Perspectives on Building and Sustaining a Community-Engaged Youth Research Collective

• In Event: Youth-Led Research on the Effects of Racial Microaggressions in U.S. High Schools: Processes and Findings

Abstract

Objectives and Perspectives: We are members of the Youth Research Council (YRC), a university-affiliated, youth-driven research team committed to enacting justice-focused research in local schools. Every other week, we are dropped off at, drive, or take a bus to a local university campus, where we meet in a bright, sun-filled classroom. Over snacks and round tables, across google docs and whiteboards, we collaborate on mixed methods research that examines the effects of racial microaggressions on U.S. high school students. In this article, we reflect on our individual motivations for joining and remaining a part of the YRC from our respective vantage points. These vantage points are determined both by our roles within the YRC and our individual identities, informed by our lived experiences and factors such as race, age, and gender. While each of our perspectives on the YRC is unique, tracing the overlaps and divergences between them reveals a multi-dimensional picture of how we collectively sustain – and are sustained by – our engagement with the collective.

Modes of Inquiry: The YRC is a community-engaged, youth-driven research collective based at George Mason University. We use Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) methods to investigate topics that our youth researchers care about and have particularly robust insights into because of their lived experiences and positionality (Caraballo et al., 2017; Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Watson & Marciano, 2015). For example, for the past two years, we have investigated how youth experience and respond to racial microaggressions in high schools. There are many reasons that people join community-engaged research partnerships, many of which have been discussed in other articles (Knight, 2022; Shah, 2021) We hope that being transparent in this article about our multiple and diverse reasons for joining the YRC we will show that despite – or, perhaps more accurately, because of – the wide range of motivations that brought us together, our goals for the YRC are often surprisingly aligned.

Conclusions and Significance: Those of us who create and join community-engaged research projects are also often concerned with the sustainability of these partnerships: what keeps them afloat and what keeps people engaged in the work? One way people often discuss the sustainability of such programs is through the concept of reciprocity (see Cushman, 1996). Barker & Bloom-Pojar (2022) talk about the importance of sharing knowledge, data, and tools in a university-community partnership about reproductive health. Green (2023) describes reciprocity as a “sustained and recursive practice” (p. 55). The narratives we offer in this paper illuminate how these types of transformative reciprocity can be mutually constituted and sustained (Call-Cummings, Dazzo, & Hauber-Ozer, 2023; Shumake & Shah, 2017; Powell & Takayoshi, 2003).
These ongoing conversations about building and sustaining community engaged partnerships are multi-faceted, and examining them from multiple perspectives is necessary for making sure that community-engaged research partnerships are being established and maintained in ethical, justice-oriented ways. In this spirit, we have co-written this article to share our diverse insights on questions about building / joining research partnerships (what brought us here?) and sustaining them through transformational reciprocity (what keeps us here?).

Authors

• Bethany Monea, University of the District of Columbia

• Amy Best, George Mason University

• Liz Rotherham, Youth Research Council

• Sara Berhe-Abraha, Pomona College

• Natale Gray, Youth Research Council

• Sara Martah, Youth Research Council

• Anahat Goraya, Youth Research Council

• Jeffery Keller, George Mason University