"Once It's Online, Nobody Can Take It Back": Ethics of (Self-)Representation in Collaborative and Youth-Led Participatory Action Research

• In Event: 66.015 - "With and For" Not "On" or "About": Engaging the Limits of Education Research for Movement-Building

Abstract

In a recent issue of Anthropology & Education, researchers engaging with anti-colonial, anti-racist, and participatory community and youth-centered research examined Foucault’s panopticism (1977) in education through the frame of surveillance as methodology and pedagogy. As surveillance, panopticism results in pedagogies of compliance and (self-)censorship (Ali, 2016; Martinez, 2016) amongst educators and youth, and methodologies of subordination and evaluation amongst university researchers (Vossoughi & Escudé, 2016). When youth, community members, teachers, and university researchers make attempts to collaborate in community and youth-led participatory action research (YPAR), such pedagogies and methodologies of surveillance do not disappear. They must be recognized and navigated throughout the research process with an awareness of the range of precarity and risk experienced across the group. In addition to the gamut of risks that may be played out on individuals and loved ones, each navigates a collage of willingness and capacity to risk. In other words, within critical participatory action research (CPAR), we can be put at risk and must also decide what we are able and willing to risk. As layers of surveillance are identified, this duality of risk requires differently positioned people to consider a new ethics of participation in the form of representation of themselves and each other in research and dissemination to communities, across institutional spaces, in representations by outsider journalists and commentators, and framing themselves and their work for academic audiences.

This paper draws on the experiences of one multilingual and multiply-raced YPAR collaborative, working with a non-tenured teacher and graduate student researcher in and out of school. For three years, youth from the Nuestrxs Derechos Latinx YPAR collective have navigated public and institutional spaces, experiencing them as minefields of potential risk, particularly within the larger ecology of nativism and xenophobia exacerbated by the 2016 presidential campaigns. The paper considers the following questions: (1) For teachers, youth, and precariously situated (graduate student or non-tenured) researchers, how is collaborative and participatory research disciplined and informed by pedagogies and methodologies of surveillance? (2) What ethics of self and collective representation emerged as youth and adults navigated terrains of surveillance, precarity, and risk associated with their collaborative PAR in and about school?

This work is significant as it offers an ethics of self and collective representation within the oppressive context of surveillance and accompanying expansive risk within which CPAR seeks to unveil, resist, agitate, dismantle, and create. Connecting to the conference theme, it recognizes that there can be no public scholarship or education of “diverse democracies” without the persistent reimaginings and strategic maneuverings of anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-oppressive collaborations. In so doing, it suggests an examination of the organic ethics that emerge from collaboratives such as Nuestrxs Derechos in order to protect and continue acts of public scholarship and humanizing education.

Author

• Jenna Cushing-Leubner, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater