How Can We Think About the Conditions Through Which Truth Emerges?

• In Event: Community-Based Research as Consequential Research

Abstract

The final paper in this session, authored by Brian Lozenski, asks educational researchers, “How can we think about the conditions through which truth emerges?” The author’s own research and scholarship grapples with these pre-conditions for truth through the lenses of youth subjectivity and the potential for educational research to enact policy by building capacity for historically marginalized communities to become central actors.
The paper situates blackness, not as an individual or group racial identity, but as a site of suffering in US education through dispossession, erasure, and targeted violence (Dumas, 2014; Love, 2020; Sojoyner, 2017). The author discusses the potential for blackness to become a generative site of truth-telling through the engagement of youth and adults in participatory forms of educational research. Two projects are documented: a youth participatory action research collective called the Uhuru Youth Scholars (Uhuru) (Lozenski 2017; 2019), and a participatory ethnography of an intergenerational Pan-African community called the NuSkool of African American Thought (NuSkool) (Thomas-Kpetay & Lozenski, 2021). These two projects highlight the capacities of communities situated outside of the academy to pursue truth.
Drawing from the work of Uhuru, the author describes the symbiotic relationship of truth and subjectivity. The author theorizes that the integration of Black Studies/Ethnic Studies and YPAR builds a dual-subjectivity within youth where they are subjects of their own curricular exploration and simultaneously developing a subjectivity as researchers and knowledge producers. I highlight the implications of this dual-subjectivity for the political agency of youth of African descent.
The paper concludes by discussing how those working in institutions, such as school districts and universities, who may be interested in transformative policy-making can create infrastructures for participatory power-sharing. Drawing from my recent educational policy analysis (Bertrand & Lozenski, 2021). The author also discusses how participatory research necessitates a more open and intentional analysis of the bases of social power to enact educational change. These arrangements of shared power are meant to create spaces for suffering not only to speak, but to move toward actual material changes in the lives of those who have borne the brunt of colonial (mis)education in the US.

Author

• Brian Lozenski, Macalester College
  Presenting Author