Critical Social/Personality PsychologyCommunity Engaged Work & Research

Rod Watts:Social justice research and action: Youth Community Organizing (YCO): Works with international and national organizations to raise the profile of YCO among policy-makers and philanthropic organizations, and disseminate promising YCO practices among practitioner-activists. SPD work :Increase the profile of sociopolitical development in the scholarly sector. We created a strategy to advance theories of sociopolitical development and action in multiple disciplines including education, psychology, and anthropology based on shared ideas and terminology .

María Elena TorrePolicy Consulting: Working with community-based advocates we use our research to consult with and advise policy makers on education and criminal justice policy.Legal Testimony/Amicus Briefs: We have provided Expert Witness Testimony for cases on educational, and gender inequity. As members of Communities United for Police Reform we have contributed to Amicus Briefs challenging the constitutionality of discriminatory and abusive policing and in support of Court ordered reparations.Advancing Youth Community Organizing in Key Sectors: Our International Study of youth community organizing and civic engagement aims raise the profile, and access to resources in for work in Youth Community Organizing (YCO)—an alternative to the more dominant “Positive Youth Development” which is far too limited scope, especially with youth or color and others subject to oppression.

Brett Stoudt“Stats for the People” / “Mapping for the People” Clinics: We work with Make the Road, Cop Watch, Picture the Homeless and other organizations to analyze public data or their own home-grown surveys, often offering them our computer resources (e.g., spss/qgis and some tutoring). Statistical-Mapping Consulting: Some organizations like DRUM, VOCAL, Cop Watch, Communities United for Police Reform and Picture the Homeless have sought our help with statistical or mapping or requested we run analyses or maps, but also raw output or more detailed reports . Critical PAR Institutes/Workshops: PSP holds annual institutes on PAR and critical statistics as well as one to three day workshops.Community Research Actions:

Morris Justice Project: The Illuminator, Sidewalk Science, Art Action, Collaborative Reports/Writing, Community Safety Wall, Broken Windows CampaignResearchers for Fair Policing: Collaborative youth comic strips, art installations, info-graphics, reports, glow in the dark bracelets

Public Science Shorts: using media, website archives, twitter, tumbler, testimonials, data blogs, and documentary shorts – organized collaboratively – to engages with publics online. Organizational Activist-University Research Collaborations: Direct research collaborations with community orgs to conduct strong research while moving forward their policy agendas.Facilitating/Hosting Community-Academic Discussion/Debate: We organize or sponsor many public discussion that invites various publics and including academics, the mayors office, etc to engage with important social justice issues at the public university.

Sonia Abigail SánchezLegal consulting: Helped design a methodology/approach to a question of educational justice that stresses the need for students and teachers to direct the conversation on policies that will impact their lives. Community-led research and organizing with the Migrant Power Alliance and ICE FREE NYC (icefreenyc.com/)—to end ALL cooperation between NYC agencies and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). We organize while engaging in archival research and testimonio/oral history for policy and discourse change. With another NYC-based, grassroots, collective of mostly young, Latina@s/Chican@s, we explore with creative community-building practices, organize a variety of events/workshops/conversations around politics, history, culture, and the arts. Our ‘community conversation surveys,’ documentation, other research, resource sharing, and actions are responses to issues in our communities, including gentrification, deportation, racialized police violence, labor & educational justice, etc. The way we do research as a community provides great insight for addressing questions of methodology, process, ethics, access, practicality, and epistemology in research.

Jennifer Chmielewski Qu(e)erying school discipline project. Research project examines discipline disparities for LGBTQ students of color in New York City public schools. Our team has worked with a community advisory board for this social justice oriented research to understand how LGBTQ students of color are rendered vulnerable in schools through hostile climates and discriminatory/zero-tolerance discipline policies, the strengths they have to thrive in these schools, and how can schools can build cultures that are affirming for all students. Collaborating with Community advisory board. We have held data workshops with our community advisory board --made up of LGBTQ youth, educators, legal and community activists-- to develop and implement the research project as well as interpret our findings. Policy work. We have written a policy whitepaper and presented with our findings and recommendations for interventions, research, and policy in NYC education. We presented research and recommendations to members of the mayor’s office and Department of Education as we push for policy changes in school discipline practices in New York City.Research blog writing for SPARK (Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge; http://www.sparksummit.com/) – SPARK is an intergenerational, but teenage girl-fueled activist movement to demand an end to the sexualization of women and girls in the media and support the development of girls' healthy sexuality and self-esteem. My research blogs translate scholarly articles on the effects of objectification and sexualization on girls into a format that the average adolescent girl can understand and access.

Kimberly BelmonteCommunity Research: Researchers for Fair Policing –working with Make the Road New York (MRNY) and the Public Science Project (alongside Amanda Matles, Brett Stoudt, Caitlin Cahill, Maria Torre)—as a group of professors, graduate students, organizers, and youth activists, we have worked together to study the effects of aggressive policing of youth of color in New York City (see us at www.publicscienceproject.org).

(Created surveys, youth-led videoed testimonials, comics around experiences with police with a small team of youth. Given presentations at academic conferences, co-writing whitepaper with MRNY co-researchers.)

LGBTQ School Discipline Project: examines how gender identity and sexual orientation are related to students’ experiences. With the Public Science Project (with Brett Stoudt, Maria Torre, Michelle Fine & Jennifer Chmielewski) we convened a participatory advisory board of youth, teachers, lawyers, and community organizers interested in LGBTQ and education to guide our research questions and interpretations. (Work has involved: focus groups with young people, collaborative youth-led surveys, white paper with empirically-informed recommendations to improve school climates– especially for LGBTQ, GNC students, presentations for academic audiences and for Mayor de Blasio’s office staff.) Research blogger for SPARK: Write research blogs for this inter-generational feminist organization, translating unaccessible contemporary research on sexualization and objectification into a format and language that the average adolescent can read and understand. (http://www.sparksummit.com/category/research-blog).

Talia SandwickExpert legal testimony – I assisted Michelle in the research and writing of Expert Testimony for Cruz v. California, an ongoing class action lawsuit about inequity in meaningful learning time in California public schools, filed by Public Counsel and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.Youth Participatory Action Research – With a team of PSP faculty and graduate students (Brett Stoudt, Caitlin Cahill, María Elena Torre, Amanda Matles and myself) worked with organizers and youth activists/co-researchers from Make the Road New York’s Youth Power Project. As the Bushwick Action Research Collective, we use a range of participatory methods with youth co-researchers to study issues related to school discipline, surveillance, and policing to imagine new possibilities for NYC public school models that are more respectful and responsive for their students, and more integrated within and responsible to their surrounding communities.

Wen LiuPublic Lectures on queer theory and LGBT movements: Wen has been invited to and given lectures on the LGBT movements through the lens of queer theory by community organizations in NYC, Taipei, Shanghai, and Beijing. The series of talks hope to engage with audiences with different levels of knowledge and situate feminism and queer theory in the rapidly changing global LGBT movements.

Bushwick Action Research Collective

Gaurav JashnaniCo-Coordinator of the Challenging Male Supremacy Project (CMS): CMS is a New York City-based collective, composed of men working to end gender-based violence and promote a transformative vision of social justice. CMS aims to engage male and masculine-identified people to build individual and collective accountability and a practice of confronting male supremacy, as it intersects with other systems of oppression, toward collective liberation. We support this process through political education and creating a structured space for activists and organizers to come together to further develop a feminist analysis and practice in our chosen work and personal lives.

Launch of ICE FREE NYC at 26 Federal PlazaMorris Justice Project Sidewalk Science