Welcome to The Opal Project!
The Opal Project is the outcome of a participatory action research project called “Can You Dig It?” conducted through the Ph.D. program in Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, which was completed in 2006.
Recruitment for the first round of this Institutional Review Board-approved research took place on the East Lawn of the State Capitol building in Albany, New York, in July of 2006, at the 26th Annual Bastille Days Vigil and Demonstration with the Mental Patients Liberation Alliance, to stop the use of shock on children.
I asked participants who were advocates and activists with psychiatric histories, who gave informed consent to be involved with this study, to confront The Opal and offer ideas of what, if anything, they thought ought to be done with it.
These findings were published in the Journal of Radical Psychology under the title, “Who fancies to have a Revolution here? The Opal Revisited (1851-1860)”.