The Anti-Racism Collaborative, administered by the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID), has awarded 21 summer research grants, totalling more than $100,000, to individuals and teams comprised of University of Michigan (U-M) graduate students.
“Graduate students make important contributions toward the advancement of innovative research and anti-racist principles,” says Elizabeth R. Cole, NCID director and University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Psychology and Women's and Gender Studies. “It’s critically important to provide resources that support this current generation of emerging anti-racism scholars.”
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2023 Projects
Strategies for Radical Healing: Examining Family Social Support as a Protective Factor for Adolescent Police Contact
Deaweh Benson (PhD Student in Developmental Psychology)
Adolescent police contact is associated with adverse mental and physical health outcomes. Due to systemic racism in policing, Black adolescents disproportionately experience police contact. Despite documented harmful outcomes, adolescent police contact persists throughout the American context. Research on protective factors that can ameliorate the link between police contact and poor health is necessary. The proposed study will adopt theoretical frameworks from biopsychosocial models of racism and radical healing to investigate whether family social support buffers police contact among Black adolescents (n= 1,069) sampled in the Future of Families Child and Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), a birth-cohort study of mostly low-income families.
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Feeling Left Out of School: Epistemic Exclusion’s Affective Impact on Early-Career Scholars
Eden Harrison (PhD Student in Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies)
Epistemic exclusion, a term that describes the scholarly devaluation of faculty of color, involves feeling excluded, unsupported, invisible, and disrespected (Settles et al., 2020a; Settles et al., 2020b). Little is known about what epistemic exclusion looks like for graduate students or the specific feelings that epistemic exclusion elicits for them. I plan to conduct 6 focus groups investigating the connection between affect (e.g., feelings of devaluation, isolation) and epistemic exclusion in Black graduate students to determine: 1) how epistemic exclusion manifests for Black graduate students and 2) how affect plays a role in Black graduate students’ experiences of epistemic exclusion.
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Structural Determinants of Black Youth Mental Health: Examining the Role of Structural Racism
Aaron Neal (MA Student in Psychology)
In this project, we partner with Black youth using community based participatory research to examine the racist institutions that are determinants of Black youths’ mental health. Further, this project investigates how these institutions work together to create structural racism, and determines to what extent structural racism contributes to Black youths’ experiences with depression. This project follows Jones’ (2018) anti-racism conceptual framework by naming racism, describing how racism is acting across contexts impacting Black youth, and then utilizing those findings to strategically intervene with effective policy and intervention.
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Black and Latina Girls’ Early Pubertal Transition and Gendered Racial Identity Development
Joonyoung Park (PhD Student in Developmental Psychology)
Black and Latina girls are the earliest in their age cohort to experience pubertal transition; Black girls are more vulnerable to ethnic-racial discrimination due to their more mature-looking bodies. Researchers have identified that parents’ healthy ethnic-racial socialization could mitigate the adverse effects of ethnic-racial discrimination and yield better youth well-being. However, ethnic-racial socialization in conjunction with pubertal socialization and how it relates to historically marginalized girls’ developmental outcomes are not well understood. This dissertation aims to examine how mothers can support Black and Latina girls during their early pubertal transition that yields positive gendered racial identity and adjustments.
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Experiences of Sexual Harassment among Black Queer Women in the Workplace
Kelsie Thorne (PhD Student in Psychology)
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, researchers, policymakers, educators, and practitioners must mitigate continued harm for the most vulnerable groups of women. The majority of literature on sexual harassment is overly-representative of the experiences of heterosexual, cisgender, and white women, despite evidence that queer women of color are at higher risk for sexual harassment due to their multiple marginalized identities. To address this gap, I will conduct qualitative interviews with Black queer women in order to understand their experiences of sexual harassment. Further, utilizing an intersectional framework, I investigate if Black queer women are subjected to a distinct form of sexual harassment due to their overlapping race, gender, and sexual identities.
Read the complete article in National Center for Institutional Diversity
