Emerging Tensions: Can Youth of Color and Researchers Shift Consciousness Against White Neoliberalism?

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: Shifting Partnerships and Priorities for Organizing

Abstract

Low-income youth of color have internalized negative ideas about themselves and their communities that affect organizing efforts and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) findings, making it imperative for researchers and organizers to attend to these ideas. Using Critical Race Theory and critical whiteness studies as a framework, we identify some of the ideologies that arose in two YPAR projects that we led as organizers and researchers. This paper considers what young people of color thought they deserved as public goods in spaces racialized under a white neoliberal logic and how YPAR and organizing efforts might shift their consciousness. Furthermore, we consider how these tensions call into question the validity of research happening within nations built on settler colonialism and slavery.

Authors

• Julia A Daniel, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Janiece Zalina Mackey, Young Aspiring Americans for Social and Political Activism (YAASPA)

• Keno Walker, Power U Center for Social Change