Youth Organizing and Political Education as Critical to Addressing Contradictions in Youth Participatory Action Research

• In Event: 63.063 - Critical Examination of Emerging Tensions in Youth Participatory Action Research and Building Liberatory Praxes

Abstract

This paper explores some contradictions that arise when conducting Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and posits that political education and organizing are important tools to employ in resolving these contradictions. Drawing from critical theories of race and gender (Evans-winters & Esposito, 2010; Stovall, 2005; Wun, 2014) and social movement theory (Jasper, 2004; Su, 2018), this paper examines challenges endemic to YPAR in current socio-political conditions. These challenges call into question the validity of any survey within nations built on settler colonialism (Tuck & Gorlewski, 2016) that perpetuate ideas such as anti-Black racism (Dumas, 2015), racialized sexism (Hill Collins, 2004) to reinforce unequal distribution of resources (Patel, 2016). The opportunities to address these challenges occur as young people build a new understanding about existing inequalities that can shift how they conceptualize public goods and what they will organize and demand (Lipstiz, 1995). As youth organizers build a sense of collective power with young people, they can act on this new consciousness to demand changes in practices and resource distribution (Jasper, 2004; Salinas & Fraser, 2012; Warren, 2014).
During a YPAR project, youth and I developed and conducted a survey of their peers and a collective analysis and reporting process. As a participant observer, I was present and helped in all stages of the process including interviewing 19 youth throughout the 2 years we worked on this. While surveying, the youth encountered and challenged internalized racism (Jones, 2000) amongst their peers in a low-income Black community (Stovall, 2005). Some surveyed youth, for example blamed students for discipline issues in school and praised the use of harsh policies, while some had thought discipline to be unfair but didn’t think that they had the power to change it. Through the survey process, the youth engaged their peers in critical conversations about what would justice look like at their school, and what would it look like to organize for power. This consciousness raising work continued into the organization's practices, as newly recruited youth joined the organization and still grappled with internalized hegemonic ideas about how young Black people should be treated in schools. The practice of doing this research, learning about how youth felt on the ground, and working to shift the narrative that they were hearing was critical to the development of the young organizers, as well as to the strategic orientation of the campaign.
The challenges the youth found raise questions for researchers around validity when conducting research, given what we see sometimes as internalized oppression. Existing literature on community-based research considers how internalized oppression can create methodological challenges (Minkler, 2004). This paper contributes to such literature by considering how these challenges can destabilize the legitimacy of data, as well as how organizing efforts can address these challenges. It pushes us to consider how YPAR participants negotiate the normalization of unjust conditions that are often be reflected in surveys and other findings and how organizing can challenge that normalization.

Author

• Julia A Daniel, University of Colorado - Boulder