It's the Fugitivity for Me! Forging Freedom in the Methodologies of Youth-Led Research

• In Event: Seeking Routes to Freedom: Fugitive Methodologies for Rethinking Community Research, Literacies, and Engagement

Abstract

The power of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement has invited us to confront the complex ways that racial oppression and other intersecting systems of power continue to kill, exploit, and marginalize Black lives across the world. Yet any conversation about racial equity in our society cannot be divorced from a history of colonialism, settler colonialism, and imperialism which has long been centered on the white supremacist logic of destroying and/or displacing Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and their lands. Central to the history of colonialism is the role of schooling as an essential arm for colonizing forces to root their own ideologies, histories, and ways-of-being into the oppressed. Much of this logic remains embedded in American schooling in the service of perpetuating racial and economic inequities. Paris and Winn’s edited volume, Humanizing Research, invites educational scholars into the thick tension of what it means to conduct qualitative research within marginalized groups while maintaining a focus on equity and justice (Paris & Winn, 2014). Given its violent colonial history, oppressive practices inhere within the traditional research process in ways that require intentional disruption. Grounded in conceptual and methodological framings of fugitive literacies and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, this study examines how spoken word poetry of youth researchers functions as fugitive methodology within an out-of-school Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) program to disrupt the racist and colonial logic of traditional approaches to academic research.

Initial themes suggest that bringing together YPAR and the fugitive literacy practice of spoken word poetry creates opportunities disrupting the traditional qualitative research process in the service of centering creativity, community, and critical consciousness.

Author

• Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts – Amherst