Nathan R Todd

In our Ecologies of Liberation Lab, we draw from ecological models to focus on the places, spaces, settings, and structures that maintain oppression and/or facilitate liberation.  This ecological emphasis pushes beyond a sole focus on individuals to instead understand individuals in relation to their larger ecological contexts, and the dynamic interplay between individuals and their ecologies.    

We are interested in how ecologies shape processes of oppression and liberation.  We draw from community psychology and other liberation psychologies to consider liberation as a process of resisting oppression grounded in an analysis and transformation of social conditions. Taken together, we want to better understand how to create spaces and settings that catalyze liberation and resist oppression in the service of promoting wellbeing and social change.  Our work also is intersectional in how we understand individuals, their multiple social group memberships, and their larger social ecologies. 

We have two new lines of research:

• We are launching work to examine sexual and gender minority (SGM) spirituality and wellbeing. In particular, we are interested in the multiple ways SGM people construct their spiritualities inside and outside of religious institutions, and furthermore how religious institutions and settings can better support SGM spirituality and wellbeing. As one example of this work, we are engaging with open and affirming religious congregations to understand the process of becoming and sustaining being an open and affirming congregation.  Integral to this work is an intersectional focus that incorporates a focus on gender, class, race and ethnicity, religious and spiritual diversity, and other facets of privilege and oppression.
• We are developing tools to assess religious climate to better understand how such climate operates as a form of structural stigma contributing to sexual and gender minority health disparities.   As an initial project, we are examining state-level indicators of religious climate to test how religious climate predicts and may moderate sexual and gender minority health disparities.    

In other ongoing work, we examine:

• College campuses as a particular type of social setting, doing research to better understand campus efforts to promote diversity and inclusion.  We work with campus partners to understand the impact of campus-diversity programming on diversity-related attitudes and behaviors. 
• The ways in which religious settings such as congregations promote social justice engagement.
• How White students understand and respond to racism and White privilege.
• Attitudes related to racial microaggressions and colorblind ideology.