Stony Brook University’s Center for Changing Systems of Power (CCSP) recently held a roundtable event where four student grantees discussed the results and impact of their summer research projects. The students, representing different academic disciplines, shared how their work addressed social justice issues both locally and globally.
“This is the first year we’ve done this and we hope to do it every year,” said Manisha Desai, executive director of CCSP and the Empowerment Trust Endowed Professor of Global Citizenship at Stony Brook University. “This program is to fund our students, grad and undergrad, who are doing work that’s related to social justice locally or globally.”
Kamilah Pasha, a social work major and CCSP Summer Social Justice grantee, focused her project on mental health disparities among youth in Central Islip, New York. She highlighted that 41.8 percent of residents in Central Islip live below the poverty line, with one in five children experiencing mental, behavioral, or developmental disorders. Pasha explained that economic hardship often leads families to deprioritize mental health care, perpetuating cycles of trauma.
“This number is attention grabbing,” said Pasha. “It infuriates me because the issue isn’t changing, and New York State’s mission on poverty and the economy focuses on child tax credits and inflation refunds, instead of adjusting the systemic injustices. Long Island is one of the most segregated places in America so this becomes a multifaceted issue no longer about economics alone but race as well.”
Pasha’s initiative provided toolkits with sensory items such as fidget tools and noise-canceling headphones for special education classrooms. These resources aim to support early intervention by helping children develop self-awareness about emotional well-being.
Merica Griffin presented her project titled “Indigenous Land and Cultural Sovereignty,” which combines academic research with creative photography focused on Indigenous land rights in Latin America and local Indigenous history at Stony Brook University’s Setalcott Nation land. Griffin collected data on fire policy across South America, Central America, and the Caribbean while also documenting Long Island state parks through photography.
“Oftentimes, through colonialism, these countries do not have sovereignty,” said Griffin. “Specifically, what we are looking at is fire policy. Through lack of land sovereignty, these communities aren’t able to steward their land.”
Griffin noted that prescribed burns are important for conservation but often not accessible due to limited sovereignty. She hopes her art can connect global Indigenous issues with local awareness at Stony Brook.
In another presentation titled “Settler Colonialism, Ecocide, and the Climate Crisis in Occupied Palestine,” Ariek Norford examined how environmental degradation linked to occupation affects Palestinian communities’ health outcomes.
“My part of this research was as a Palestinian who is familiar with Palestine’s history, and also as an ecologist who works in farming communities,” said Norford. “It’s this connection between people and the land where neither can live without the other, and it’s very contrary to Western thinking of people and nature as separate.”
Norford described settler colonialism as involving displacement of native populations along with cultural loss: “One tool of this is ecocide, which is unlawful acts committed with knowledge that there’s a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long term damage to the environment,” Norford said.
The project explored how loss of land contributes to malnutrition among Palestinians and disrupts traditional community structures.
A fourth study was conducted anonymously by a PhD candidate in clinical psychology under the title “Using EEG to Explore How Cultural Context and Racism Affect the Brain and Mental Health.” This research used EEG technology to investigate how experiences of race-related social rejection might influence depression risk by analyzing neural responses during same-race versus other-race interactions.
“In a meta-analysis, stress and depression were among the top three most frequently reported mental health problems associated with racism,” said the researcher.
The study found stronger links between racism-related stressors and negative mental health outcomes for Asian American as well as Latino participants compared to African Americans; however, more research is needed into specific mechanisms involved.
“Social rejection has been proposed as one of the possible pathways through which this translates,” said the researcher. “Race-based rejection sensitivity was associated with greater negative emotions in African American students, and racial discrimination is also associated with personal insecurity and social interactions which could lead to increased distress. So there is a small and growing body of research that is starting to look at neurobiological measures of race-related social processing.”
Desai emphasized CCSP’s broader goals: “CCSP’s mission is to promote epistemic, aesthetic, and social justice locally and globally,” she said. “By providing grants to undergrad and grad students working on these issues we hope to be a bridge to community engaged research, activism, and advocacy that contributes to social justice at home and abroad.”
