People
Mica Baum-Tuccillo
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Mica is a PhD candidate in Critical Social Psychology whose work explores social science as a tool for political transformation and justice. As a co-founder, collaborator, and researcher on several critical participatory action research studies, Mica’s work brings together coalitions of youth, organizers, researchers, and advocates using a variety of creative and community-based methods. Mica’s dissertation examines the value of epistemic, relational, and methodological “knots” that emerge in participatory research grounded in collective struggle. Mica is a 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
This summer as an ERI/PS2 Fellow, I worked with the Beyond Acceptance Research Collective (BARC) to explore the creative practices queer, trans, and gender-expansive people are using, and seeking to learn, to resist in this time of rising anti-trans and anti-queer violence, and how these practices can be documented and shared. I helped to found BARC more than five years ago when I was just beginning my doctoral work. We are an intergenerational participatory research collective that began our research (when the majority of our collective were in high school) by studying queer and trans young people’s experiences of family in NYC. That initial project, funded by the NYC Department of Health and in partnership with the Public Science Project at the Graduate Center, used creative participatory research methods including mapping, zines and collective analysis to challenge traditional models of family acceptance and highlight strategies that go beyond acceptance toward solidarity, justice, and liberation for queer and trans youth.
In our research meetings this summer, we sat together surrounded by notes, sketches, scraps, images, and memories of our own organizing and others’ who inspire us. This was our makeshift “mood board” for queer resistance. We especially wrestled with the importance of honoring everyday acts of resistance, which so often get overlooked next to mythologized events. Authoritarian times demand precisely this kind of attention: the steady, ordinary practices of survival, care, and resistance that sustain queer life.
Through this process, three threads of inquiry came into focus, each tied closely to our own lives and communities, and each offering a window into how queer resistance takes shape in everyday spaces. One strand of our research examines the community-building power of Lil’ Park Drag Show, an outdoor celebration of queer performance and gender nonconformity co-founded by queer and trans youth and young adults. Another traces queer histories and resistances in Chinatown, attending to cultural practices that have sustained queer existence across generations. A third explores the intersections of queer space-making and disability justice organizing in lesbian communities. These directions emerge directly from our lived connections: Willow’s founder/performer role at Lil’ Park, Serena’s familial and cultural roots in Chinatown, and Audre’s connection to several lesbian organizers and her deep interest in the history of disability-focused lesbian movements. In the coming months, we will develop our research into zines and other public-facing products that can be shared with the communities we want our work to be accountable to.
Alongside these threads, we are also co-authoring a chapter that reflects on our research methods and approach, focusing on how participatory approaches can hold epistemological tensions to produce more rigorous and accountable science.
Another highlight of the summer was presenting at the Public Science Project’s Summer Institute, where we shared our evolving work with other researchers experimenting with participatory methods. That presentation underscored what we felt all summer: that creating a space for collective queer inquiry is itself a form of resistance.
We leave the summer with sharpened questions and renewed commitment to producing research that not only documents queer life in unbearable times, but sustains it.
