Invisible Labor

• In Event: Digging in the Soil: Bringing Light to the Invisible

Abstract

Researchers and funders carry their own insights into negotiations for research agendas and awards, an inherently top-down approach. The assumptions informing research grants necessarily require ground-truthing. The ethics of RPPs, YPAR, and other participatory projects entail ongoing listening, relational deepening (Jones, 2002; Ritterbusch, 2019), and doing what we call “soil-work.” Although soil-work is often invisible labor (Jurow et al., 2016), it is critical for sustainable community partnerships albeit in inter or intra-racial spaces. To theorize soil-work, we draw on endarkened inquiry (McClish-Boyd & Bhattacharya, 2021), which centers:
Life’s lessons on surviving and thriving to further fortify strength and bridging (Cross et al., 2017) in RPP’s or PAR spaces that are inter-racial.
Spirituality as a protective barrier and a source of strength, and a way to recalibrate within decisions to inform and interpret our experiences from within our own positionality.
Dreams and hopes to manifest opportunities to check for catalytic validity (Lather, 1991) and bring joy to research and practitioner spaces.
Interwoven is the intentional refusal to accept deficit perspectives and make an informed and careful pivot toward re-imagining spaces of abundance and holism (Cortes, 2020). We draw examples to ground this theorization from a nationwide network, an RPP working with eight partners nationwide on career equity. In doing so, we highlight the layers of participation inherent in RPPs: the internal research team, partner network, and actors and interactions outside of the network, including employers and funders.

Author

• Janiece Z. Mackey, Young Aspiring Americans for Social and Political Activism
  Presenting Author