Changing Ourselves as We Act to Change the World
My research asks how people are psychologically transformed through participation in socially organized activity. Across developmental and social psychology, I study how shared activities can reorganize how people think, relate to others, understand themselves and society, and become capable of new forms of action.
A central thread across this work is the cultural-historical activity theoretic (CHAT) idea that development takes place through activity. My earlier and continuing research examines children’s private speech and sociodramatic play as contexts for the development of motivation, perspective taking, and self-regulation. My more recent work extends this developmental lens into adulthood by examining activism, collective action, labor struggle, and social movements as potential sites of psychological transformation.
This brings together questions that are usually studied separately: how children develop through play and language, how adults change through participation in collective struggle, and how broader historical movements can reshape attitudes, identities, solidarity, consciousness, and political imagination.
From Play to Collective Action
In CHAT and Vygotskian traditions, particular activities can become leading activities when participation in them reorganizes motives, relationships, psychological capacities, and forms of agency. My developmental research has examined sociodramatic play as one such context in childhood.
My current work asks a parallel question about adulthood: can participation in collective action and organizing sometimes function as a developmentally leading activity? Rather than treating activism only as an outcome to be explained – asking why people protest or organize – I am interested in what participation itself does to people. Collective struggle may create new relationships, identities, interpretations of society, emotional experiences, and capacities for action that could not be understood simply as preexisting characteristics of activists.
At another level, I approach collective action and social movements as forms of psychological intervention into society. Movements do not only express attitudes or mobilize people who already agree with them; they can alter the social and symbolic environments in which people think, feel, and interpret the world. By disrupting everyday routines, making conflicts visible, introducing new political frames, and compelling people to confront questions of power and inequality, collective struggle can reshape public attention, implicit and explicit attitudes, solidarity, consciousness, and understandings of what kinds of social change are possible.
Research Areas
Social Movements & Psychological Change
Much of my recent work investigates this possibility empirically by treating social movements as population-level psychological interventions rather than only as political or historical events. I study whether major episodes of collective action can alter implicit and explicit attitudes, public attention, solidarity, and understandings of social inequality – including among people who are not themselves movement participants.
This work includes research on Black Lives Matter, disability-rights activism, labor organizing, teacher strikes, and other movement contexts. A recurring question is how direct participation, indirect encounters, public discourse, and learning about movements can reshape psychological processes at both individual and population levels.
Activism, Solidarity & Intergroup Relations
A second line of research focuses on what happens to people who participate in organizing itself. I am especially interested in how sustained activism transforms identity, relationships, emotion, political understanding, and people’s sense of what is possible.
This work also examines intergroup contact within movements. Activists from different racial and ethnic groups often collaborate around shared political goals under conditions that differ substantially from everyday intergroup contact. I study when these relationships reduce intergroup bias, foster political solidarity, and contribute to continued collective action.
Social Class, Work Alienation, & Labor Struggle
My research on social class begins from the view that class is not adequately captured by socioeconomic status or subjective class identification alone. Drawing on Marxist psychology, I examine class as a social relation structured through work, exploitation, and conflict.
This work investigates work alienation, class consciousness, political solidarity, labor struggle, and collective action, while also developing approaches to measuring class that better capture people’s position within social relations rather than simply their income, education, or occupational prestige.
development, Play, & Cultural Historical Activity Theory
My developmental research examines how children use private speech, play, imagination, and social interaction to regulate their activity and develop new psychological capacities. I have studied how sociodramatic play can increase children’s private speech and motivation and how children’s self-directed speech can support perspective taking rather than simply reflect egocentrism.
These projects continue to inform my broader research program. Cultural-historical activity theory provides a framework for thinking about development as something that occurs through participation in historically organized forms of activity rather than solely through processes located within individuals.
Psychological Transformation through Collective struggle
Across these projects, I ask how historically organized forms of activity – especially movements confronting racism, ableism, exploitation, and other forms of domination – can transform not only institutions and public attitudes, but the people who participate in and encounter them. The aim is to understand how people develop new forms of solidarity, class and political consciousness, identity, and collective agency as they struggle to transform the social relations that have shaped them