My research program examines the social and cultural contexts that promote positive development, liberation and human rights for oppressed communities, primarily Latinx immigrants and their families, and centralizes concerns of action and equity throughout the research process.

 

This program is grounded training across various subfields of psychology, including developmental, liberation, and community psychology, as well as human rights scholarship. My scholarship integrates these disciplines in a variety of ways throughout my research. For example, I integrate human rights into examinations of development by considering them as a macrosystem influence on development, where human rights violations influence underlying ecological levels with consequences for development. I draw on psychopolitical validity, a concept central in community psychology, in my research by incorporating prior research on oppression into studies as well as reflecting on whether the research process promotes transformative social change (Prilleltensky, 2003). Across my research projects I engage oppressed communities in the research process in a multitude of ways; this reflects liberation psychology’s commitment to the experiences of those marginalized and to building knowledge towards liberation. The commitment to social transformation dovetails with applied psychology’s priority for translating research for policy and practice, although with specific attention to circulations of power and social change outcomes. Reflecting on these priorities, I outline and plan for potential application of a project at the outset of the research process. I utilize the positive tension born out of the epistemological and scholarly disagreements of these disparate subfields to produce theoretically rigorous research. Overall, my research program examines the social and cultural contexts that promote positive development, liberation and human rights for oppressed communities, primarily immigrants of color and their families, and centralizes concerns of action and equity throughout the research process.

 

I utilize methodological approaches that are informed by these disciplinary foundations. My research is grounded within a transformative paradigm, which centers research in response to social inequities. Previous and current work utilizes a variety of methodological approaches, including participatory action research, transformative mixed methods, qualitative thematic analysis, grounded theory informed qualitative analyses, and descriptive and inferential statistics, including secondary data analysis of a nationally representative data set. These approaches are employed to best address the research question at hand while remaining conscious of power dynamics, and the larger systems of oppression that the research is situated within.

 

My prior work engages in research across the academic-community spectrum. From authentic community-university partnerships stewarded by a group of researchers or an institution to more traditional academic research, my research has utilized multiple arrangements. Moreover, several research projects have been conducted outside of the academy with third sector organizations, such as a human rights foundation or community organizations. These experiences have shaped a research program that is responsive to the pragmatic concerns of grant timelines, community priorities, and scholarly progress in the field of human development.