Susan Opotow (Training Area Coordinator)
PhD, Social and Organizational Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University
My research focuses on injustice and investigates the socio-political/ psychological contexts in which the scope of justice -- the extent of our justice concerns for others -- widens or narrows. My theoretical work on injustice is based on my empirical studies utilizing quantitative, qualitative, and historical methods to examine how, when, and why injustice directed at marginalized groups is rendered ‘normal.’ I also study the complementary, inclusionary process, when justice concerns, rights, and resources are extended more broadly within a society to widen the scope of justice. I have situated this scholarship within several productive contexts that include environmental conflict, public schooling, post-war (i.e., USA Civil War, World War II) change, and museum exhibitions on historical injustice. I am currently Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology Editor, and recent honors include: Baruch College-Rubin Museum Faculty Fellowship (2012-2013), Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues’s Distinguished Service Award (2012), American Psychological Foundation’s Lynn Stuart Weiss Lecture Award (2011), and election as the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues’s President (2009). I am a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and three of its divisions and serve on the APA Committee on International Relations in Psychology (2010-2013).
e: sopotow@gc.cuny.edu
Dr. Opotow's CV
Luis Barrios
Ph.D., Clinical Psychology, Carlos Albizu University
Dr. Barrios is a Board Certified Forensic Examiner and a professor of Latina/o psychology; Latin American studies; ethnic studies; qualitative research and methodology; and cultural criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is also the chair of the Department of Latin American & Latina/o Studies. Since 1988, Dr. Barrios is a columnist of El Diario La Prensa in New York City, one of the oldest Spanish newspapers in the United States.
He is the co-editor with Louis Kontos and David C. Brotherton of Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspective (2003-Columbia University); co-author with David C. Brotherton of Almighty Latin King & Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang (2004-Columbia University); and co-editor with Dr. Mauro Cerbino of Otras naciones: Jóvenes, transnacionalismo y exclusión. Quito: Ecuador: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales. Dr. Barrios is also the author of Josconiando: Dimensiones Sociales y políticas de la espiritualidad (2000-Editorial Aguiar), Pitirreando: De la desesperanza a la esperanza (2004-Editorial Edil) and Coquiando: Meditaciones subversivas para un mundo mejor (2008-Editorial Búho).
Current research projects include work on people deported from the USA with particular focus on psychosocial trauma; the transnationalization of street gangs; and the socio-historical and cultural contemporary perspectives of life in the Dominican-Haitian Border.
In addition, Fr. Barrios is an associate priest at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in West Harlem. Luis Barrios is a community activist, a priest activist and a faculty activist.
e: lbarrios@jjay.cuny.edu
Tamara Buckley
Ph.D., Counseling Psychology, Columbia University, Teachers College
Dr. Buckley’s research program focuses on reducing health disparities in mental and physical health among persons of color both by building knowledge about the complexity of racial and gender identity development and by introducing theoretical models for increasing individual and organizational- level multicultural competence. Dr. Buckley has received numerous awards for her research including an in-residence Visiting Scholars Fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation (2007-2008) and the Carolyn Payton Early Career Psychology Award, from APA, Division 35, Psychology of Black Women. She is currently working on a book to be published by the Russell Sage Foundation entitled, “Talking about Race: A New Pedagogical Model for Cultural Competence” that presents a theoretical model for how to create contexts that are psychologically safe for developing multicultural competence. Dr. Buckley is currently an NIMH-funded fellow with the Hunter College Center for Community Urban Health in HIV research for the community.
e: tamara.buckley@hunter.cuny.edu
Caitlin Cahill
Caitlin Cahill is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Environmental Psychology. She does participatory action research with communities investigating the everyday intimate experiences of global urban restructuring, specifically as it concerns gentrification, immigration, and education. Caitlin is interested in creating collective spaces for dialogue, creativity, knowledge production, critical research and action. Before coming to CUNY, Caitlin worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah. In Salt Lake City, she co-directed the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective (with Matt Bradley and David Quijada), an intergenerational social justice think tank that engages young people as catalysts of change in a model integrating community-based collective research, arts and activism.
In addition to co-editing special journal issues on participatory ethics and youth participation,
Caitlin’s work has been published in journals including Area; Environment & Planning A; City & Society; Gender, Space & Culture; Journal of Youth Studies, and The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, among others, and edited collections such as the Gentrification Reader, A Companion to Social Geography, and Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion. Committed to interdisciplinary, engaged scholarship, Caitlin has received several awards for her research, teaching and public service including special recognition from the ACLU for her work with young people on educational rights. Currently, Caitlin is on the editorial boards of Community Development, Children’s Geographies, and Children, Youth, and Environments. Caitlin is on the advisory board of the Public Science Project http://www.publicscienceproject.org and the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action at Durham University, UK.
e: caitcahill@gmail.com
Joshua W. Clegg
Ph.D., Psychology, Clark University
Most recently, Dr. Clegg's research has focused on assessing sustainable behavior in institutional contexts, research that is part of a larger proposed project investigating messaging and tailoring strategies for grass-roots sustainability work. Previous research focused on understanding socially alienated life experiences – both in the broad biographical sense and in the more narrow sense of proximal relational processes. Dr. Clegg's research is epistemologically pluralistic but not eclectic – that is, multi-method, without being theoretically agnostic – a reflection of his abiding interest in philosophy of social science. Dr. Clegg continues to do work applying historical analysis and continental, post-modern, and post-critical philosophies to research methods and theories in Psychology. This work is influenced by phenomenology and dialogism (and other related traditions), and most particularly by the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin.
e: jclegg@jjay.cuny.edu
William Cross
William E. Cross, Jr., Ph.D. is one of America's leading theorists and researchers on black identity development in particular, and racial-ethnic identity development in general. His text, Shades of Black (Temple University Press, 1991) is a classic in the field. In 1963 Bill graduated from the University of Denver with a BA in psychology. He attended Roosevelt University for MA level studies in clinical psychology and after completing all course requirements and a clinical internship, he worked for two years at a state mental hospital. Although he never completed the MA degree, his exposure to clinical psychology explains his lifelong focus on process and developmental stages. Bill was swept-up by the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Subsequently, he constructed Nigrescence Theory to explicate the identity change process linked to social movement dynamics. The Cross Model became “the” template for scholars fashioning similar models on Native American Identity, Women’s Identity, Gay-Lesbian Identity, and Asian American Identity, etc. Dr. Cross completed his doctorate at Princeton University, where his life long friend, Badi G. Foster, helped Bill forge a connection between psychology and African American Studies. His first academic appointment with the African Studies and Research Center [Cornell University] combined black studies and psychology. Bill entered Cornell as a psychologist, and after 20 years of immersion in interdisciplinary Black Studies, left the Africana Center transformed into a Cultural Psychologist. While at Cornell [1973-1994], Dr. Cross wrote Shades of Black, which voiced his challenge to the Black Self-Hatred thesis, presented a major revision of the original Negro-to-Black Identity Change Model, and outlined a two-factor theory of self-concept structure (SC = PI + RGO). In 1994, he left Cornell to take a position at Pennsylvania State University, where his career was revitalized. Peony Fhagen-Smith – a graduate student at Penn State – turned Bill’s perspective toward a lifespan perspective, a focus recently revisited in an expanded work co-authored with Tuere Binta Cross, his daughter. At Penn State, Bill formed a research team consisting of Beverly Vandiver, Frank Worrell, Kevin Cokley, and Peony Fhagen-Smith. Together they designed, tested and validated the Cross-Racial-Identity-Scale [CRIS], one of the most important and exemplary measures used by Division 45 scholars. Terrell Jones, also from Penn State, introduced Bill to the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC), founded by Janet and Milton Bennett. In 2000 Bill joined the faculty of the Social-Personality Psychology Program, at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and at one point he also coordinated the GC Program in Africana Studies. Working along side Michelle Fine, Kay Deaux, Tracey Revenson, Colette Daiute and Robert Reid- Pharr, Bill’s work in the early 2000s became more progressive and openly radical. Bill’s conceptualization of racial-cultural identity enactments in everyday life evolved while at CUNY. Bill was awarded emeritus status in 2008 and he continues to serve on dissertation committees for doctoral students in social-personality and developmental psychology at the GC-CUNY. In 2001 Dr. Cross was named Distinguished Psychologist by the Association of Black Psychologists; in 2009 he received the Social Justice Education Award at the Winter Roundtable, Teachers College, and also in 2009, The William E. Cross, Jr., Lectures Series was created as part of the Annual Conference on Cross-Cultural Issues in Counseling and Education, sponsored by the Counseling Education Program at Georgia Southern State University. Recently Dr. Cross was elected President-Elect for Division 45 of the American Psychological Association, where he follows in the footsteps of Robert Sellers, Justin McDonald, and Luis Vasquez.
For a brief period Bill lived in Henderson, NV; where he accepted a position at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in Counselor Education. Recently, Bill and his wife Dawn moved to Colorado. Bill did not stay “retired” very long and currently he coordinates the Higher Education Program in the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver, which is to say his career has come full-circle, as he has returned to the university where he took his undergraduate degree.
e: wcross@gc.cuny.edu
Jessie Daniels
(PhD, MA, UT-Austin)
Jessie Daniels is an internationally recognized expert on the Internet manifestations of racism. She is the author of two books about race and various forms of media, White Lies (1997) and Cyber Racism (2009), as well as dozens of peer-reviewed articles in journals such as New Media & Society, Gender & Society, American Journal of Public Health, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.
From 1995-1999, Daniels taught Sociology at Hofstra University, then left academia to work in the Internet industry (1999-2000). There, she worked as a Senior Producer, creating live, online events for Fortune 500 companies. She came back into academia through an NIH-funded research project at Rikers Island, New York City's largest jail, that explored the role of masculinity and race in promoting health for young men leaving jail and re-entering their communities (2002-2005). An article in the journal Health Promotion & Practice based on that research won the Sarah Mazelis Paper of the Year Award (2011).
For 2012-2013, she is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, co-leading a seminar that is a conversation between scholars in the humanities and social sciences about "poverty" and working on her own, book-length manuscript, tentatively called, "Health and Poverty on Display: From TV to YouTube."
Her latest project is: JustPublics@365, an initiative funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation that is intended to re-imagine scholarly communication in the digital era for the public good.
Since 2007, Daniels has maintained a scholarly blog, RacismReview, which regularly gets 200,000 unique visitors each month, and has received well over than 2 million visitors since it began. Forbes Magazine named her one of “20 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter.” You can find her on Twitter: @JessieNYC.
e: jdaniels@hunter.cuny.edu
Michelle Fine
PhD, Social Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University
Dr. Fine served as chair of the Social/Personality Psychology Program during the 2008-2011 academic years. For the past 20 years, Dr. Fine has been engaged in varied critical participatory research projects, across diverse contexts including schools, communities and prisons, to document, interrupt and organize for just alternatives to injustice. The intellectual history of this work sits in the social psychological legacy of Kurt Lewin, W.E.B. DuBois and Marie Jahoda, Ignacio Martin Baro. Crafted in critical race, feminist, neo-liberal and post-colonial theory and through critical participatory methods, these projects are designed toward critical theoretical interventions, to produce social policy/amicus briefs and "to be of use" in social movements for human rights.
A Distinguished Professor of Social Psychology, Women's Studies and Urban Education at the GC, Dr. Fine has taught at the Graduate Center, CUNY since 1992 and is a founding member of the Participatory Action Research Collective/Public Science Project at the Graduate Center. From 1981 – 1992, she was a member of the Human Development faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and since that time has had the privilege of teaching (and mostly learning) in New Zealand, Cyprus, China, Israel/Palestine, Canada and Turkey.
e: mfine@gc.cuny.edu
Nicholas Freudenberg (Hunter College)
DrPh, Public Health, Columbia
MPh, Public Health, Columbia
Dr. Freudenberg is a Distinguished Professor of Public Health at Hunter College and the Graduate Center and is director of the CUNY Doctor of Public Health program. For more than 20 years, he has worked with community organizations, civic groups and government agencies to develop, implement and evaluate interventions to improve the health of disadvantaged urban communities. His current research focuses on three areas: the development of multi-level policies and programs to reduce the adverse impact of incarceration on health; environmental and policy strategies to reverse current epidemics of obesity and diabetes; and the impact on population health of corporate practices in the food, alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceutical, firearms and automobile industries.
e: nfreuden@hunter.cuny.edu
Wendy Luttrell
PhD, Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz
Wendy Luttrell has recently been appointed Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, and comes to the Graduate Center from the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she held the Nancy Pforzheimer Aronson Chair in Human Development and Education. She is a leading authority on how urban American schooling shapes and reinforces beliefs about gender, race, class, identity, knowledge, and power. Her research focuses on how systems of inequality get internalized, especially by learners who have been marginalized, excluded or stigmatized. Luttrell has designed innovative visual method that offer research participants an active role in representing their worlds, as they understand them, and that illuminate complex social, cultural and psychological processes. She is the author of two award winning books, School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women's Identity and Schooling (1997), and Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens (2003). She is the editor the newly released volume Qualitative Educational Research: Readings on Reflexive Methodology and Transformative Practice (2009). Her current project, Children Framing Childhoods, follows thirty-four diverse, low-income (mostly immigrant) children from elementary school to high school and identifies the role that gender, race and immigrant status play in how they portray their social and emotional worlds. Dr. Lutrrell has been awarded numerous fellowships including the American Council of Learned Societies, Rockefeller Foundation, Spencer Foundation and a Marie Curie Fellowship Award of the World Egalitarian Initiative, University College Dublin.
e: wluttrell@gc.cuny.edu
Suzanne Ouellette
PhD, Psychology, The University of Chicago
Dr. Ouellette's research interests focus on personality understood not as static, genetically set traits; but rather stances toward self and world that are constantly changing as individuals live their lives in complex social, political, and cultural settings. Her life study research brings Dr. Ouellette to contexts like community based HIV/AIDS organizations, radiation clinics, artists’ studios, and public and private gardens. In all, she wants to practice what Henry Murray called a "bent of empathy and curiosity toward all profound experiences of individual men and women." Through work with students, at the borders of the social sciences and the humanities, Dr. Ouellette seek to build a Critical and Liberatory Personality Psychology. Now emeritus, Dr. Ouellette continues to work with current and former students and research colleagues to do scholarly writing. Her primary commitment is currently to art and painting. Dr. Ouellette's website presents examples of her current work and the ways she has merged the worlds of academic psychology and art.
Affiliations:: GMHC, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Columbia School of Public Health
e: souellette@gc.cuny.edu
Susan Saegert
Social Psychology PhD, University of Michigan
Dr. Saegert is Professor of Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center and subprogram head of Environmental Psychology. Her research includes studies of crowding; environmental stressor; housing and human development /well being; and women and environments. She directs the Housing Environments Research Group which works in partnership with community organizations and coalitions to to improve distressed housing and neighborhoods. She has collaborated with governmental, non-profit, and private sector organizations and institutions on the plan for downtown Denver, housing for the elderly and persons with special needs, neighborhood based services for the elderly, and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program 2 grant to Nashville TN. Her recent research concerns homeowners’ experiences of the foreclosure crisis and their policy implications; the relationship of housing and health; and alternative housing policies to promote stable, sustainable affordable housing. Her books include S. Saegert, J.P. Thompson, & M. R. Warren (Eds.): Social capital and poor communities (Russell Sage, 2005), Freudenberg, N., Klitzman, S., & Saegert, S. (2009) Urban Health and Society: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Research and Practice.Jossey Bass, and DeFilippis, J. & Saegert, S. (Eds) (in press). The Community Development Reader, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge.
e: ssaegert@gc.cuny.edu
Brett Stoudt
Dr. Stoudt is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department with a Joint Appointment in the Gender Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice as well as the Environmental Psychology Doctoral Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He has worked on numerous participatory research projects with community groups, lawyers, and policy-makers nationally and internationally. His interests include the social psychology of privilege and oppression, aggressive and discriminatory policing practices as well as critical methodologies. His work has been published in volumes such as Class Privilege & Education Advantage and Conflict, Interdependence, & Justice as well as journals such as The Journal of Social Issues, The Urban Review, and Men and Masculinities.
e: bstoudt@jjay.cuny.edu
Deborah Tolman
EdD, Human Development and Psychology, Harvard University
Dr. Tolman is newly arrived at CUNY (Spring, 2009) as a faculty member. Her primary appointment is in Social Welfare, which is the doctoral program jointly located here at the GC and at Hunter College School of Social Work. She is delighted to be putting down roots in the SP program now as well. Dr. Tolman's research is on adolescent sexuality, specifically the "unmentionables" around pleasure as well as danger, agency as well as prevention for girls. In recent years, her research has been around desire for connection as well as embodied sexual feelings for boys (all sexualities), gender (understood as ideologies) and its development, sexualization of girls and women, and how sexuality, relationships and negotiation of popular culture, youth culture and adult fears and notions are interwoven over the course of adolescence.
e: dtolman@gc.cuny.edu
María Elena Torre
Dr. Torre is the Director and co-founder of The Public Science Project. For the last 15 years she has been engaged in critical participatory action research projects nationally and internationally with schools, prisons, and community-based organizations seeking to further social justice. Her work introduced the concept of ‘participatory contact zones’ to collaborative research, and she continues to be interested in how democratic methodologies, radical inclusion, and notions of solidarity impact scientific inquiry. Before becoming director of The Public Science Project, Dr. Torre was Chair of Education Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. She is a co-author of Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and Changing Minds: The Impact of College on a Maximum Security Prison. Her writing can also be found in volumes such as the Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology (American Psychological Association), Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation, and Place (Routledge), the Handbook of Action Research (Sage), and in journals such as Feminism and Psychology, the Journal of Social Issues, Qualitative Inquiry, and the Journal of Critical Psychology. Dr. Torre was a recipient of the American Psychological Association Division 35 Adolescent Girls Task Force Emerging Scientist and the Spencer Fellowship in Social Justice & Social Development in Educational Studies, and is on the national board of the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project and What Kids Can Do.
e: mtorre@publicscienceproject.org
Roderick Watts
PhD, University of Maryland, College Park
At the broadest level my interests are in social justice and liberation studies, which I see as a transdisciplinary endeavor. Evolving from my past interest in human diversity, particularly social identity and oppression, I have over the years settled into three areas of research and practice: (1) youth sociopolitical development, (2) African American cultural-racial identity, and (3) African American men's development.
Some highlights from my recent work in these areas:
• In "Critical Consciousness: Current Status & Future Directions" My co-authors and I review recent developments in theory and empirical research on Freirian approaches to liberation. It is part of volume titled: Youth Civic Development: Work on the Cutting Edge.
• A colleague and I recently submitted a grant proposal on international youth organizing to examine, among other things, the role of social identity in the political development of young people. This follows on the heels of a study I did on the same topic with support from the Spencer Foundation.
• What is the relationship between cultural orientation, healthy development, and sociopolitical engagement? I am interested in how unique intersections of history, culture, and oppression shape social identities. I currently direct research for a national initiative to advance African culture-based rites of passage programs for African American youth.
• My current work on manhood development includes a HIV-related preventive intervention using the "critical consciousness coaching" method I developed for African American male adolescents. Based on promising findings with rural Kenyan men, the National Institutes of Health funded a colleague's intervention research study with this population.
e: rwatts@gc.cuny.edu