Nic M. Weststrate
Emerging Awardee (2023)
Assistant Professor, Human Development and Learning, Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education
About
Nic M. Weststrate (PhD, Toronto) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and member of the Center for Research on Health and Aging at the University of Illinois Chicago. In the current context of revived censorship and erasure of LGBTQ+ lives and experiences from public spaces and discourses, Nic’s community-engaged research program takes up the central question: How do LGBTQ+ youth access knowledge and wisdom necessary to survive and thrive in a marginalizing society? To address this, Nic studies narrative ecologies of development, with a specific focus on the potential for intergenerational storytelling to disrupt disparities and promote health and well-being among LGBTQ+ elders and youth, while also sustaining the LGBTQ+ communities’ rich cultures and histories. His work imagines a model of community-based LGBTQ+ education with intergenerational engagement and healing at its heart. Nic’s community partners include the Senior Services Program at the Center on Halsted and Pride Action Tank of the AIDS Foundation Chicago. Recently, Nic received a large research grant from the Spencer Foundation to sustain and expand a community-engaged ethnographic experiment called the The LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project (www.generationliberation.com). Within the UIC community, Nic partners with the UIC Gender and Sexuality Center, with support from a Student Affairs Faculty Research Fellowship, to execute the Brick By Brick: LGBTQ2SIA+ Campus Climate Study. Nic teaches courses on adult development and aging, sexuality development, and self and identity development to undergraduate students in the Human Development and Learning BA program.