About me

My name is Sakaria Laisene Auelua-Toomey, and I am a social psychologist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Broadly, I study how systems of oppression (i.e., racism and colonialism) are maintained and reinforced by an interplay between psychological processes and our social contexts. In my research, I use a range of methods (e.g., surveys, field experiments, archival analyses, natural language processing) and include diverse perspectives to examine how our social contexts come to shape people's expressions of and reactions to oppression in a variety of domains.