10/30/2025
By Urmitapa Dutta

The College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Psychology invites you to attend a doctoral dissertation defense by Ireri Bernal.

Date: November 13, 2025
Time: 1:30 - 3:30 p.m. EST
Location: McGauvran 311
(Please contact Ireri_Bernal@student.uml.edu for link to attend virtually.)

Committee:

  • Urmitapa Dutta Ph.D., Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Lowell (Chair)
  • Larissa Gaias, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Lowell and University of Washington
  • Dolores Delgado Bernal, Ph.D., School of Education, Loyola Marymount University, Louisiana

Dissertation Title: Lawrence Resiste: Theorizing Everyday Violence and Resistance Through Pláticas

Abstract:
This dissertation seeks to uplift how community members in Lawrence, Massachusetts theorize everyday violence and everyday resistance. Guided by Participatory Action Research, decolonial feminisms, and Chicana feminist epistemologies the dissertation employ a plática methodology, engaging in conversations with community members—current and former teachers, artists, activists, and organizers living and working in Lawrence. This is supplemented with activist ethnography. Specifically, it asks: when residents and organizers attempt to resist, where do they encounter friction, and what do those frictions reveal about how oppression is organized? How do counter-stories and counter-practices reframe dominant narratives about Lawrence and open practical, anti-oppressive horizons for community well-being? Critical narrative analysis of the pláticas and ethnographic research reveal key findings: (1) public education under receivership: how discourses of “accountability” organize harm; (2) development and “revitalization”: how return-on-investment (ROI) logics produce dispossession; and (3) Nonprofit Industrial Complex (NPIC) governance and resource gatekeeping: how “community benefit” consolidates power. Taken together, these findings show how administrative, legal, and narrative mechanisms quietly reproduce harm across housing, schools, labor, development, and welfare, while counter-stories and counter-practices reframe dominant narratives and expand collective capacity. Ultimately, this dissertation advances pláticas as a decolonial, praxis-oriented method that illuminates the NPIC’s constraints, equipping organizers and nonprofit practitioners with analytic tools and actionable pathways for accountable, transformative change.