Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series—On November 3rd, CRF will welcome Dr. Lisa Bowleg, Professor of Applied Psychology at The George Washington University, to campus. Dr. Bowleg's talk will provide an overview of intersectionality, its Black feminist activist and theoretical roots, and its recent odysseys into social science and behavioral research with understudied populations such as Black heterosexual and gay and bisexual men. Dr. Bowleg debates that focusing on a single identity (e.g., gender) without its intersection with other key social identities (e.g., race, sexual identity/orientation, class) provides a very limited understanding of people’s experiences and outcomes.

Dr. Bowleg is a leading scholar of intersectionality, and intersectionality research.  For almost 20 years, her qualitative and mixed methods research has examined the effects of masculinity and social-structural contexts on Black men’s sexual HIV risk behaviors; and Black lesbian, gay, and bisexual people’s experiences with stress and resilience. High-impact journals such as the American Journal of Public Health, Health Psychology, and AIDS and Behavior have published her work.  In 2014, the American Psychological Association’s Committee on Psychology and AIDS awarded her its AIDS Distinguished Leadership Award.

This lecture is sponsored by the Center for Research on Families’ Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series. The Center for Research on Families (CRF) is an endowed interdisciplinary research center in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture  Series brings internationally recognized speakers with expertise in family research to campus each year. The lecture series began in 1999 through an endowment established in memory of Tay Gavin Erickson.