Professor M. Brinton Lykes
In the 25 years since she first traveled to Argentina and Guatemala as a scholar-activist, Professor M. Brinton Lykes has devoted her career to helping people transform trauma and displacement into self-empowerment. She has witnessed not only the aftermath of human atrocities, but what she calls “people’s continuing desire to speak truth to violence.” This summer, the American Psychological Association will recognize Lykes’ sustained and enduring service to underserved populations and honor her many contributions to international psychology with its 2013 International Humanitarian Award.
Lykes is associate director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, where she coordinates the Human Rights of Migrants: Transnational and Mixed-Status Families project. She leads an interdisciplinary team that does outreach and advocacy work with organizations that serve primarily Central American immigrants in the Boston area and Providence. Lykes leads “Know Your Rights” workshops in the communities she works in, and initiated research into the psychosocial effects of increasingly harsh U.S. immigration policies. She recently explored how parents communicate the threat of detention and deportation to their children in an article in the journal Community, Work & Family. And she participated in a major academic symposium, Migration: Past, Present, and Future, on March 21–22, where she moderated a panel about race and class in U.S. immigration.
“I was raised with a strong sense of social responsibility and grew up during the major social movements of the 20th century,” says Lykes, who chairs the Lynch School’s Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology. “I’m deeply moved by the possibility that people who are struggling can achieve transformation.”
Lykes’ expertise in human rights abuse and state-sponsored terrorism has brought her to a range of international settings, including South Africa, El Salvador, Chile, and Northern Ireland. In 2007, she returned to her native New Orleans to partner with African-American and Latina community-based health promoters to develop new models of cross-community leadership for a city rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.
The focus of much of Lykes’ scholar-activism, however, is in rural Guatemala, where she is part of an ongoing gender and reparations project. There, she collaborates with Mayan women who have survived sexual violence and armed conflict with the goal, she says, of “better understanding their experience of seeking truth.” Lykes is also involved with a Guatemalan Center for Human Rights and International Justice program that addresses the legal and transitional needs of those who have returned to the country, either voluntarily or through deportation.
Lykes says she incorporates the creative arts and participatory action and what she calls liberatory research to engage and empower local communities. “[She] starts by listening,” says David Hollenbach, S.J., the University Chair in Human Rights and International Justice and director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice. The result, he says, is that she enables community members to become agents of change and urges the center to pursue scholarship that responds to real-world problems.
Last fall, Lykes was named the recipient of the Ignacio Martín-Baró Lifetime Peace Practitioner Award from the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence of the American Psychological Association. She will receive that honor and the International Humanitarian Award at the APA’s annual convention in Honolulu.