Stefanie Holden
Stefanie Holden is a Ph.D. student in Psychology at UC San Diego in Dr. Karen Dobkins’s Human Experience and Awareness Lab (HEALab). She is primarily interested in exploring the impact of conflicting social and cultural influences on how people make sense of their lives and identities via the life stories they tell. By integrating life experiences into an internalized and evolving story, individuals are able to draw connections between their past, present, and future while simultaneously forming an identity and sense of self. As these stories are both socially and culturally embedded, Stefanie’s work is particularly focused on examining these stories to address two questions: (1) How do bicultural individuals navigate and make sense of competing and/or conflicting life scripts, which represent the culturally shared expectations about the order and timing of events in a prototypical life? And (2) How do targets of frequent prejudice or dehumanization form their own identities while inhabiting a societal space that is so biased against them, and in what ways does this prejudice and dehumanization also affect their engagement with society and the larger culture?
