200004 PR Forschungsorientiertes Praktikum (2024S)

Mapping arts in the Urban space: Art throughout Vienna and relations to population-wide well-being.

The aim of this course is to serve as an alternative for a research internship in some area of Psychology as might be conducted in a third-party institution, business, or with a working psychologist.

In this class, students will gain real-world experience in conducting research by working on research questions in groups, learning methodological skills relating to data acquisition, analysis, and the designing and conducting of studies, as well as discussing and critiquing one's own and other published empirical scientific work.

Content/Focus:
In this semester, our focus will be on the role of geography and mapping as a tool for psychology. We will engage in a project to conduct a wide-scale mapping project (at the district level in Vienna) of target features in the urban space as a basis for subsequent assessment of population-wide health and well-being statistics. This will have the specific focus on the presence of visual arts or aesthetic interventions in the city (murals, sculptures, graffiti, etc.). Students will be tasked with walking the city in target districts and producing maps, with their team, of all art works. This will be combined with general discussions of mapping and geo-humanities approaches, considering this emerging trend in psychology.

Students' activities will further be based within, and one element of, a larger Third-party EU programme led by the PI (Pelowski, EU H2020 Societal Challenges and the Arts), and with architects, geo-humanities experts, and/or involving onsite collection in the public areas of the city of Vienna.

Content will include: lectures and group discussion on underlying theory and practice , lecturer-led planning of onsite data collection, assessment design, discussion of public engagement and data collection procedures, as well as reading of key papers, and presentation of the output of students' work. An overall theme of the course will be that students will be treated, and expected to act as if they were performing as interns in the PI laboratory, contributing work to the project, but also with the extra addition of a learning framework.