I met Ivana in 1988 when I joined the department. What follows are a few basics as I recollect things. I don’t know that any of us could claim to really know her – she was a very private person.
Ivana was appointed a lecturer in the dept from 1970 and was promoted to professor in 1988 – a post she held until till her retirement in 2003. She was HoD from 1988 – 1991. Most of that time she and I were the only profs in the dept and I was on external funding, so she carried a large responsibility pretty much unaided.
For me, she was a direct link back to the very earliest days of the department – she introduced me to Peter McEwan, the first prof and HoD. She occasionally talked about other early profs – Alan Baddeley, Neville Moray – but it was clear that her research focus was very different from theirs. In many ways, hers was a solitary voice in the department.
Her main research concerned the logical structure and theory of dialogicality – and she was one of a small number of eminent Continental European social psychologists who basically built the whole theory of social meaning. They did this with a concern for ontology and epistemology, highly unusual at that time, that would be considered bang up to date today. The distinction about being a Continental social psychologist was to signal a stand against all of the American and British school of experimental social psychology (think Stanford prison study etc etc) which they considered to be too superficial to be of any value.
Her teaching was not well-received by the bulk of students who found the philosophy hard and the Czech accent equally hard. This was in the days of unamplified lectures and she and the Logie didn’t mix, if we’re honest. But she ran highly rated electives on specialist subjects and for many students, hers was a very different insight into Psychology.
There was no touching point between her interests and mine but I very much liked her ideas about cognition – that cognition is the machinery of inter-personal communication and that it makes little sense to study cognition in 1 person rather than in a dyad. I suspect that she would have a lot to say about the double empathy problem in autism.
The last conversation I had with her was typical. We were both at a meeting at the Royal Society about the “replication crisis”. My view was (and is) that the replication crisis is what happens when you take null-hypothesis testing way beyond what it can really deliver. Her view, much more interesting, was to ask why is it called a crisis and who stands to gain from calling it that?
As with most theoretical work, there was little cost to her main research and so she had no need of grants in that area. To balance this, she developed the area of AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) aids – talking mats primarily – with Joan Murphy and was never without grants to cover that work.
She was one of the most distinguished staff members we have had. She was elected to FRSE and later elected FBA, both highly prestigious awards. Without her, the department would be a different sort of place.