Ecologies of Liberation Lab
Ecologies of Liberation Lab Mission
-
We aspire to conduct research that is relevant to social issues, fosters critical reflection, and motivates social change at local, organizational, and societal levels of analysis.
-
We pursue research with a spirit of collaboration, curiosity, ethical sensitivity, and kindness.
-
We work to promote diversity and liberation in all facets of our lab, encouraging us to collaborate together to pursue our full potential as people, scholars, and agents of change.
Research Interests
- Sexual and Gender Minority Health Equity
- Sexual and Gender Minority Religion and Spirituality
- Religious Settings, Religious Environment, and Structural Stigma
- Diversity Education and Social Justice Engagement
- Intersectionality
- Ecological Methods and Analysis
Research
In our work we draw from ecological models to focus on the places, spaces, settings, and structures that maintain oppression and/or facilitate liberation. This ecological emphasis pushes beyond a sole focus on individuals to instead understand individuals in relation to their larger ecological contexts, and the dynamic interplay between individuals and their ecologies.
We are interested in how ecologies shape processes of oppression and liberation. We draw from community psychology and other liberation psychologies to consider liberation as a process of resisting oppression grounded in an analysis and transformation of social conditions. Taken together, we want to better understand how to create spaces and settings that catalyze liberation and resist oppression in the service of promoting wellbeing and social change. Our work also is intersectional in how we understand individuals, their multiple social group memberships, and their larger social ecologies.
We have two new lines of research:
- We are launching work to examine sexual and gender minority (SGM) spirituality and wellbeing under the broader umbrella of SGM health equity. In particular, we are interested in the multiple ways SGM people construct their spiritualities inside and outside of religious institutions, and furthermore how religious institutions and settings can better support SGM spirituality and wellbeing. As one example of this work, we are engaging with open and affirming religious congregations to understand the process of how congregations become and then sustain being an open and affirming congregation. Integral to this work is an intersectional focus that incorporates a focus on gender, class, race and ethnicity, religious and spiritual diversity, and other facets of privilege and oppression.
- We are developing tools to assess religious environment to better understand how religious environment may operate as a form of structural stigma contributing to sexual and gender minority health disparities. As an initial project, we are examining state-level indicators of religious environment to test how religious environment predicts and may moderate sexual and gender minority health disparities.
In other ongoing work, we examine:
- College campuses as a particular type of social setting, doing research to better understand campus efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. We work with campus partners to understand the impact of campus-diversity programming on diversity-related attitudes and behaviors.
- The ways in which religious settings such as congregations promote social justice engagement.
- How White students understand and respond to racism and White privilege.
- Attitudes related to racial microaggressions and colorblind ideology.
See Research to learn more about our ongoing and future work
Recent News
-
August 2022 – We are very excited to welcome Daniel Nguyen to the Ecological of Liberation Lab as a first year graduate student.
-
July 2022 – Congrats to Allyson Blackburn and Dr. Todd for their paper, “Pride in our community: Reflecting on LGBTQ publications in the American Journal of Community Psychology” published in the American Journal of Community Psycholoy which served as an Invited Editorial to introduce the Virtual Special Issue they guest edited.
-
July 2022 – Congrats to Brett Boeh for completing her internship, and starting her postdoc at SHARP HealthCare in San Diego.
-
July 2022 – Congrats to Jaki Yi for successfully passing her dissertation defense! Her dissertation is titled, “Activism among Asian American college students: A grounded theory study.”
-
July 2022 – Congrats to Jaki Yi for leading her team of Dr. Todd, Emily Blevins, and Ross Wantland for their paper titled “Colorblind racial ideology and student expectations and reactions to a university-sponsored diversity workshop” published in the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
-
June 2022 – Congrats to Jaki Yi for being selected for the Asian American Psychological Association Graduate Leadership Institute.
-
May 2022 – Congrats to Jaki Yi for leading her team of Drs. Helen Neville, Nathan Todd, and Yara Mekawi for their paper titled “Ignoring race and denying racism: A meta-analysis of the associations between colorblind racial ideology, anti-Blackness and other variables antithetical to racial justice” published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology. This paper was featured by APA with a press release. Way to go team!
-
May 2022 – Congrats to Jaki Yi for being awarded the Frederick and Ruby Kanfer Award for Excellence in Research!
-
February 2022 – Congrats to collaborator Shoko Watanabe and Dr. Todd for their conference presentation where they used latent class growth modeling to examine how longitudinal patterns of religious doubt predicted subsequent religious disaffiliation. Way to go Shoko!
-
January 2022 – Congrats to Dr. Todd for being awarded a grant from the Louisville Institute titled, “Understanding the Process of Becoming an LGBT Open and Affirming Congregation”
-
December 2021 – Congrats to Emily Blevins who had a paper titled “Remembering where we’re from: Community- and individual-level predictors of college students’ White privilege awareness” published in the American Journal of Community Psychology.
-
December 2021 – Congrats to collaborator Yara Mekawi, Emily Blevins, and Dr. Todd for their paper titled “Reducing acceptability of racial microaggressions using online videos: The role of perspective-taking and White guilt” published in the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
-
November 2021 – Congrats to Emily Blevins and Dr. Todd for their poster titled “Using appraisal theory to improve the measurement of racial affect” which was presented at the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) virtual conference!
-
October 2021 – Congrats to Jaki Yi who contributed to a paper titled “Perceiving fairness in an unfair world: System justification and the mental health of girls in detention facilities” accepted for publication at the journal American Journal of Community Psychology.
-
September 2021 – Congrats to collaborator Yara Mekawi and Dr. Todd for their paper titled “Focusing the lens to see more clearly: Overcoming definitional challenges and identifying new directions in racial microaggressions research” published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
- August 2021 – Congrats to Todd Lab alumnae Grace Bai and Anna Wruck as they begin their master’s programs in psychology this fall!
- August 2021 – Congrats to Yara Mekawi as she begins as an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Louisville!
- June 2021 – The Todd lab was excited to attend and present virtually at the 2021 Biennial Society for Research and Community Action (SCRA) conference. Way to go on everyone’s presentations!
- May 2021 – Congrats to Jaki Yi for being awarded the Department of Psychology Diversity Award for her outstanding research contributions to psychological topics related to diversity!
- May 2021 – Congrats to Emily Blevins for being awarded the Sarah C. Mangelsdorf Award from the Psychology Department. This award recognizes excellence in both scholarship and teaching . . . way to go Emily!
- May 2021 – Congrats to our undergraduate students Madeleine Fowler, Semira Abera, Eleanor Humphreys, Grace Bai, and Anna Wruck for presenting a virtual poster titled “Friends, follows, and feelings: Diverse online and offline social interactions predict racial empathy and White guilt” at the Association for Psychological Science (APS) annual conference!
- See News for more!