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Paula Castro
Paula Castro is a professor of social psychology at ISCTE-IUL and a researcher at CIS-IUL. Her research focuses on psycho-social processes that are involved in social change, especially change stimulated by legal innovations: new laws and public policies. In developing a social psychology of legal innovation, she has explored how individuals, communities and institutions respond to – e.g., accept, contest, reframe, narrate, normalize, resist – new ecological laws and public policies, looking in particular at the public reception of biodiversity, climate change, recycling and public participation laws. She has also explored the dynamics of public/expert relations in environmental matters. Other areas of interest are social memory, local knowledge and relation to place in rural communities and in urban neighbourhoods undergoing change processes, like gentrification.