PsySR Vote 2021
PsySR Membership, thank you for taking the time to login and vote.
This year we are asking members to weigh in on the Administrative Team slate.
The new slate consists of:
President-Elect – Rakhshanda Saleem
Secretary – Gorden Crean
Treasurer – Buz Markuson
In a “yes” or “no” vote you will be asked if you support this slate. There were no competing nominations; as such, this is a yes or no vote of confidence for the proposed .
Rakhshanda Saleem
Dr. Saleem is a licensed psychologist and a neuropsychologist with expertise in evaluating neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders including learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders and associated behavioral difficulties. Her teaching and scholarship is guided by her belief in education’s critical role in transforming and promoting individual and societal change towards creating a just and equitable world. She is a Harvard Medical School clinical instructor where her clinical interests include culture-sensitive assessment and care for patients with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. She is involved with numerous social justice grassroots efforts and was one of the founding members of the South Asian Committee for Human Rights (SACH). Rakhshanda has also been involved in post-9/11 civil and immigrant rights issues and Action for a Progressive Pakistan (APP) and has focused on anti-discrimination work and the rights of the least powerful and dispossessed people.
Rakhshanda’s research interests include an intersectional and cross-struggles analysis of systemic inequalities/injustices and structural violence and their impact on disenfranchised and marginalized populations. Her current project (at UMass Boston) involves understanding and exploring these issues through interviewing members from three communities, “undocumented” Latinos (as) immigrants, Muslims (immigrants and non-immigrants), and LGBTQ+ persons who have experienced incarceration. Past project involved interviewing South Asian immigrant women to identify pre and post migration factors impacting their wellbeing. Another areas of interest and a developing project is exploring the trajectory of individuals involved in cross-struggles solidarity and community organizing and social movements as a response to systemic and structural violence
Gorden Crean
I am a US-born white settler, genderqueer cis man from an upper-middle class background. I am informed by growing up in a body and a context of privilege and oppression, experiencing from a young age a spiritual confusion and a knowing-feeling that something is deeply wrong, yet often being taught to suppress it or individualize its origins. Holding on to that knowledge and struggling against the cultural currents of denial, greed, entitlement and escapism, and being told in so many ways that I am the crazy one, has often led me to isolation, depression and anxiety. I understand these as rooted in my body’s refusal to adapt to a sick society, its attunement to violence and suffering and liberation.
As a budding community psychology scholar-activist, I am interested in supporting processes of psychosocial transformation: the interrelated processes of psychological transformation (e.g. development of communal sense of self, healing of internalized oppression and the psychological impacts of oppression) and social transformation (e.g. building autonomous and consensus-based forms of governance, transformative systems of accountability, and other liberatory institutions/interrelationships). I aim to do research in service and partnership with grassroots organizers, cultural workers and healers who work to sustain communities of resistance, care and love: the sites where psychosocial transformation occurs.
And a brief statement on issues that are important to me:During the past 4 years, I have been a part of a loose community of activists in the city of Worcester, MA, where I have been involved with community organizing and community-building related to racial justice, climate justice, transformative justice, and anarchism. During that time I have enacted and witnessed barriers to effective organizing, including burnout and lack of resilience, exclusionary dynamics, and unhealthy relationship to conflict. These experiences have led me to more deeply appreciate the need for practices of collective healing inside of liberation, as articulated by the framework of healing justice. I am currently interning for Elevated Thought, a youth organizing, arts and social justice nonprofit in Lawrence, MA, to support them in integrating healing justice practices into their work, and in beginning to offer mental health resources and programming for young people in Lawrence.
Buz Markuson
Buz is an enrolled agent and tax account. He has been a practicing accountant for the last 60 years. Buz has acted in the capacity of CFO for a major lithography company for over 40 years, and currently owns his own small accounting business. Buz has provided financial advice and service to PsySR for over 10 years.