Trinidad-born psychology scholar lands professor job at US university

Social psychology educator and researcher Justin Preddie didn’t realise that he’d end up falling in love with teaching and academia when he first signed up as a psychology major at Hampton University in Virginia some 11 years ago.
Sharing that he was sure that he didn’t want to work in applied psychology, the Santa Cruz native recalled being “fairly certain that psychology was the path.” However, he wasn’t quite sure where that interest would take him.
Preddie didn’t begin to consider a path in academia until his second undergraduate year, when one of his lecturers, social psychologist Dr Candice Wallace, upon observing the quality of his assignments, told him that he had ‘a mind suited to research.’
Wallace’s research of the African American experience and its varied psychological effects on members of the community inspired Preddie’s own burgeoning interests in research and the understanding of his identity as a queer Black man living in North America.
“Her class was really the first that confirmed that I had chosen the right major,” Preddie said.
Guided by Wallace, Preddie took up research opportunities, which led to a broadening of his knowledge within the field, and in turn, opened new possibilities for interest and research. “It sort of concretised from there.”
A decade later, Preddie is a freshly minted doctorate holder, and postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania, where he will take up a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in Psychology and Africana Studies beginning in the 2022 fall semester.
Preddie’s journey as an academic is woven into his own self-discovery over his time spent in the US–his queerness, as well as the experience of being Black and from the Caribbean, and integrating into North American culture.
Through coming to understand himself at all intersections of his identity, how the facets of this identity play off against each other within the wider culture, and the way in which these experiences impact the psychology of the persons within those groups, Preddie was able to develop pertinent and relatable research that answered both personal and academic questions.
“We research things that are personally relevant to us,” Preddie said, explaining that his training allowed him to develop much of what was already his lived experience into research “in a more formalised way.”
“My work is specifically focused on Black gay men,” he stated. Through his understanding of Blackness as diasporic and transcending culture, Preddie, as a researcher with Caribbean roots, is able to serve within the Africana Studies department, dedicated to scholarship that centres the experiences of persons of African descent.
Naturally, Preddie contributes to this research using his expertise as a social psychologist, using frameworks to better understand the psychological impact of factors such as prejudice and stereotypes, and how these lead to the development of both external perception and self-concept, taking into account the impact of slavery, civil rights and LGBTQ+ rights, among other factors.
Preddie clearly stated some of the key questions that his research asks: “What does it mean to be Black? What does it mean to be gay? And what does it mean to be Black and gay simultaneously? What does it mean to operate as a Black, gay man in the United States?”
To further explain, Preddie said that when one thinks of a Black man, the idea conjured by this would be different from that of a gay man, which would, in turn, be different from that of a man who is both Black and gay.
Though summed up in a few sentences, the work is comprehensive and ongoing, requiring the tools to intricately and closely understand aspects of the Black experience in ways that can be used, not only to build scholarship but to “improve the psychological well-being of Black folks in the US and in the diaspora.”
Preddie’s work is evidence of the importance of intersectionality, a framework that takes into account overlapping identities and experiences to understand the layers of prejudice faced by members of various communities.
Intersectionality can be applied to all communities, using factors such as ethnicity, socio-economic background, language, gender identity and sexual orientation to better understand and remedy the prejudices faced by these groups. In other words, one can hardly deal with Black issues accurately without addressing the varied experiences of Black people of different complexions, with different gender identities, sexual orientations and from different income brackets.
Preddie said that one of his objectives as an educator is to challenge his students using “perspectives that they have not encountered before that are either different or similar to their own.” This is where the breadth of his work’s “diasporic implications” comes in, offering to his mostly US-raised students the variations of the Black experience.
“They have a hard time imagining what life can look like outside of a particular context that defines the United States,” he explained. This, he said, speaks to many North Americans’ tendency to be “highly insular” when considering the lived experiences of others, often placing the US at the centre of their worldview.
And yet, all differences considered, Preddie shows his students that culture can still serve to unify the disparate members of the diaspora, an equally important aspect of how he delivers his content.
“I help them understand that the reasons why culture merges differently has a lot to do with history [and that] experiences can be parallel to theirs but distinct because of different cultural norms,” he added.
Preddie expressed his excitement to take on the new post in the coming academic year, one that would give him a higher rank at the university and would also allow him to expand his teaching and research undertakings. He aspires to continue advancing the communities he is committed to serving, hoping that his research would be harnessed in seeking their overall improvement. (Source: The Loop, Dec 31, 2021)