Faculty
Sonia Sánchez
BA, University of California, Santa Cruz. MPhil, PhD, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Special interests in how systems and structures of oppression have impacted relationships between differently marginalized communities, and how these same communities challenge divisive structures, develop and sustain solidarities, and continue to envision more liberatory futures. This includes an interest in critical social- and liberation psychologies, social justice-oriented research methodologies, queer of color theory, intersectional migrant justice, and oral history. SLC, 2026–
Undergraduate Courses 2026-2027
Psychology
-
Open, Seminar—Fall
PSYC 3416
This course will engage a feminist psychology that recognizes how the psychological and physical well-being of women, queer, and/or trans people—but also all people—requires understanding and challenging oppressive structures and building more life-affirming ones. As such, this seminar will explore the category of gender within and beyond the psychological discipline and will aim to familiarize students with major theoretical perspectives on gender including social constructionism, various feminist traditions, queer theories, post-colonial theories, and various psychological traditions. Engaging these traditions, we will think expansively about how gendered practices—from sexuality to labor and family—have been studied in relation to patriarchy and racial capitalism, but also how they form meanings in the physical and psychological lives of individuals. We will examine psychological empirical research as well as interdisciplinary theoretical and multimedia works on gender across history and culture, emphasizing the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, disability, and immigration in the experiences of women, girls, two-spirit, trans, and/or nonbinary individuals. We will, for example, read Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and Sandra Harding and watch film/documentary clips about Indigenous frameworks of gender. We will engage with how gender is embedded in contested relations of power in diverse communities and how feminists and psychologists have pushed for change in and beyond academia to envision healing, solidarity, and justice.
Faculty
-
Intermediate, Seminar—Spring
PSYC 3145
In this course, we will explore research methodologies and traditions that scholars and non-academic communities have used toward transformative change. We will focus specifically on research approaches that support efforts to address injustice at the root and build collective community power. While drawing from across disciplines for decolonial, feminist research methodologies, we will be rooted in a critical social psychological lens that illuminates the importance of structural and historical analysis as well as analysis built through individuals’ subjectivity and lived experience of oppression and resistance. Students will learn about various liberatory uses of research methodologies and analytic frameworks from across time and space —including community-engaged and participatory action research, oral history and testimonio, black feminist ethnography, and other activist scholarship. Many of these research approaches and frameworks have been forged through and shaped by liberatory traditions/social movements, hence we will explore them firmly rooted within these histories—in particular, Black, Indigenous, and queer liberation, and disability justice and abolitionist movements. We will learn how these movements’ ideals and theoretical and strategic interventions are critical for justice-oriented research because of (a) their invaluable, sharp analysis of the conditions and root causes of oppression, and (b) their expansive, transformative visions and approaches toward justice. Theoretical and empirical readings from psychology and other disciplines will be enriched by visits to learn about activism and engagement with multimedia sources offering important theorizing (e.g., documentary and other film clips, podcasts, art, music, etc.). This course may be of special interest to students considering a future in interdisciplinary research, who plan to engage in projects that address injustice, or more generally, who wish to engage with transformative theories of change.
Faculty