Kristen Hackett / Environmental Psychology

Graduate Student Researcher
February 2020 – June 2024hackettka@gmail.com ka_hackett on Twitter

Kristen Hackett is an activist, scholar, and educator working towards decolonized, anti-racist, and just urban futures in New York City. She is an executive committee member of the Justice For All Coalition (JFAC), a volunteer-based community group comprised of neighbors advocating and organizing around just futures for all in western Queens. She is also a student and fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY. As a PhD Candidate in the environmental psychology program at The Graduate Center, her dissertation is a feminist activist ethnography that centers the perspectives and experiences of fellow JFAC members so as to reexamine the past, re-situate the present, and reimagine the future of western Queens. As a GC Digital Fellow with the GC Digital Initiatives and a co-coordinator with OpenCUNY, Kristen has explored her interest in using digital tools and methods for public and activist scholarship. She is continuing to pursue this interest through the digital component of her dissertation work called Recalibrating Queens.

Previously, Kristen has taught courses on urban studies, urban research methods, social movements and environmental psychology at John Jay College, Queens College and The New School. Additionally, she has held local and national leadership positions including Chair and Chair-elect of the Graduate Student Committee of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), program representative and at-large representative for the Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council (DSC) at The Graduate Center and executive committee member of the doctoral program in which she is pursuing her degree. She has also published in relation to previous research and ongoing activist work. This includes research on community land trusts in Housing Studies, on participatory budgeting in New Political Science, on community understandings of displacement in Shelterforce and multiple op-eds on housing and development in New York and western Queens in City Limits.