The Emancipatory Sciences Lab

@eslab.bsky.social

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We're a network of scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists. Visit us: https://emancipatorysciences.ucsf.edu Our lab promotes knowledge building and the realization of dignity, access, equity, healing, and social justice through collective power.

Divya Babbar

Licensed Clinical Psychologist and founder of Interwoven Psychotherapy & Liberatory Praxis

Divya also holds an adjunct clinical faculty position at the George Washington University Professional Psychology Program, where she supervises doctoral students learning to conduct individual and couples therapy. Divya maintains a strong clinical interest in complex trauma, interpersonal distress, dis(ability), and gender and sexual identity development. In particular, Divya’s work with clients actively explores how their distress might be influenced by their lived experiences within interlocking systems of oppression. Divya earned their doctorate degree at George Washington University and completed their doctoral internship at Stony Brook University Counseling Center.

Recent publication: Babbar, D. (2025). The Identified Patient and their Illegible Healer: Power, Relationality, and the Erasure of Disability in Therapeutic Training Discourse. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 26(2), 138–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2025.2503592

Capitalizing on Disability: Labor Process and Governance in Disability Employment Programs

In my dissertation I focus empirically on job training programs for workers with disabilities, combining historical research on the development of this industry with nineteen months of ethnographic fieldwork across two contemporary employment programs. My analysis highlights the contradictory status of disability under neoliberalism, showing that disability is presently defined by the simultaneous purported inability to work and imperative to work, and reveals how the state and private capital mobilize these contradictions to produce disabled workers as a workforce suited to the hiring needs of contemporary corporations. Papers from this project have been published in the American Sociological Review, Work and Occupations, Social Science & Medicine, and Critical Sociology.

Emily Ruppel

Social model of Disability

This term was developed by people with disabilities during the 1960s to 1970s in the UK. Although he wasn’t responsible for creating the concept, Dr. Mike Oliver is the one who officially named the model. This term refers to the way that problems that disabled people face aren’t because of their disability but rather the way that society isn’t organized in a way to support disabled people. This concept was instrumental in changing the narrative of disabilities from being a medical issue to a human rights issue. It has been criticized for not talking into account the experiences of impairment, or the individual issues that people face. In response, Dr. Oliver maintains that this models is simply a tool that people can use in order to make sense their disability, and if it’s not helpful, then find another model.

Social Model. (n.d.). Disability Equality Education. https://www.disabilityequalityeducation.org/social-model

This graphic features a photo of Benjamin Klebanoff, as well as a dark blue background with bright blue titles and white text. It shows the title of the blog "Chronic Pain: A Call to Listen" as well as a quote that reads: "The cry of chronic pain is crucial information about the world we are living in. It constitutes collective embodied knowledge on a massive scale about the most impactful issues of our times: power, inequality, and systemic violence. We shouldn't be asking how to get rid of chronic pain, we should be asking how to better listen to it."

Structured Intersectional Oppression

Structured Interesectional Opression is a fremework that attemps to understand and quantify the ways that overlapping structural and systematic opression shape health disparities, espeically at a state level.

Homan, P., Brown, T. H., & King, B. (2021). Structural Intersectionality as a New Direction for Health Disparities Research. Journal of health and social behavior, 62(3), 350–370. Finlay, J., Esposito, M., Langa, K. M., Judd, S., & Clarke, P. (2022). Cognability: An Ecological Theory of neighborhoods and cognitive aging. Social science & medicine (1982), 309, 115220. Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition. (n.d.). Walking in Two Worlds: Understanding the Two-Spirit & LGBTQ Community.

Understanding Ageism: Perspectives from Those Who Experience and Perpetuate It

What is the guiding question of your dissertation research?
My research focuses on ageism, specifically on how ageist attitudes, beliefs, and comments directed toward older adults shape their everyday experiences. As global populations continue to age, it is essential to understand and address the social implications of this demographic shift. My work examines how evolving cultural norms and social policies can foster a more inclusive, equitable, and age-diverse society.

Aaron Li (he/him)

Cognability

According to Dr. Jessica Finlay's work, cognability refers to an area's ability to support people's cognitive health as they age. Her work examines features related to physical activity, social interaction and cognitive stimulation in later life which could help protect against cognitive decline. Along with this she created an interactive map which rates the cognability of an area based on positive features such as how many park or rec centers there are, how many places there are to connect with others like religious organization, schools or museums, while also taking into account negative features like highways or sites of pollution.

Finlay, J., Esposito, M., Langa, K. M., Judd, S., & Clarke, P. (2022). Cognability: An Ecological Theory of neighborhoods and cognitive aging. Social science & medicine (1982), 309, 115220. Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition. (n.d.). Walking in Two Worlds: Understanding the Two-Spirit & LGBTQ Community.

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This photo features a bright blue banner at the bottom with matching bright blue title text and frame around a picture of the author of the blog post, Three Merians. It also features a quote in white text about community and collective action. This image has a dark blue background.

Angie Perone (she/her)

Assistant Professor at the Director, Center for the Advanced Study of Aging Services
School of Social Welfare at University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Perone is an interdisciplinary community-engaged scholar and licensed attorney. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley and the Director of
the Center for the Advanced Study of Aging Services (CASAS). Her work engages diverse communities and partners that builds from prior experience as a civil rights attorney, community organizer, social worker, and nonprofit leader. As a civil rights attorney, she focused on discrimination, healthcare, and transformative justice and oversaw a national LGBTQ+ Elder Law Project. She subsequently served as a founding executive director of SAGE Metro Detroit (now MiGen), which focused on services and advocacy for/with LGBTQ+ same-gender-loving older adults in the Detroit Metro area. She then served as an RWJF Health Policy Fellow in U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin's office and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Her research foregrounds equitable aging across three areas: long-term care and
caregiving, workplace rights, and LGBTQIA+ issues.

Stephanie Hernandez (she/her)

Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Dornslife School of Public Health at Drexel University

Dr. Hernandez is a demographer whose research focuses on how systems of inequality shape health outcomes for LGBTQ+ populations. Her interdisciplinary work spans three broad areas: documenting and understanding LGBTQ+ health inequities, operationalizing intersectionality in health disparities research, and using biosocial approaches to understand disparities across the life course. Her current NIH LRP project examines intergenerational transfers of time and money among LGBTQ+ adults and their association with poor health outcomes. She is also
preparing an NIH R01 proposal to examine how cumulative disadvantage contributes to cardiovascular disease risk. As a first-generation queer Latina scholar, she is deeply committed to advancing health equity through research that centers the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people of color. Dr. Hernandez also hopes to train and mentor the next generation of LGBTQ+ scholars to address persistent LGBTQ+ health inequities.

Normative Family Formation Under U.S. Immigration Law

What is queer migration? My research examines how U.S. immigration law shapes the family formation of queer immigrants in the era of marriage equality. Making claims for legal inclusion necessitates embodying the values of the nation-state. Queer immigrants must make themselves legible to immigration authorities as members of legitimate, non-fraudulent, and (hetero)normative families to receive citizenship rights.

terms: homonationalism, sexual citizenship, claims-making, non-adversarial lawyering

Juhwan Seo (he/him)

Aaron Guest

Assistant Professor, Center for Innovation in Healthy and Resilient Aging at the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation of Aging at Arizona State University

Dr. Guest is an interdisciplinary trained social-environmental gerontologist whoes overarching aim of his research program, and indeed life’s work, is
to create an equitable society for aging for all people. To accomplish
this goal, he takes a disease/condition-agnostic approach to address
the challenges faced by aging, underrepresented, and underserved
populations. His research has centered on the aging experiences of
older adults in rural areas and those who identify as lesbian and gay.
Through his work, he aims to create the optimal person-environment
fit for the most advantageous health benefits for individuals as they age.

Austin Oswald, (They/Them)

Assistant Professor, School of Health and Human Performance, Dalhousie University

Dr. Austin Oswald is a community-engaged scholar deeply committed to the liberation of LGBTQ+ people across the life course, particularly those with intersecting marginalized identities. They are the recipient of a 2024 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant for a project that explores “queering” the age-friendliness of Nova Scotia. In addition, they received a 2025 Research Nova Scotia New Health Investigator Grant for a provincial survey study assessing the health of LGBTQ+ Nova Scotians and their access to culturally responsive healthcare.

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Jason (Jace) Flatt, (He/Him/They/Them)

Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, School of Public Health, Department of Social and Behavioral Health

Jace’s $5+ million-funded research portfolio works to better understand health concerns and needs of diverse sexual and gender minorities or LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and additional identities) people living with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and their caregivers and care providers. Some of his recent research has focused on the needs of the LGBTQIA+ community around caregiving needs, risk and concerns for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and navigating healthcare
and long-term care services. You can learn more about Jace’s research at www.RainbowsofAging.org.

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Queering the Toolkit: Sexual Health in the Era of PrEP, DoxyPEP, and U=U.

In this dissertation, I examine how the biomedicalization of sexual health, particularly through interventions like PrEP and ARTs (to prevent HIV transmission) and DoxyPEP (to prevent bacterial STIs), is reshaping both provider-patient relationships and broader cultural understandings of risk, pleasure, and care within GBTQ+ communities. To do so, I draw on interviews with primary care and sexual care-focused medical providers and GBTQ+ community members in the San Francisco Metro Area. Biomedicalization is a multi-layered social process that captures the rapid transformation of medical knowledge, technologies, and practices, with particular attention to the dynamics of power and structural inequality. It is especially useful for understanding the intersection of culture, power, and health practices in contemporary contexts. In my interviews, I find that providers and patients navigate complex ideas of risk, classification, and cultural meanings of sex and sexual health, centering the existence and use of biomedical tools in their decision-making and meaning-making processes. I also find that biomedicalization within this arena is made more dynamic by how it interacts with queer ways of knowing and queer embodigments of sexual agency.

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Ryan DeCarsky
(He/Him)

queer

Historically, queer was used as a derogatory term to label someone who is homosexual as "outisde, not from within." In the late 20th and early 21st century, this term was reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ community and used as a term of resistance in movemnets like Queer Nation (fighting for LGBTQ+ rights and visibility). Now, queer is an umbrela term that means non-heteronormative identities and sexualities.

Archives, T. N. (2021, February 9). The National Archives - “Queer” history: A history of Queer [Text]. The
National Archives Blog. https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/queer-history-a-history-of-queer/

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Ethan Cicero
Assistant Professor, Emory University, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Future of Nursing Scholar, Butler-Williams Scholar

Dr. Cicero’s program of research focuses on the interrelationship between social inequities and the effects of adverse and affirming social conditions on the health and
well-being of transgender and nonbinary (TNB) adults. With a particular emphasis
on promoting healthy aging and reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and
related dementias, Dr. Cicero’s work is at the forefront of addressing critical gaps
in our understanding of aging and cognitive health among TNB populations.

Throughout his research career, Dr. Cicero has pioneered methodological
innovations in studying TNB adults, employing advanced epidemiologic,
community-engaged, and mixed-methods approaches

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Your Body is Not Your Own: (Dis)embodied Sexual and Mental Health in Evangelical Purity Culture

My ongoing research is rooted in the relationship between mental health and cisgendered norms and social structures. In my dissertation, I explore negative mental health experiences, particularly pertaining to disordered eating and sexual dysfunction, of participants assigned female at birth (AFAB) within the Protestant, evangelical movement called purity culture. Drawing on 65 in-depth interviews, I utilize constructivist grounded theory to center the concept of bodily autonomy, with particular attention to how bodily autonomy is confiscated by purity culture and its efforts to enforce conservative, cisheteronormative control over ‘dangerous’ AFAB bodies. I focus on the repression and objectification of gendered, cisgendered, and sexualized bodies, finding that participant experiences of gender, sexuality, and ‘sin’ are deeply intertwined.

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Epistemology of the Closet

Using the metaphor of the "closet" to describes the ways that literature and heteronormative Western culture limit our understanding of sexual identity, Sedgwick examines the ways in which the closet reinforces social power dynamics and structures promoting shame, but also explores idea of secrecy being used both to exclude and privilege.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. (1990). Epistomology of the Closet.

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