Nuestro Grupo as a Community-Anchored Space for Deep Organizing: Theorizing Discursive Sovereignty in Educational Praxis for Research That Is Consequential

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. Community-Based Education That Is Consequential: A Foregrounding of Latina/o/x Communities in Texas, Illinois, and California Securing Presence in K–12 Public Education

Abstract

We examine how Nuestro Grupo (NG) builds a social architecture for research and educación that is responsive to community needs and that focuses on educational policy and praxis through research and community-partnered work, including legislative action and teacher engagement. NG is a consists of an intergenerational group of community members, researchers, educators and activists in Austin, TX that collaborate to operate a community-anchored, partnership-based, Saturday school (Academia Cuauhtli), and advocate for Latinx educational issues in the region (Rubio et al., 2021). Building on Valenzuela and Lopez’s (2015) community-based research approach, we ethnographically analyze how NG provides a sovereign and relational space (Sabzalian, 2019) and a model for research that is critically responsive to the needs of marginalized Latinx communities (Pedraza et al., 2003).

Authors

• Angela Valenzuela, The University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Christopher L. Milk Bonilla, Texas State University
  Presenting Author