebels may do more harm than good. By deviating from what most people do, based on a moral concern, moral rebels pose a thr…
Public views of the Sustainable Development Goals across countries
A fine is a more effective financial deterrent when framed retributively and extracted publicly
Saints, sinners and standards of femininity
It has been suggested that women are encouraged, particularly by the popular media, to gain ‘feminine’ power through the pursuit of a ‘suitably’ petite figure. The current project investigated, from a feminist poststructuralist perspective, the construction of female obesity and female anorexia in 20 popular magazine articles (10 anorexia and 10 obesity articles). Of interest was the extent to which the two states, despite both being physically u…
Empowerment' and the Pole
The activity of `pole dancing' has recently been transformed from an act performed exclusively in strip clubs to one currently marketed as a form of aerobic exercise. While much feminist academic work has investigated aspects of the sex industry, such as stripping, very little research has been conducted into this recent social phenomenon of pole dancing as a recreational activity. This study takes a feminist poststructuralist approach to the inv…
Spinning the pole
Pole dancing is an activity that came to prominence in strip clubs. Despite its widespread reinvention as a fitness activity for women, pole dancing is still strongly associated with, and indeed trades on, its exotic, erotic and sexual connotations. In this article, we examine how the pole dancing industry portrays itself to potential participants via a discursive analysis of the websites of 15 major pole dancing studios in Australia. In particul…
Discursive constructions of infant feeding
Recent feminist and sociological scholarship has problematised the underlying medical assumptions in the established literature on infant feeding by attending to the social and discursive construction of breastfeeding practice. Such work has suggested that the pervasive cultural discourse around breastfeeding as the ‘morally correct’ choice has implications for actual decisions and practices as well as subjective judgements and feelings, particul…
Giving Guilt the Flick”
Manuals offering advice to new parents on the topic of infant feeding have recently begun to attend to the possible implications of pro-breast-feeding discourses for mothers’ subjective experiences, particularly with respect to guilt. In this article, we present a discursive analysis of focus groups with 35 Australian mothers in which we examine how mothers discuss their infant-feeding practices and their related subjective experiences. We focus …
Damned if You Do and Damned if You Don't
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record
Understanding Restoration Volunteering in a Context of Environmental Change
Habitual behaviors or patterns of practice? Explaining and changing repetitive climate‐relevant actions
Understanding human behavior lies at the heart of responses to climate change. Many environmentally relevant behavior patterns are frequent, stable, and persistent. There is an increasing focus on understanding these patterns less in terms of deliberative processes and more in terms of habits and routines embedded in everyday life. Examinations of the ‘habitual’ nature of environmentally consequential activities have been approached from two theo…
A fine is a more effective financial deterrent when framed retributively and extracted publicly
Co-benefits of addressing climate change can motivate action around the world
Network analysis reveals open forums and echo chambers in social media discussions of climate change
Action to tackle the complex and divisive issue of climate change will be strongly influenced by public perception. Online social media and associated social networks are an increasingly important forum for public debate and are known to influence individual attitudes and behaviours – yet online discussions and social networks related to climate change are not well understood. Here we construct several forms of social network for users communicat…
Too hot to handle
The norms associated with climate change
On the Relation Between Social Dominance Orientation and Environmentalism
Approval of hierarchy and inequality in society indexed by social dominance orientation (SDO) extends to support for human dominance over the natural world. We tested this negative association between SDO and environmentalism and the validity of the new Short Social Dominance Orientation Scale in two cross-cultural samples of students ( N = 4,163, k = 25) and the general population ( N = 1,237, k = 10). As expected, the higher people were on SDO,…
Identity Mediators
We explore the nature and evolution of the role of candidates' spouses in U.S. presidential election campaigns through a lens of social psychological theorizing that sees leadership as emerging from activities of identity construction of leaders and followers. Our discursive analysis examines how aspiring First Lady speeches at party national conventions construct both their husbands and the particular national identity construction most presentl…
Public views of the Sustainable Development Goals across countries
Could Vegans and Lycra Cyclists be Bad for the Planet? Theorizing the Role of Moralized Minority Practice Identities in Processes of Societal‐Level Change
Shifting society to more sustainable modes of consumption poses significant challenges to the way people live their lives. Many everyday practices commensurate with addressing sustainability goals are currently minority pursuits, especially in highly industrialized countries. Such minority practices often come to form the basis of social identities (e.g., as “vegans” or “cyclists”). These moralized minority practice identities (MMPIs) represent t…
Towards a Psychology of the Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus
Scholars, government scientific research institutions, and public policy‐making entities are increasingly focusing on environmental issues from a food‐energy‐water (FEW) nexus perspective. This nexus represents the interconnection of these three systems, which are essential to human life. The FEW nexus is inherently and inescapably interdisciplinary. However, to date, there have been relatively few academic contributions to understanding the nexu…
Gendered ageism and gray hair
Aging women frequently use hair dye to disguise their age in order to avoid being stigmatized as “old”. Recently, however, some have chosen naturally gray hair. Informed by Goffman’s theory of stigma, we investigated why they would do so in the face of age-discrimination, and their experiences of the process. We identified two major, oppositional themes, competence and authenticity. Despite wanting to avoid perceptions of old-thus-incompetent, wo…
Communication strategies for moral rebels
Current carbon‐intensive lifestyles are unsustainable and drastic social changes are required to combat climate change. To achieve such change, moral rebels (i.e., individuals who deviate from current behavioral norms based on ethical considerations) may be crucial catalyzers. However, the current literature holds that moral rebels may do more harm than good. By deviating from what most people do, based on a moral concern, moral rebels pose a thr…
The nuances of “the social cure” for people who experience psychosis
People can derive health benefits from social group memberships. However, joining groups can be difficult for people experiencing psychosis due to the social impacts of the condition and public and internalised stigma. We interviewed a diverse group of 26 people experiencing psychosis and explored through thematic analysis their perceptions of how psychosis influenced social identity processes. Participants confirmed both the impact of psychosis …
A comparison of prebunking and debunking interventions for implied versus explicit misinformation
Psychological research has offered valuable insights into how to combat misinformation. The studies conducted to date, however, have three limitations. First, pre-emptive ("prebunking") and retroactive ("debunking") interventions have mostly been examined in parallel, and thus it is unclear which of these two predominant approaches is more effective. Second, there has been a focus on misinformation that is explicitly false, but implied misinforma…
Talk amongst yourselves’
The use of a moderator has become ubiquitous when using focus groups for social science research.While a skilled moderator can facilitate discussion, we argue that, in some instances, moderators can potentially hinder the generation of the types of group discussions that academic researchers may seek to access.In this paper we outline some of the challenges associated with moderated focus groups and propose a complimentary methodology: a remotely…
The Brief Solastalgia Scale
Witnessing degradation and loss to one’s home environment can cause the negative emotional experience of solastalgia. We review the psychometric properties of the 9-item Solastalgia subscale from the Environmental Distress Scale (Higginbotham et al. (EcoHealth 3:245–254, 2006)). Using data collected from three large, independent, adult samples ( N = 4229), who were surveyed soon after the 2019/20 Australian bushfires, factor analyses confirmed th…
Bringing identities to the table
Although vegetarian and vegan (veg*an) diets can produce various health, environmental and animal welfare benefits, they remain socially contentious. Despite the fundamentally social nature of eating, in-situ investigations of the social-interactional elements of dietary identities have so far been lacking. Using a recently developed remotely-moderated focus group design, we explore (across 25 discussions involving 122 participants) the discursiv…
Psychology (26 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Environmental Education and Sustainability (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Politics (7 works)