07/03/2024
By Urmitapa Dutta

The College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, invites you to attend a doctoral dissertation defense by Gordon Crean on “White Antiracist Psychosocial Transformation and Accountability: Narratives and Knowledges from White Participants in Abolitionist Movements."

Candidate Name: Gordon Crean
Degree: Ph.D.
Date: Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Time: 2 p.m.
Location: Virtual Meeting via Zoom. Please contact Gordon_Crean@uml.edu or Urmitapa_Dutta@uml.edu for a link to attend.

Committee Members:

  • Urmitapa Dutta, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Lowell (Advisor/Chair)
  • Cheryl Llewellyn, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Lowell (Co-chair)
  • Lorien S. Jordan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Educational Measurement and Research (Qualitative Inquiry), University of South Florida
  • Rev. Samantha Lynne Wilson, Ph.D., Hope for Us: Conflict Engagement Team, Unitarian Universalist Association

Abstract:
This study explores how white settlers engage in critical reflexivity and centered accountability within abolitionist movements against the prison industrial complex (PIC) in the US and Canada. The PIC is viewed as a pillar of coloniality and racial capitalism, maintaining oppressive social arrangements based on various identities. While many white settlers support PIC abolition, they often perpetuate harm through oppressive patterns of whiteness. Using critical narrative inquiry, interviews were conducted with white participants in PIC abolition efforts. The research examines narratives, knowledges, and practices of transformation that participants are co-creating, as well as challenges they face. An idiographic, thematic narrative analysis approach focused on participants' narrations of their own transformation in practicing reflexivity and accountability. The study also analyzed convergences and divergences across narratives to understand broader movement dynamics. Participants shared insights about tensions, supports, and labors involved in practicing reflexivity and accountability, demonstrating efforts to transform oppressive ways of being and relating. Findings are discussed in relation to critical community psychology, critical whiteness studies, and abolitionist literature, with implications for activists, scholars, and practitioners striving to engage in transformative praxis and build communities of resistance across power differentials.