In the Shadow of Our Data: Resisting a Mother-Blaming Narrative in a Participatory Action Research Study

• In Event: Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Arts-Based Research and Social Justice

Abstract

The Polling for Justice study was a youth-centered participatory action research project that took place between 2008 – 2011. The study examined youth experiences at the intersections of education, criminal justice, and public health. In this paper, I lift up one piece of data on the intergenerational fallout of school non-completion from the Polling for Justice survey and I detail the embodied artistic methodology through which the research team made sense of, reconciled, resisted, and theorized from this data. I claim that artistic embodied methodology within the context of a multi-generational participatory action research team made it both necessary and possible to theorize against oppressive mother-blaming narratives.

Author

• Maddy Fox, Brooklyn College - CUNY