Sandra joined the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science (DPBS) in 1995, having been previously a lecturer at the Institute of Psychology of PUC-RS, Brazil. A social and clinical psychologist by training, her research focuses on the social psychology of public spheres, community development, social representations theory and the socio-cultural context of knowledge development and transformation. Sandra has held visiting professorships in France, Brazil and Sweden and advised a wide range of Brazilian and international organisations including UNESCO and WHO. She continues to hold strong teaching and research links in her native Brazil and Latin America as a whole.
In 2012 Sandra was made a Fellow of the British Psychological Society in recognition for her expertise and contribution to the field of social and cultural psychology.
Alongside an extensive number of journal articles, her books include Social Representations and the Public Sphere: the symbolic construction of public spaces in Brazil (In Portuguese, Vozes, 2000); Textos em Representações Sociais (in Portuguese, Vozes, 1994, now in its 15th reprint); Knowledge in Context: Representations, community and culture (Routledge, 2007; Portuguese translation, Vozes, 2008) and Underground Sociabilities: identity, culture and resistance in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (UNESCO, 2013, with J Priego-Hernandez; Portuguese edition, UNESCO, 2013). In preparation is ‘How Communities Think’, a monograph surveying the de-legitimisation of collective forms of thinking and the processes whereby communities share knowledge. Her overall research and intellectual project are firmly grounded on the idea of psychology as a societal and cultural science.
Recent and current research projects include:
Communicating Bottom-up Social Development: A dialogue between multiple stakeholders in the UK and Brazil
Resilience and Porosity of City Borders: A psychosocial investigation in three Brazilian cities
Underground Sociabilities
Kids Company: A diagnosis of the organisation and its interventions
Cost Action IS 1205: Social and psychological dynamics of historical representations in the enlarged European Union
Children and the Public Sphere
She directs the MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology and supervises doctoral students working in the field of social representations, community development, knowledge encounters and the social psychology of public spheres.