As the Decolonial Research Collective at UMass Lowell, we are committed to (co)building intentional communities of care and epistemic resistance. Graduate students committed to social justice and transformative education are integral to our collective. You can learn more about our work and commitments here.
Jerry Lucius Pyrtuh
Jerry Lucius Pyrtuh is a doctoral student in the Applied Psychology and Prevention Science program. He seeks to strive toward conscientization of shared affects and psychic sufferings experienced by minority communities in the Northeastern Borderlands of India. He draws from critical decolonial psychology to think through pressure points of structural-systemic powers such as identity conflicts, normalized violences, class boundaries, geo-infrastructural alteration projects, and other political economies that complicate negotiations across the personal, intimate, and the ecological. Through this work, he hopes to co-imagine a psychology that moves outside the confines of the clinic by taking on a political, historical, and cultural consciousness, and into the intricate landscapes of people in communities. He is motivated towards transgressional and transformational scholarship that seek to materialize solidarities.
Alisha Solomon
Alisha Solomon is a master's student in the Community Social Psychology program. They are interested in transgressing epistemic violence present in academic spaces through a decolonial praxis. Inspired by Womxn of Color feminism, they aim to take part in activism driven research projects that involve collective care and the facilitation of empowerment. They aspire to contribute to a body of work that critiques neoliberalism, ethnocentrism and coloniality in a way that fosters radical hope.
Ireri Bernal
Ireri Bernal is a doctoral student in the Applied Psychology and Prevention Science program. She aims to conduct participatory and community-based research that centers the building of relationships, mutuality, and the co-creation of knowledge and resistance strategies. She approaches her work through a liberatory and decolonial psychology lens informed by Black, Indigenous, Womxn of Color Feminisms. She is particularly interested in the role of decolonization in collective healing and resistance movements and the relationship between personal and collective transformation.
Najifa Tanjeem
Najifa Tanjeem is a doctoral student in the Global Studies program. Her work centers around transforming communities and knowledges from the Global South into active actors for social change. Her experience of growing up, studying, and working within colonial matrices of direct, structural, and cultural violence in the Global South made her interested in studying decolonial frameworks and critical qualitative research. By theorizing from below, she aims to disrupt the colonial discourses of globalization, migration, and media representation as well as construct rehumanizing counter-discourses as a decolonial praxis.
Gordon Crean
Gordon Crean is a doctoral student in the Applied Psychology and Prevention Science program. Broadly, they are interested in supporting processes of psychosocial transformation: the interrelated processes of psychological transformation (e.g. development of communal sense of self, healing of internalized oppression and the psychological impacts of oppression) and social transformation (e.g. building autonomous and consensus-based forms of governance, transformative systems of accountability centering reparations and rematriation, and other liberatory institutions/interrelationships). They aim to do research in service and partnership with grassroots organizers, cultural workers and healers who work to sustain the communities of resistance, care and love where psychosocial transformation occurs. They are deeply inspired by movements for prison abolition, and for decolonization.