Dr. Azucena Verdín researches Chicana feminist epistemology in the social sciences, Mexican-American families, and Identity development and racial/ethnic socialization. Her research centers the voices and experiences of communities of color, broadly, and Mexican-American communities specifically. Dr. Verdín is intentional about her methods, rejecting comparative research techniques that tend to depict people of color as deficient/deficit.
Curious about collaborating with Azucena?
Azucena is seeking collaborators that share a critical orientation toward epistemology and methodology. She enjoys working with BIPOC students who are interested in learning how to apply woman of color and critical theories to qualitative and quantitative research projects. She welcome collaborations with researchers in human development, family studies, early childhood education, and psychology disciplines who explicitly use woman of color feminist frameworks.
Chicana feminist epistemology in the social sciences
Ancestral knowledge systems
Chicana feminist systems of knowledge among Latina college students
My approach to research is informed by Chicana feminist epistemology (CFE), a framework that challenges the view of research as neutral and value-free while acknowledging how my cultural intuition as a Chicana researcher heightens my theoretical, epistemic, and interpretive sensitivity to research of, by, and for Mexican-origin families.
I am currently supervising students to systematically investigate how CFE has been used in developmental science, family science, psychology, and related disciplines to inform research methodologies.
While much of this research has been qualitative in nature, I am also learning from leading Chicana scholars about emerging methods for applying CFE in quantitative analysis. Currently, I am exploring how to take the tenets of CFE and CFT and apply them to all phases of the research process.
Mexican-American families
Quinceañera rituals
Family identity
My research on Mexican American families prioritizes within-group phenomena and lived experiences. For instance, how colorism operates differently across family members, professional spaces, and Chicano-dominant communities.
Focusing on how Mexican American youth, adults, and families experience racism, acculturation, classism, nativism and sexism outside of a White-Black paradigm reflects an intentionally decolonial approach to research that acknowledges 500 years of double colonization for Mexican origin people that spans multiple indigenous lands, imperial projects, and erased histories.
Identity development
Racial/ethnic socialization
Identity processes
conocimiento
nepantla
Family identity
My work on identity development is informed by Chicana feminist concepts of gendered/racial/cultural in-betweenness and Dan McAdam’s narrative identity. It’s an intentional shift away from classical identity theories (e.g., Erikson and Marcia) who viewed identity as categorical statuses and often led to deficit views of identity development for anyone who wasn’t white, male, cis-hetero, and middle class.
Closely related is my work on racial/ethnic socialization. I’m particularly interested in bottom-up socialization practices, which occurs when adolescent or adult children of first-generation Latinx parents share messages of cultural pride with their parents based on a reconnection with lost or erased ethnic-cultural knowledge.
Phase 2 of the Chicana/Latina Flourishing Project
This research study examines the life narratives of Latina college students to better understand how identity processes are ‘storied’ across the lifespan transitions and events. These transitions may include events that are unique to the Latinx experience, such as continental migration, quinceañera rituals, and re-indigenization processes.
In addition to collecting Latina students’ stories, the C/LFP builds off of the success of the 2023 pilot study and pairs Latina students with Latina mentors while providing ongoing psychoeducation in Chicana feminist concepts such as conocimiento, choque, and nepantla.
Thank you to Texas Woman’s University Research & Sponsored Programs for supporting the Chicana/Latina Flourishing Project pilot study in 2023.
I am also currently completing a research study that examines how perceived racism can predict the likelihood of bringing a weapon to school for Latino boys.
Azucena Verdín, Ph.D. 