Institute Faculty

Critical Participatory Action Research Annual Institute Faculty Bios

Caitlin Cahill, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Critical & Visual Studies, Pratt Institute.  A community-based urban & youth studies scholar, Caitlin does participatory action research with young people investigating questions of global urban restructuring and the production of inequalities in the areas of gentrification, immigration, community development and educational access. Caitlin is committed to creating collective spaces for dialogue, creativity, knowledge production, critical research and action.  In Salt Lake City, Caitlin co-founded the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective (with Matt Bradley and David Quijada), an intergenerational social justice think tank engaging young people as catalysts of change in a model integrating community-based participatory action research, arts and activism. Currently, Caitlin is on the editorial boards of Children’s Geographies and Community Development, and is also an affiliate editor for Children, Youth, and Environments. Caitlin received her doctorate in Environmental Psychology with a concentration in Public Policy and Urban Studies from the City University of New York.

Michelle Fine, PhD is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Urban Education and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Chair of Social/Personality Psychology program.  Her recent awards include the 2011 Kurt Lewin award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the 2010 Higher Education and Criminal Justice award from the College and Community Fellowship, the 2008 Social Justice Award from the Cross Cultural Roundtable at Teachers College, Columbia University, the 2005 First Morton Deutsch Social Justice Scholar Award from Columbia University, and the 2001 Carolyn Sherif Award from APA. For over 15 years she has been involved in a rich set of participatory action research projects focused on circuits of dispossession and resistance in schools, communities, and prisons.  These projects seek to produce public science for social change through legislation, critical social theory, and popular mobilization for educational justice.

Maddy Fox is an Assistant Professor of Children & Youth Studies and Sociology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She is interested in the overlap between art and participatory knowledge production, research methodologies for provoking political solidarity, and young peoples’ every day experiences of public policy. Her current research is a multi-generational participatory study on the lived experiences of income inequality and neighborhood change in Brooklyn’s school district 15. Maddy was the director of the Polling Justice Project, a PAR project on youth experiences at the intersections of criminal justice, education, and public health in New York City. In collaboration with performance artist Una Osato and the PFJ research team Maddy developed an artistic embodied approach for analyzing and disseminating findings on youth experiences of policy betrayal and critical resistance. Her writing can be found in journals such as Children & Society, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, and in volumes such as A Critical Youth Studies for the 21^st Century (Brill) and Critical Qualitative Research Reader (Peter Lang). Maddy co-edited the volume Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Narrative to Build Community and Make Social Justice Claims with Rickie Solinger and Kayhan Irani.

Cory Greene is a formerly Incarcerated organizer for the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions (CNUS) and The Incarceration to Education Coalition (IEC). Cory graduated from the Applied Psychology program at NYU’s Steinhardt school of Culture, Education, and Human Development in 2013. He is one of the co-founders of How Our Lives Link Altogether! (H.O.L.L.A!) an organization dedicated to youth leadership development, radical healing, youth organizing, and community empowerment with historically marginalIzed youth of color. Cory is a student in the Critical Social Personality Psychology doctoral program at the Graduate Center of the CUNY where he plans to engage in/with participatory action research: an epistemology and practice that challenges inequalities, normative assumptions of “the normal”, and promotes social/human justice!

Monique Guishard is on the Psychology faculty at the City University of New York (CUNY) Bronx Community College Campus and is a graduate of the Critical/Social-Personality Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Monique is a founding member of The Public Science Project. Her participatory action research with young people has explored parent activist and youth researchers’ critical consciousness development in the context of community organizing and conducting research on the academic resource and achievement gap. Monique’s research investigates what it means to be ethical from the perspective of participatory researchers as a means of addressing ethical concerns about ownership, interpretation, self-determination, rights, and social justice that are present in all scientific inquiry. Guishard’s  work also aims to endarken (employ Black, Latina, and Indigenous  feminist writing)  the fracture points between conventional Institutional Review Board centered ethics and De-colonial participatory action research (DPAR) ethics.

Prakriti Hassan Prakriti is a research assistant for the Public Science Project. She received a bachelor’s in forensic Psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY. Prakriti has been a member of the Morris Justice Project since its beginning, and through MJP she discovered a passion for participatory action research and a strong interest in statistics. She is dedicated to social justice and equity and plans on continuing that commitment through further education.

Einat Manoff is an urban designer and currently a student in the Environmental Psychology Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center. Her research focuses on issues of Internal Displacement and refugees in Israel-Palestine through the perspectives offered by psychology, geography, urban planning and visual culture. Einat teaches in the Department of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College and the Urban Design Department at City College of New York.

Amanda Matles is a doctoral student in the Earth and Environmental Science Department, Geography specialization at the CUNY Graduate Center. Amanda uses video based methods to develop research about the everyday intersections of law and social control, and to document the complex makings of human geographies. She recently worked with the Paper Tiger Video Collective producing a feature length documentary called Rerooting the Motor City : Notes on a City in Transformation in 2013. Highlighting the voices of veteran labor activists, local historians, rappers, and urban gardeners, Rerooting explores the potential for radical social and ecological regeneration in post industrial urban geographies. Her work has been exhibited in New York, London, Washington DC, New Brunswick, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. Amanda earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2004 and was a 2010 fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York, NY. She is currently at work on a participatory video research project with youth researchers in Bushwick, Brooklyn called Being Policed. Together they are producing a series of video shorts visualizing statistical data and archiving interviews with youth about Stop and Frisk policing and aspects of harsh Zero Tolerance policies in schools.

Brett G. Stoudt, PhD 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 CUNY Graduate Center. He has worked on numerous participatory action research projects with community groups, lawyers, and policy-makers nationally and internationally. His interests include the social psychology of privilege and oppression as well as aggressive and discriminatory policing practices. He is also interested in critical methodologies, particularly critical approaches to quantitative research. His work has been published in volumes such as Geographies of Privilege as well as journals such as The Journal of Social Issues. He is the recipient of The Michele Alexander Early Career Award for Scholarship and Service from The Society for the Psychology Study of Social Issues (SPSSI).

María Elena Torre, PhD is the founding Director of The Public Science Project and faculty member in Critical Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 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 for over 15 years. 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. 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. María is on the national board of the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project and What Kids Can Do, and was a recipient of the American Psychological Association Division 35 Adolescent Girls Task Force Emerging Scientist, the Spencer Fellowship in Social Justice & Social Development in Educational Studies, and the Michele Alexander Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues of the American Psychological Association for Early Career Excellence in Scholarship, Teaching, and Service. She is presently serving on Mayor de Blasio’s Taskforce on School Climate, and is co-leading “What’s Your Issue?” a participatory study with LGBT and gender non-conforming youth of the priorities, dreams, and desires of LGBT and GNC youth.