Racial/Ethnic Dynamics, Impact and Applications
Applied Psychology Research
Diane Hughes is professor of Applied Psychology in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Development, and Education. Her research focuses on (a) understanding how racial/ethnic dynamics influence people's experiences at work, in classrooms, in neighborhoods, and in families, and (b) ethnic and cultural differences in parents' socialization goals, beliefs, and practices, especially as these influence children's learning.
Workshops & Speaking Engagements
Drawing from an extensive scientific knowledge base, Dr. Hughes conducts workshops to provide tools and strategies for parents, teachers, and other service providers who work with ethnically diverse youth to help them understand the race-related issues that youth encounter in their daily lives and strategies for approaching them.
Published Work
Diane Hughes has been published in a variety of academic journals.
Press & Interviews
Diane Hughes has also been interviewed and featured on various media outlets.
Current Projects in The Learning Race Lab
How Black Mothers Train Their Boys to Resist Racism and Oppression
In this project, we use qualitative and Q-sort methodology to analyze racial socialization messages of resistance for liberation and survival in longitudinal data of Black mothers’ of boys interviews.
Racial Socialization in White Families
For this project, we use qualitative methods to analyze themes of racial socialization around whiteness within white families in a longitudinal study of interviews white adolescents and their parents.
School racial climate website
In this project, funded by the Spencer Foundation, we are building a public facing website for school administrators, teachers and other education professionals to provide tools for understanding and evaluating the racial climate of their schools.
“The work on socialization in White families has been particularly difficult sometimes for a host of reasons, which makes it all the more important. It's been wonderful to counter it with the work on black boys’ resistance to understand these topics from a range of perspectives.”
— Research Team Member
About Dr. Diane Hughes, PhD
Diane Hughes is Professor of Applied Psychology within the Steinhardt School at New York University. Dr. Hughes has written extensively about ethnic-racial dynamics across various settings including families, schools, workplaces and peer groups, especially in relation to parenting and adolescents’ well-being. Topics that she studies include experienced discrimination, racial stereotypes, racial socialization, and ethnic identity across ethnically and racially diverse samples of adolescents as well as factors that shape academic engagement and achievement. She teaches courses on adolescent development, Human Development, Community Psychology, Race and Ethnicity and Research Methods. Hughes also conducts local and national workshops for parents and community members on having conversations about race with children. Hughes received her B.A. in psychology and African American studies from Williams College and her PhD in community and developmental psychology from the University of Michigan. She is former chair of the MacArthur Midlife Network’s subcommittee on Ethnic Diversity in Urban Contexts and former Chair of the Cross-university Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity. Her research has been funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, and the Spencer Foundation.