Brinton Lykes

Lykes originally hailed from New Orleans. She obtained her first BA degree from Hollins University before proceeding to Harvard University where she obtained an M.Div. in Applied Theology. She obtained a Ph.D. in Community Psychology from Boston College.^[2]

Lykes has worked at Boston College since 1992 where she was promoted from associate professor to full professor in the Lynch School of Education. She has held various posts including department chair and Associate Dean. Lykes also held academic and administrative roles in the Department of Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa from 1999-2001.^[3]

Lykes work has focused on understanding the impact of state-sponsored violence and terror. She has worked in multiple national and transnational contexts of armed conflict, state-sponsored violence and humanitarian disasters, including multiple decades in Central America, in particular with the Maya peoples^[4] of Guatemala. She has used participatory action research and oral history as her primary research methods.^[5] She is the co-founder of the Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights.^[6]

She is the co-editor of the International Journal of Transitional Justice.^[7]She also co-edited The New Deportations Delirium: Interdisciplinary Responses (New York University Press, 2015), with Daniel Kanstroom^[8]

In 2016, Lykes was promoted from Associate Director to Co-Director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College where she served until 2025^[9]

Lykes has received a variety of awards for her work including the APA International Humanitarian Award^[10] of the American Psychological Association, the Seymour B. Sarason Award for Community Research and Action^[11] the Florence L. Denmark and Mary E. Reuder Award for Outstanding International Contributions to the Psychology of Women and Gender and the Ignacio Martín-Baró Lifetime Peace Practitioner Award of the APA Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence.^[12]

Lykes' work is situated within community psychology and examines the effects of political violence, coerced displacement, and systemic inequalities.^{[13] [14]} Her work examines participatory and action-oriented methods that involve communities in the research process, especially those who have been affected by human rights abuses and are recovering from conflict.^[15][16]

Her work focuses on women and Indigenous communities in Latin America, especially Guatemala.^[16] She investigates how memory, narrative, and testimony become means for a people to understand trauma and survival through difficult lived experience of violence.^[15]

Liberation psychology is another critical domain of her work, where she conducts research on everyday lived experience in the social context of ethnic conflict, social exclusion and structural injustice, as well as how communities respond to these conditions. Additionally, she studied the realities experienced by migrant families with a specific look on the psycho-social consequences of detention and deportation.^[17]

• Lykes, M. Brinton. 1996. A conversation between William Ryan and M. Brinton Lykes. Section VI in ‘Myths about the powerless: contesting social inequalities’. Edited by M. Brinton Lykes, Ali Banuazizi, Ramsay Liem and Michael Morris. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press.
• Lykes, M. Brinton. 1996. Introduction in ‘Myths about the powerless Contesting social inequalities’. Edited by M. Brinton Lykes, Ali Banuazizi, Ramsay Liem and Michael Morris. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press.
• Lykes, M. B. & Sibley, E. (2014). Liberation psychology and pragmatic solidarity: North-South collaborations through the Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 20(3), 209–226.
• Lykes, M.B. (2014). Maya Women of Chajul. In Coghlan, D. & Brydon-Miller, M. (Eds). The SAGE encyclopedia of action research. (Vols. 1–2) (pp. 529–532) . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Lykes, M.B. (2014). Ignacio Martín-Baró. In Coghlan, D. & Brydon-Miller, M. (Eds). The SAGE encyclopedia of action research. (Vols. 1–2) (pp. 523–526). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE

• Comas-Díaz, L.; Lykes, M. B.; Alarcón, R. D. (1998). “Ethnic conflict and the psychology of liberation in Guatemala, Peru, and Puerto Rico.” American Psychologist, 53(7), 778–792.
• Lykes, M. B. (2013). “Participatory and action research as a transformative praxis: Responding to humanitarian crises from the margins.” American Psychologist, 68(8), 774–785.
• Lykes, M. B. (1997). “Activist participatory research among the Maya of Guatemala: Constructing meanings from situated knowledge.” Journal of Social Issues, 53(4), 725–746.
• Lykes, M. B.; Blanche, M. T.; Hamber, B. (2003). “Narrating survival and change in Guatemala and South Africa: The politics of representation and a liberatory community psychology.” American Journal of Community Psychology, 31(1–2), 79–90.
• Lykes, M. B.; Crosby, A. (2011). “Mayan women survivors speak: The gendered relations of truth telling in postwar Guatemala.” International Journal of Transitional Justice, 5(3), 456–476.
• Brabeck, K. M.; Lykes, M. B.; Hunter, C. (2014). “The psychosocial impact of detention and deportation on U.S. migrant children and families.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 84(5), 496–505.
• Kanstroom, D.; Lykes, M. B. (eds.) (2015). The New Deportations Delirium: Interdisciplinary Responses. New York: New York University Press.

• Crosby, A.; Lykes, M. B. (2019). Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.