Cultivating an Ethics of Improvisation: A Minor Riff on Youth Participatory Action Research

• In Event: Methodological Explorations in Rhythm and Motion

Abstract

This paper explores the improvised aspects of an arts-based youth participatory action research project that took place at a middle school in the southeastern U.S. In so doing, it operationalizes Deleuze and Guattari’s (1975/1986) notion of a minor literature to illustrate how the conventional qualitative research process that underpins the methodology was disrupted by a different type of inquiry that could not have been planned in advance. Specifically, the paper highlights how this inquiry developed through unconventional language use, micropolitical connections, and a voicing of collective values. Implications include the need to account and create space for the unplanned aspects of this work as part of an ethical and methodological responsibility to youths’ ways of knowing, doing, and becoming.

Author

• Nicole Siffrinn, University of Southern Maine