What's Your Issue? Building Policy for LGBTQIA Youth Rights From the Ground Up

• In Event: 77.022 - Bottom-Up Policy Making in an Age of Misinformation: Critical Youth Participation as a Practice of Power

Abstract

What’s Your Issue? is a national intergenerational critical participatory action research (CPAR) project led by LGBTQIA youth designed to lift dreams, desires, struggles, and experiences of LGBTQIA youth to build policy and support movements for  LGBTQIA youth rights (Torre, 2018). Findings include the positive impact of “Dignity Schools”, schools that recognize and support the flourishing of LGBTQIA youth in school curriculum and policies; the radical reimagining of gender and sexuality identities; and the positive relationship between experiences of discrimination and activism. Nested within the Public Science Project at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, our work is guided by the belief that to develop more genuinely “public” policies, research must be shaped by the perspectives and critical participation of the public, particularly those who have paid the most for cumulative dispossession (Fine & Ruglis, 2009). By critical participation, we mean that those with most at stake in the policies take the lead in the research process – shaping the questions and design, working in partnership with university researchers to determine methods, collect and analyze data and disseminate findings (Sandwick et al, 2018; Torre et al, 2012). What’s Your Issue? (WYI) specifically centered LGBTQIA of color youth that have historically been left out of the conversations that determine the conditions that shape their lives.

Our paper opens a conversation about the possibilities and challenges of participatory research and policy making using the example of WYI youth researchers in New York City who have partnered with the Mayor’s Office LGBTQ youth Unity Project. Using the local and national findings from WYI, analyses of NYC data, their lived experiences, and new NYC specific youth research, WYI youth researchers were invited to co-create LGBTQ youth policy from the “bottom up.” In so doing youth (disproportionately youth of color) that have long been neglected by the city – LGBTQIA youth being discriminated against and/or pushed out of school, youth in the city experiencing homelessness and/or housing insecurity, youth targeted by aggressive policing, youth living in fear of ICE raids) were recognized for their expertise on LGBTQIA youth experiences within NYC and repositioned within City government as policy architects. This collaboration introduced a new radical participatory contact zone in the borderlands between research, organizing and policy – across race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, and a wide set of experiences, social positions, and political agendas. From this space between worlds or “entremundos,” (Anzaldúa, 1987) we will offer for discussion a set of questions and issues raised by our experience which we and others embarking on similar collaborations must navigate: questions of power, privilege and vulnerabilities; conflicts of language, community urgency, and bureaucracy, challenges of priorities, values, and commitments; razor wires of political opportunity, tokenization, and cooptation; and the uncharted possibilities of new relationships, ideas, and solidarities.

Author

• Maria Elena Torre, City University of New York - CUNY