Listening for Place: Black and Indigenous Youth in Relation to Tkaronto

• In Event: Methodological Commitments and Refusals: Engaging Slow Methodology With Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous Communities

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

This presentation is based on a youth participatory action research project with Black and Indigenous youth in Tkaronto (the Mohawk word for Toronto). The study examined youth relationships to Tkaronto through photography, interviews, and group discussions. The paper details activities conducted with young people and the findings from the study. More specifically, the author describes how slow methodologies, as practices of collective learning, experimentation, and careful listening, can reveal deep connections, frustrations, and aspirations for Tkaronto’s future.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

The author employs critical place inquiry, which engages with place in social science research as more than a neutral backdrop or physical landscape for social life (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). Critical place inquiry includes a range of methodologies and methods that engage with place as dynamic and having influence on social practices.

The study engages with Quashie’s (2022) discussion of slow methodologies. The author describes slow methodologies as a way of carefully observing and listening to participants’ engagement with place.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

Youth participatory action research is a method best understood as a mode of inquiry rooted in centering participant expertise and collaboration (McIntyre, 2007; Fine, 2010). Youth participants engaged in participatory, arts-based activities about their theorizations and relationships to Tkaronto. Participants used photovoice to take photographs in response to place-based prompts, e.g. “take a photo of a place that needs a change,” “take a place where you feel safe.”

Critical place inquiry takes shape in photographic and mapping methods (Tuck and McKenzie, 2014). Participants drew maps of their neighborhoods, took pictures of their favourite places, identified key places they wanted to change, and described their hopes for the future of these places.

Furthermore, participants conducted peer-to-peer interviews, following Kvale and Brinkmann’s (2015) approach to lifeworld interviews. Lifeworld interviews involved open-ended questions that are neither overly structured or entirely unstructured.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

The data includes photographs made by participants, interviews, and other recorded discussions about Tkaronto.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
The study reveals the deep-rooted relationships that Black and Indigenous youth create and negotiate in Tkaronto. Participants expressed complicated and fraught relationships to the neighborhoods they came from, and the city at large. The depth of many conversations were structured through slow listening.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work

Youth perspectives of place and their desired futures for the place they inhabit are instructive to educational researchers. In addition to the question of “how” to do research, the question of “where” research is conducted is necessary. In contemporary movements for decolonization, the paper takes seriously the tangible return of land and imagines with youth what they will mean for them.

Author

• Sefanit Habtom, University of Washington
  Presenting Author