Moving Toward Transformation: Youth Participatory Action Research as Restorative Justice

• In Event: Toward a Critical Restorative Justice Praxis

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores how Presente, an explicitly critical youth-led Restorative Justice (RJ) group at a high-reform school (“Lavoe”) used indigenous circle practice and youth participatory action research (YPAR) to challenge injustice in their school. While YPAR is not traditionally understood as a restorative practice, this paper aims to position it as such and explore how the use of YPAR created the conditions for individual, interpersonal, and structural change at Lavoe.

Theoretical Frameworks
This paper begins by bringing together literature on the school-prison nexus (Kaba & Meiners, 2014), racial neoliberalism (Goldberg, 2009), and the punitive commonsense (Wacquant, 2009) to illuminate the ways in which, in the context of neoliberal schooling, RJ can reproduce and reify inequity. Next, I bridge critical RJ theories (Evans & Vaandering, 2016; Winn, 2018) and research on YPAR (Mirra, Garcia, & Morrell, 2016) to illuminate the potential of YPAR as a restorative practice that can help protect against the neoliberal cooptation of RJ.

Methods and Data
The findings are based on a three-year ethnography of the Presente Restorative Justice program at Lavoe High School. Lavoe High School is located in a small Northeastern city and serves students who are predominantly Latinx (80%) and categorized as economically disadvantaged (72%). Data include participant observation of weekly after school meetings, document analysis, interviews with 18 student restorative justice peer leaders, fieldnotes, and critical self-reflection notes.

Findings
Presente’s coupling of circle process and YPAR created the possibility for individual, interpersonal, and structural change. For students involved with Presente, my findings suggest they developed: (1) love and appreciation of ethnic history, culture, and identity; (2) commitment to solidarity and community; and (3) collective hope. In regards to school transformation, Presente’s use of circles and YPAR created a (1) shift from punitive logic to a healing impulse; (2) increased focus on representation; and (3) a shifting view of community engagement throughout the school. Furthermore, the use of YPAR and the resistance school administration had to the demands students made as a result of their YPAR illuminated conflicting understandings of the purpose, aims, and value of restorative justice.

Significance
As RJ proliferates, research has shown that when taken up in schools RJ can reinforce and reify the very racial inequities it purports to address (Author, 2017; Author, 2020). Given this tendency, researchers and RJ practitioners have made the case for transformative justice that is explicitly critically and aimed at structural change. However, there is limited research on what transformative justice looks like on the ground in schools, what possibilities it creates, and what challenges exist. This paper explores the use of YPAR as one way of answering the call for transformative justice and illuminates the possibilities and challenges that exist when doing this work in schools that are governed by a logic of racial neoliberalism.

Author

• Dani O'Brien, Northland College