Through Our Lens: Black and Indigenous Youth Making Sense of Movements and Place

• In Event: 31.025 - Beyond In/Visibilities: Working With and Through Visual Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper is based on a SSHRC-funded research project led by [co-author], entitled “Making Sense of Movement Youth Photovoice Project”. During the project, we worked with Black and Indigenous youth living in urban Toronto to co-theorize their post-secondary aspirations and relationship(s) to place (their schools, communities, the city). The study was also interested in how social movements, like Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, were shaping how these young people understood themselves, Toronto, and their futures. This paper shares the activities we conducted with the young people and our findings from the study.

Theoretical framework:
The guiding theoretical framework for the study was Youth Participatory Action Research (yPAR), a praxis that “provides young people with opportunities to study social problems affecting their lives and then determine actions to rectify these problems.” (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). This methodology believes young people are the experts of their lived experiences. In this, we did not take the data produced from the study for further analysis. Rather, this paper treats the questions, thoughts, and work produced by the youth co-researchers as theory/ies. This framework and ethic is integral to how we engaged with the young people and how we write about our work with them.

We also employ a critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015), which understands the centrality of place in qualitative research. Critical place inquiry holds space for many methods that consider place in deliberate, complicated, dynamic ways.

Methods:
This paper shares data co-created with the youth researchers through visual and non-visual methods. The research study primarily used photovoice, a qualitative research methodology that aims to enable participants to document, to promote critical dialogue, and to reach policymakers (Wang & Burris, 1997). Young people used photography to think through and respond to prompts they were given and that they created. Further, young people were trained in interviewing techniques, designing and conducting peer-to-peer interviews.

Data source:
The peer-to-peers interviews the youth co-researcher conducted, the photographs they produced, captioned and narrated, as well as the recorded conversations we had throughout the research study are the raw data this paper considers.

Results:
This study and our paper reveal that Black and Indigenous youth are socially and politically engaged. Black and Indigenous young people know a lot about the communities they reside in, and more, they care deeply about these communities. They make strategic and thoughtful decisions for their future based on their understandings of self and place.

Significance:
Toronto is a changing city that is quickly gentrifying neighbourhoods that are primarily Black and Indigenous. As the host city of the 2019 AERA meeting, this paper situates the place of the meeting and makes clear the responsibilities qualitative educational research has to young people. In a changing city, theorizing truths from the lived experiences of community member is critically important to shaping educational policy. Our work centres the voice of the current and future change-makers, as engaged in the particularities of growing up Black and/or Indigenous in Toronto.

Authors

• Sefanit Habtom, University of Toronto

• Eve Tuck, University of Toronto