11/18/2025
By Jamie Trottier
The Department of Psychology proudly announces that Psychology doctoral student Ireri Bernal has successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, marking a significant milestone in her scholarly journey and in community-centered research on Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Bernal’s committee brought together a distinguished group of scholars:
- Urmitapa Dutta, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, UMass Lowell (Chair)
- Larissa Gaias, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, UMass Lowell & University of Washington
- Dolores Delgado Bernal, Ph.D., School of Education, Loyola Marymount University, Louisiana
A Celebration of Community Knowledge and Resistance
Bernal’s dissertation, Lawrence Resiste: Theorizing Everyday Violence and Resistance Through Pláticas, offered a timely and powerful investigation into how residents of Lawrence understood, confronted, and transformed the conditions shaping their everyday lives. Guided by Participatory Action Research, decolonial feminisms, and Chicana feminist epistemologies, Bernal employed a plática methodology—an approach rooted in intimate, community-centered conversation—to engage teachers, artists, activists, and organizers living and working in the city.
Supported by activist ethnography, the project examined critical questions such as:
- Where do residents encounter friction when resisting systemic harm?
- What do these points of friction reveal about the organization of oppression?
- How do community-generated counter-stories challenge dominant narratives and open new pathways for collective well-being?
Through critical narrative analysis of the pláticas and ethnographic research, Bernal’s dissertation highlighted three key terrains of everyday violence and resistance:
- Public education under receivership—where discourses of “accountability” quietly organized harm.
- Development and “revitalization”—where return-on-investment logics produced dispossession.
- Nonprofit Industrial Complex governance—where “community benefit” narratives consolidated institutional power and restricted resources.
Taken together, these findings revealed the administrative, legal, and narrative mechanisms that reproduced harm across housing, schools, labor, development, and welfare systems—while also uplifting the counter-stories and community practices that reframed dominant narratives and expanded collective capacity.
Bernal’s work ultimately advanced pláticas as a powerful decolonial, praxis-oriented method—one that illuminated the constraints of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex while equipping organizers and nonprofit practitioners with analytic tools and actionable pathways for accountable, transformative change.
The Department of Psychology proudly celebrates Ireri Bernal, Ph.D., and the profound community-rooted scholarship she brings to the field.