Team Bio

I work with a group of brilliant graduate students who study gender and sexuality in the lives of adolescents and adults. Jenn Chmielewski, a member of this group with deep research experience, will join me. The larger group will be part of the "team"; we meet together weekly to consult with each other, strategize solutions to challenges we are facing, make sense of our findings and disseminate our work. Our group has expertise in many research methods, including PAR.

Deborah Tolman

I have always been curious about adolescent girls' sexuality and how gender dynamics inform their experience. I have been studying sexuality since I was an undergrad at Harvard, which raised eyebrows back then. Now I am a professor of critical social psychology and have been doing innovative research on the topic for over 20 years using an array of research methods (interviews, focus groups, surveys and statistical analysis, often "mixing" them for stronger results). My book, Dilemmas of Desire, was an early example of bringing girls' voices to how we understand their experiences. I have a Masters in sex education from Penn and a PhD in developmental psychology, with a focus on adolescence, from Harvard. I have been working in public higher education most of my career; I have been a professor at San Francisco State and now at CUNY. I publish widely and speak in public venues frequently. As co-founder of SPARK Movement, my commitment to girls has grown to supporting them in being activists to fuel social change about how their bodies are treated and to recognize their strengths beyond how they look. These two ways of working come together in PAR and the creation of SPARK Research! Having done a successful PAR project with a group of girls and their teacher who wanted to know about slut-shaming in their school, I am working now with my students on various efforts to do critical research on gender and sexuality and ensuring that our work and that of our colleagues around the country, and eventually the globe, goes "beyond the academy" to inform what the public knows about gender and sexuality and policies that affect the lives of so many (SexGenLab).

Jennifer Chmielewski

I have been studying gender and sexuality since I was an undergraduate student at Dickinson College. I also have a Master of Education in Counseling Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University. I am currently a doctoral student in the Critical Social/Personality Psychology program, and member of SexGenLab at The Graduate Center, CUNY. My work uses critical feminist theories and methods to explore women and girls’ lived experiences of gender, desire and sexual identity through an intersectional and social justice lens. In particular, I have focused on examining issues of sexualization in the lives of diverse adolescents and young women through a variety of research methods (experiments, surveys, interviews, focus groups). I am particularly interested in ensuring that this work on sexualization is relevant to the young women I conduct research with and can be used to fuel social change. To this end, I received training in PAR at the Critical Participatory Action Research Institute through the Public Science Project at the Graduate Center. I have engaged in participatory methods in my own work with LGBTQ adolescents of color on issues of sexualization in school. I am also a Research Blogger and the Research Blog Editor for SPARK Movement, translating psychological research on sexualization and sexuality about young women, for adolescent girls and young women.