Kristen Hackett is an activist, scholar, and educator working towards decolonized, anti-racist, and just urban futures in New York City. She is an executive committee member of the Justice For All Coalition (JFAC), a group of neighbors living in private and public housing working together to educate ourselves and our neighbors and secure just futures for all. Through this role she is also deeply involved in the city-wide and national fight to preserve public housing. She is also a student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. As a PhD Candidate in the environmental psychology program at The Graduate Center, her dissertation explores the past, present and possible futures of public housing by situating the present moment in New York City in the longer histories of financialization, racial capitalism and settler colonialism.

In previous roles as a GC Digital Fellow with the GC Digital Initiatives, a student coordinator with OpenCUNY, and a Digital Pedagogy Fellow  with The OpenLab at CityTech (CUNY), Kristen explored her interest in using digital tools and methods towards teaching, learning, collaborating, community-building, and public and activist scholarship – a trajectory she continues to explore in her dissertation and activist work.

She also taught undergraduate and graduate courses on psychology, environmental psychology, urban studies, urban research methods, and social movements at John Jay College (CUNY), Queens College (CUNY) and The New School.

Additionally, she has held local and national leadership positions including Chair and Chair-elect of the Graduate Student Committee of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), program representative and at-large representative for the Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council (DSC) at The Graduate Center and executive committee member of the doctoral program in which she is pursuing her degree.

She has also published in relation to previous research and ongoing activist work. This includes research on community land trusts in Housing Studies, on participatory budgeting in New Political Science and as a book chapter in Immigrant Crossroads: Globalization, Incorporation, and Placemaking in Queens, New York, on community understandings of displacement in Shelterforce and multiple op-eds on housing and development in New York and western Queens in City Limits and East New York News. She has also shared her perspectives and research with reporters through news articles and interviews.

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