biography
Phillip L. Hammack is Professor of Psychology at UC Santa Cruz and Director of the Sexual and Gender Diversity Laboratory. He has served in a number of leadership roles in psychology, including as president of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP), co-editor of Psychology & Sexuality, founding editor of the Oxford University Press Series on Sexuality, Identity & Society, and associate editor of Qualitative Psychology.
training
Dr. Hammack received his Ph.D. in 2006 in Cultural Psychology from the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago, where he was mentored by Dr. Bertram Cohler (a leading figure in narrative psychology) and Richard Shweder (a key intellectual architect of cultural psychology). Prior to his doctoral training, he completed a research training fellowship in Developmental Psychopathology at the National Institute of Mental Health under the supervision of Dr. Carolyn Zahn-Waxler and an M.A. in Clinical Psychology at Loyola University Chicago under the supervision of Dr. Isiaah Crawford and Dr. Maryse Richards. He completed his undergraduate studies in psychology at Georgetown University at a unique time in that department's history, when it had a major emphasis on theoretical and philosophical psychology, as well as public policy and human development. He also developed an interest in the impact of media on human development working in the Children's Digital Media Center as it was being established at Georgetown under the supervision of Dr. Sandra Calvert.
EARLY career
Trained as an interdisciplinary social scientist in both qualitative and quantitative methods, Hammack has conducted research with several communities experiencing social injustice. His early research examined the psychological consequences of poverty and the legacy of racism among young African Americans in Chicago. Conducting this research while pursuing training in clinical psychology, Hammack came to the position that the mental health challenges of subordinate groups are linked to historical and structural factors, such as the historical trauma of slavery and its continued impact through racism and economic injustice. He discovered the paradigms of critical psychology, cultural psychology, and liberation psychology at this time and chose to pursue interdisciplinary doctoral training at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Bertram Cohler and Richard Shweder.
Hammack was exposed to narrative psychology through the training of Bert Cohler, one of the first psychologists to argue for a narrative approach to the study of lives in the early 1980s. Fusing perspectives from narrative and cultural psychology, along with an intellectual concern with identity development during adolescence, Hammack became interested in the lived experience of youth in settings of political violence. His work with African American youth in Chicago had examined the experience of community violence, and with the second Palestinian uprising occurring during his doctoral training, Hammack became motivated to study the lives of adolescents in the conflict. Hammack has no personal connection to Israel or Palestine, which in this particular instance seemed to be an asset for social scientific inquiry.
Hammack began to work in dialogue-based peace education programs for Israeli and Palestinian youth in 2002 and developed two distinct research projects that resulted in numerous publications, including his 2011 book, Narrative and the Politics of Identity: The Cultural Psychology of Israeli and Palestinian Youth (2011, Oxford University Press). Hammack's approach to the study of a classic social psychological intervention ("intergroup contact") was innovative in its use of ethnographic and narrative methods and its use of a longitudinal design in which 45 adolescents were followed over a 4-year period. This research was funded by the Spencer Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation, and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame (where Hammack was a Visiting Fellow from 2010-2011).
Dr. Hammack began to study and write about sexual orientation and the lived experience of sexual and gender identity minorities in the mid-2000s. In early papers that remain widely cited, he argued for an approach to the study of sexual orientation and sexual identity development that emphasizes diversity in narratives across the life course. Central to this perspective was the foregrounding of generation-cohort in the shaping of life experience. He and Bert Cohler further developed their conception of "narrative engagement" in the introduction to their 2009 volume, The Story of Sexual Identity: Narrative Perspectives on the Gay and Lesbian Life Course (Oxford University Press).
Hammack is the recipient of three early career awards: the Louise Kidder Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), the Erik Erikson Award from the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), and the Ed Cairns Award from the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence (Division 48 of the American Psychological Association).
mid-career
In the mid-2010s, Hammack was co-investigator of the Generations Study, a major project of the Williams Institute at UCLA, funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which produced numerous articles examining generational differences and similarities among sexual minority people in the USA.
Dr. Hammack received a William T. Grant Scholars Award to study diversity in community climate toward sexual and gender diversity in California from 2013-2018, with a focus on Gen Z adolescents. This award, coupled with a year-long fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University in 2018-2019, greatly influenced Dr. Hammack's thinking about sexual and gender diversity this century.
In 2018, The Oxford Handbook of Social Psychology and Social Justice was published, edited by Dr. Hammack. The volume contains an introductory chapter in which Hammack outlines a set of principles to guide social justice research in social psychology.
The Sexual and Gender Diversity Laboratory was formally established at UC Santa Cruz in 2018 to reflect the foregrounding of interests related to sexuality and gender among Professor Hammack and his students. Since its establishment, Professor Hammack and his students have produced empirical works documenting forms of sexual and gender diversity this century, including nonbinary gender, kink, consensual nonmonogamies, and ace spectrum identities. A 2019 paper outlines the "queer intimacies" paradigm that underlies most empirical projects in the lab.
CURRENT RESEARCH
Professor Hammack’s current research focuses broadly on sexual and gender diversity, with particular interest in the following areas:
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Newer or more visible sexual and gender identities in the 21st century, including nonbinary gender, pansexuality, ace spectrum identities, polyamory, and sexual subcultures and identities
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Experiences of stigma among those expressing intimate diversity, including those who practice consensual nonmonogamies, kink/BDSM, and those who form queer chosen families
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Queer men's health and identity development in the 21st century, with a focus on queer masculinities, social technologies, sexual health and subcultures, and stigma and mental health
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Experience with psychedelic medicine, particularly among those diverse in gender or sexuality
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Paradigm, theory, and method in the social sciences, with a particular interest in narrative theory and methods, qualitative inquiry, social justice, cultural psychology, and life course theory
Embedded in all of Professor Hammack's current work is an interest in the following:
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Generational and intersectional patterns of experience
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The role of social technologies in experience and development
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Legal, institutional, and social policies regarding sexual and gender diversity
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Accessibility and practical application of knowledge produced