Addressing Asian Antiblackness in the Face of Anti-Asian Violence: Youth Participatory Action Research With Asian American Youths

• In Event: Reflection, Resistance, and Resilience: Latina/o/x and Hmong Youth Expanding Possibilities Through Testimonios and Youth-Driven Designs

Abstract

Paper #4

Objective
The way Asian and Black youths make sense of the racialization experienced in relation to one another deserves more scholarly attention (Lee, et al., 2020). As Asian Americans–stereotyped as model minorities and honorary whites–have been used as a racial wedge to downplay systematic racism and anti-Blackness, establishing interracial and intercultural relations and understandings between Asian and Black youths remain critical to the racial justice movement moving forward. The purpose of this paper is to present an ethnographic study that focused on how a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) program supported East and South Asian American youths to develop new understandings of race and racism, including their Asian anti-Blackness during the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements in 2020.

Theoretical Framework
YPAR is commonly understood as collaborative research with youth and adults and is driven by youths’ everyday repertories and knowledge within the communities to develop action plans that would support and foster youth-initiated strategies for change in schools and communities at large (Cammarota & Fine, 2010). Borrowed from the insights from critical youth studies (Akom et al., 2008; Cammarota, 2017), this YPAR program employed critical pedagogical project-based activities to contribute to the advocacy of youths’ initiatives to critically analyze and potentially disrupt daily tensions and conflicts arising as manifestations from their sociopolitical and educational contexts.

Methods & Data Sources
The ethnographic study drew on data gathered through participant observation and video analysis of YPAR meetings that took place over five months. The youths have been asked to participate in focus groups, once before the commencement of the YPAR program, and once after the project ended. The new and emerging knowledge, critical thinking skills, and transformative agency participants articulated before, during, and after the research interviews were analyzed through inductive content analysis (Mirra et al., 2015). Data analysis was carried out using an inductive approach, and the emergence of several code schemes captured the holistic research of youths’ participation in YPAR.

Results
Asian American youths in this YPAR program used the opportunity to reckon with their anti-Blackness and hone their latent criticality through conducting research and participating in reflexive conversations around racial inequities. YPAR created an inclusive critical dialogic space for praxis wherein youths were able to cultivate their transformative agency as they (re)imagined their roles in advancing equity in the present and the future. The ethnographic account focuses on the development of youths’ praxis and transformative agency which expanded the discovery of systematic contradictions into action and instigate ingenuities to bring about qualitative change to local activities (Sannino et al., 2016). As such, the expansion of critical awareness ultimately led to developing analytic groundings for not only youths’ praxis (i.e., the act of realizing) but also their poiesis (i.e., the act of creating) for the spread of awareness and racial solidarity.

Significance
The ethnographic study on this YPAR program offers a glimpse of the opportunities and affordances of broadening equity-oriented learning spaces within formal and/or informal educational structures through collaborative development of critical consciousness and social justice praxis.

Author

• Joan J. Hong, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author