The "Self" as the Site of Social Transformation in Critical Youth Participatory Action Research

• In Event: Ethnographic and Participatory Approaches for Understating Multiple Facets of Educational Practice

Abstract

Critical YPAR is both a methodological approach and a set of epistemological commitments about generating critical inquiry for social change with young people. I argue that critical YPAR generates individualized learning, analysis, and envisioning that fixates on the “self” as the primary site for “critical” consciousness and praxis and reduces the depth of social-material change as an outcome of individual gains. I conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with nine participants who occupied different roles in various critical YPAR projects (youth co-researchers, educators, and graduate researchers) across three North American cities. Their experiential reflections illustrate this fixated learning and its limitations. Ultimately, the paper calls for researchers and educators to re-think the conflation by critical research between the “self” and social-material relations.

Author

• Paula Veronica Elias, University of Toronto