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Phillip L. Hammack is an American academic in the field of psychology. As of 2025, Hammack is a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, where he works with the Psychology Department, Stevenson College, and John R. Lewis College. He is also director of the university's Sexual and Gender Diversity Laboratory. [1] His research explores "gender and sexual identity diversity and diversity in intimate relationships". [2]
After completing his bachelor’s at Georgetown University in 1998, Hammack earned a Master of Arts in clinical psychology from Loyola University Chicago and a Doctor of Philosophy in cultural psychology from the University of Chicago. [3]
Hammack served as president of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology and as co-editor of the journal Psychology & Sexuality. [3] He has received fellowships from the American Psychological Association and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2017–18). He has received the following awards and honors:
Throughout his career, Hammack has made several novel contributions to narrative psychology and the psychological study of gender and sexuality.
In his most cited work, “Narrative and the cultural psychology of identity” (2008), he utilizes the concept of “master narratives” alongside the developmental process of “narrative engagement” to investigate the relationship between personal narratives of identity and larger-scale, cultural, or group narratives. [4] He draws together narrative theory, Vygotsky’s “cultural-historical activity theory,” and sociological perspectives on identity and social integration. The model he proposes integrates the “ideological content” of identity, as internalized over the course of development, with the idea of identity as a life story actively constructed by the individual through activity/practice.
Hammack’s book, Narrative and the politics of identity: The cultural psychology of Israeli and Palestinian youth (2011) synthesizes his research with Israeli and Palestinian youth during the Second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) who were actively engaged in peacebuilding intergroup dialogue. [5] While conceptually anchored in psychology, the study used narrative and ethnographic methods and a longitudinal design to track adolescents engaged in peacebuilding dialogue over time. Although Hammack documents short-term changes in personal narratives of peace and conflict, the effects are mostly not sustainable over time. He attributes the unsustainability of ideological narrative change to a lack of change in the social structural and political reality of the conflict.
In Hammack’s most cited paper on sexuality, “The psychological world of the gay teenager: Social change, narrative, and ‘normality’” (2007), he and co-author and mentor Bertram J. Cohler highlight the contrasting narratives to which “gay” teens were exposed in the early twenty-first century. [6] The authors discuss two primary narratives: a narrative of “struggle and success,” which assumes a redemptive form and follows the classic twentieth-century portrayals of “coming out” as necessary for a sexual minority person to achieve psychological health, and a narrative of “emancipation” from traditional sexual identity labels. In this paper, Hammack continues his intellectual commitment to the idea that human development is characterized by a process of “narrative engagement” in which the individual appropriates or repudiates discourses and narratives to which they are exposed. His paper (co-authored with David M. Frost and Sam D. Hughes), “Queer Intimacies: A New Paradigm for the Study of Relationship Diversity” (2019), offers a framework to consider relationships that deviate from various forms of normativity, including heterosexuality and monogamy. [7]
Essentials of Narrative Analysis (2021) documents a unique person-centered method by Hammack and co-author Ruthellen Josselson. [8] Their method maintains a focus on the whole person throughout analysis and the presentation of data rather than aggregating across persons to units such as themes or master narratives, as is common in other narrative psychology approaches. Hammack has also published in areas related to nonbinary gender, plurisexuality, ace spectrum identities, sexual subcultures and identities, polyamory and other consensual nonmonogamies, kink/BDSM, chosen families, and queer men’s health. Additionally, he is interested in issues of paradigm, theory, and method in social sciences and has a burgeoning interest in psychedelic medicine and its impacts on queer identity development.
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