07/09/2025
By Stacy Seward

The College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Psychology invites you to attend a doctoral dissertation defense by Stacy Reid Seward on July 23, 2025.

Candidate Name: Stacy Reid Seward
Degree: Doctoral
Defense Date: Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Time: 1-3 p.m. EST
Location: Hybrid. McGauvran 311 and Virtual Meeting via Zoom. Please contact stacy_seward@student.uml.edu for link to attend virtually.

Dissertation Title: Dreaming in the Language of Refusal
Remembering Forward and Creating Liberatory Spaces with Black, Latina and Indigenous Women of the Caribbean Diaspora Living in Northeastern Massachusetts

Committee:
Advisor, Urmitapa Dutta Ph.D., Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Larissa Gaias, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Lowell and University of Washington
Steven Nelson Ph.D., J.D. Department of Education, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Brief Abstract:

This dissertation investigates how Black, Afro-Latina, and Indigenous women of the Caribbean diaspora living in Massachusetts navigate, resist and reimagine the violences of white supremacy through the creation of community-designed spaces. These spaces, shaped through practices of storytelling, counter-storytelling, and ancestral reclamation, serve as sites of refuge, and portals to radical joy, collective care, spiritual connection and liberatory sovereignty. Moving beyond frameworks that center trauma or marginalization, this study foregrounds the creative and liberatory practices women use to generate belonging, affirm autonomy and craft meaning in the face of erasure. Through a methodology rooted in critical storytelling and decolonial feminist theory, we illuminate how these spaces operate as embodied refusals of invisibility, commodification and surveillance.

This study finds that intentionally created spaces serve as sanctuaries and as powerful activators of joy, care, resistance and love. These spaces function as partial defenses against the daily epistemic and ontological violences experienced by Black, Afro-Latina, and Indigenous women of the Caribbean diaspora. When properly constructed these spaces are generative sites of collective remembering and future-making where joy is politicized, care is radical, and love becomes a form of refusal. Grounded in spiritual connection to land, lineage, and each other, these community-created environments challenge the imposed narratives of deficiency and offer a blueprint for liberation rooted in cultural memory and embodied resilience. This research offers a vital contribution to understanding liberatory space-making as method and outcome, and it affirms the epistemic power of women crafting worlds beyond the limits of colonial logics.