Brett Coleman

Dr. Coleman received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Community Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago and his B.S. in Psychology from Northeastern Illinois University. He joined the faculty at Clark University in 2021.

Dr. Coleman’s transdisciplinary work interrogates the intersections of race, power, and ideology. There are two main tracks his program of research. The first deals with whiteness and antiracist education. Grounded in an epistemologies of ignorance framework, this work applies primarily qualitative (and some experimental) methods to understanding barriers to and potential avenues for educating White people to understand racism as a systemic/structural process. The second track interrogates policy and practice in youth development settings serving young people of color who are subject to multiple forms of marginality. This work takes on the tensions and debates around whether such policies and practices are (or should be) fundamentally conformist and marginalizing in nature, or emancipatory and focused on the development of young people’s critical consciousness. More specifically, it addresses the intersections of funding policy, public ideology, and youth and community power as they relate to these questions. A more recent third track is under development that explores participatory action research (PAR) as pedagogy. This work draws on Dr. Coleman’s experience facilitating PAR projects with urban BIPOC youth and employing PAR in the college classroom. A recent research project explores PAR as an antidote to the influence of neoliberal ideology in the academy.