Researching "in Solidarity": Ruptures, Repair, and Perseverance in a Racial Justice–Centered Research-Practice Partnership (Poster 5)

• In Event: Centering Equity in Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

Our poster will highlight lessons learned from a coordinating team’s effort to implement a research-practice partnership dedicated to disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) harming Detroit youth. Our team awarded mini-grants and stipends to four predominantly African American, community-based action research teams composed of university, youth, and community researchers. Teams varied in research design but all incorporated some youth participatory action research methods and strove to develop relevant school community resources to counter the criminalization of and harm against Black youth. Indeed, countering anti-racism, and more specifically anti-Blackness, in ways that ultimately help children, families, schools, and communities has been our partnership’s overarching goal.
We have regarded our RPP as a vehicle of Black emancipatory praxis given both the RPP’s content focus and implementation coordination. Our coordinating process has aligned with Akom’s (2011) Black Emancipatory Action Research (BEAR) framework which conceives research as a tool for Black liberation and self-determination. While our partnership has proved rewarding, and been regarded as needed, valuable, and catalyzing of racial justice, tending to our liberatory goals has been challenging. Interpersonal tensions and epistemological “ruptures” have been part of our experience, and so has the facilitation of repair and solidarity renewal given our RPP’s commitments.
Our findings relate to our efforts to evaluate and adapt our RPP process to ensure alignment with our equity-oriented and anti-racist objectives. We have affirmed community, acknowledged harms, apologized, reorganized, outreached, and recommitted to the values that brought us together. This has partly involved (1) dialoguing about white privilege, harm, healing, and the intersectionality of race and gender; (2) redistributing fiscal and research development resources to the four action research teams; (3) challenging hierarchical, university research norms; and, (4) tending to the emotionality of justice-driven work (Author1 et al., 2022; Campanella et al., 2022). Our efforts further align with Gordon de Cruz’s (2017) call for community engaged researchers to implement research as a form of praxis that embodies the type of race-conscious analyses, asset-based understandings of communities, and privileging of subaltern experiences that critical race theories stress.
Examples of our relational and epistemological ruptures and our repair, recommitment, and perseverance from the second year of our intergenerational and multiracial RPP will be pinpointed. Conclusions are drawn from over 30 hours of observations of RPP events and PI coordinating meetings, individual interviews, and reflective memos. Additionally, we analyze survey and focus group data collected by independent evaluators along with agendas, email correspondence, and team reports. We analyzed data via the constant comparative process of reading fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and qualitative survey comments multiple times to comprehend, code, sort, and pinpoint themes. We also collaborated to pilot, refine, and apply descriptive and thematic coding schemes using Atlas.ti qualitative software, and then mapped the frequency of codes and themes to verify patterns (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014). Ultimately, we suggest ways racial justice-centered RPPs can stay true to their values and commitments by equitably tending to their internal coordination processes in order to contribute to desired emancipatory outcomes.

Authors

• Camille M. Wilson, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Richard J. Smith, Wayne State University
  Presenting Author

• Jasahn M. Larsosa, Focus: Hope
  Presenting Author

• Margaret O. Hanna, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Eric Welsby, Focus:HOPE
  Presenting Author

• Paulina Fraser, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author