M. Brinton Lykes - Lynch School Prof. of Community-Cultural Psychology, Associate Director of the Center for Human Rights & International Justice, and Chair of the Department of Counseling and Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology - recently spoke with WBUR about a Guatemalan woman detained in the federal raid on a New Bedford factory.
Click here to hear the full story online at 
www.wbur.org.
Lykes works with survivors of war and gross violations of human rights, using creative arts and participatory action research methodologies to analyze the causes and document the effects of violence and develop programs that aspire to rethread social relations and transform social inequalities underlying structural injustices.
Her activist scholarship has been published in referred journals, edited volumes, research handbooks, and organizational newsletters; she is co-editor of three books and co-author, with the Association of Maya Ixil Women - New Dawn, of Voces e imágenes: Mujeres Mayas Ixiles de Chajul/Voices and images: Maya Ixil women of Chajul. This latter work grew out of a community-based partnership between Lykes and a local Maya NGO over an eight-year period. Prior to that work, Lykes served as a consultant to ASECSA, a community-based health education program with whom she and psychologists in Chile, Argentina, and El Salvador, developed a four-country action research project exploring the impact of the creative arts in community-based psychosocial intervention programs with children and youth affected by war and state-sponsored violence, including the disappearances of their parents and/or the children themselves.
Her current participatory and action research focuses on migration and post-deportation human rights violations and their effects for women and children, with a particular focus on transnational identities (in Boston, New Bedford, Providence and Guatemala) and health disparities (in post-Katrina New Orleans). The transnational Post-Deportation Human Rights Project is a collaborative effort with two local immigrant rights NGOs, Centro Presente and Organización Maya K´iché here in the United States and the Guatemala-based project coordinated with Ricardo Falla, S.J., and Miguel Ugalde of the Landivar University in Guatemala City.
In the summer of 2008, the team she assembled spent three weeks conducting field research in the Quiché region of Guatemala, visiting the communities of many project participants from Boston, Providence, and New Bedford.
In addition to her work at and through Boston College, Lykes is co-founder and participant in the Boston Women's Fund and the Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights as well as a member of the Board of Directors of other human rights organizations.
For more information:
Center for Human Rights and International Justice
Post-Deportation Human Rights Project