Co-Theorizing Lifeworlds Across Borders: Learning With Migrant Youth About Education Policy, Place, and Collective Decision Making

• In Event: Research for the Next Generations: Doctoral Education for Black and Indigenous Communities

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper is based on the William T Grant Foundation-funded research project entitled “Migrant Youth Lifeworlds”, active during 2015-18 in New York State and during 2021-2022 in Toronto, Ontario. During this project, migrant youth co-researchers in Toronto theorized about the lifeworlds of migrant youth in the Hudson Valley region of New York State in an effort to understand postsecondary decision-making. This paper reveals alternative truths about the links between educational policy and place that are made possible when migrant youth are understood as experts on their lives, capable of making meaning over time and across settler-colonial borders. We highlight findings from how migrant youth in Toronto combine their data analysis with a deliberate engagement of their own experiences.

Perspective(s) and theoretical framework:
The framework for this paper is Youth Participatory Action Research (yPAR) which encourages youth to understand how the injustices in their lives are produced and thus can be understood, destabilized, and ultimately changed (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). We also engage in critical place inquiry which asserts the need for sustained theorizations of place that address continued forms of colonial and environmental violence (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
This paper shares data co-created with youth through coding and place-based mapping. Youth in Toronto identified codes that relate to ideologies, emotions and/or power inequalities (Saldana, 2009). Use of focus groups encouraged both collective meaning-making and contestation by generating group reactions to specific issues and revealing multiple points of view (Skop 2006). These facilitated discussions also revealed patterns and processes as understood from their own perspectives (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2015). Through place-based mapping, youth created visuals that conveyed the related locations of places, their embodied mobility, information about past experiences, and future plans (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014).

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:
Drawing on interview transcripts and visual place-based maps produced with migrant youth co-researchers in the Hudson Valley Region and Toronto, this paper describes their emplaced individual and collective lifeworlds. Also considered are youth processes of decision-making about which parts of co-created knowledge should be shared, disseminated or stay protected (Tuck and Yang, 2014).

Results substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
By bringing together research that occurred in New York State and Toronto, this paper describes three main ideas that emerge from co-researching with migrant youth: 1) Youth critiques of social injustice in education policies that impact post-secondary decision-making draw upon distinctions and links between places; 2) Feelings of connection and disconnection shape relationships to their neighborhoods and communities; and 3) Youth nuance and resist damage-centered narratives through forms of embodied mobility.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
Through work in the Migrant Youth Lifeworlds project, this paper contributes to the literature on youth post-secondary decision-making. The authors reflect on the ethical implications of understanding youth as experts on their lives. Youth stories and insights offer complex truths that encourage educational researchers to destabilize narratives that position them as wholly constrained by precarious immigration status.

Authors

• Megan Femi-Cole, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Razan Samara, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author